The Chain Gang

Even before Britannia Unchained, Chris Skidmore stood no chance of holding his seat in 2015. But he is interesting as a kind of token figure among that book's authors, a white, public school Tory active in the C of E. The rest recall the founders of neoconservatism.

Elizabeth Truss is a very recent liberal (indeed, Liberal) Leftist, doubtless as anti-monarchy and as anti-marriage as ever, and in that case correctly identifying neoliberal economics and neoconservative geopolitics as serving her constitutional and social agenda perfectly.

Several other recent promotions from the Blues rather than the Yellows are similar: an assisted suicide enthusiast who came up through the NUS and the SDP; people who both joined and left the Labour Party long after I did, which means that they were still in it well into the last Parliament; and so on. Scoop Jackson lives.

The rest of the Britannia Unchained authors are people from profoundly privileged backgrounds who nevertheless identify as ethnic outsiders waging war against the British equivalents, and even relatives, of the upper-crust WASP Republicans who never let them into their fraternities or their country clubs. They loathe Burkeanism and Anglophilia as much as any signatory to the PNAC ever did.