The last days of the Tory dinosaurs: Interview with Rafael Behr

The Lowdown podcast/ Ep:34

As we approach the end of 14 years of Tory rule — 14 years that feel as if they have been a national calamity — I interviewed Rafael Behr one of my favourite columnists for the Lowdown podcast.

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In the podcast we cover

• Rishi Sunak’s fantastic miscalculation

• How he manages to alienate everyone

• How the Conservative media destroyed the Conservative party

• Why moderate Conservatives are as much use as a chocolate ashtray on a motorbike in a hurricane

• And why Labour won’t be ready for government (no one is)

Rafael Behr has produced the best book to my mind on the British political crisis. Below is a long read from me for paying subscribers on it and on him.

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The liberal despair of Rafael Behr

A “clenching of the soul,” David Grossman calls it. The Israeli novelist’s description of the foreboding that subsumes you as your life darkens should echo with anyone who has been mentally assaulted and battered. Strength vanishes.  The body aches. The brain feels like a muscle twisted by cramp.

Rafael Behr is an essential political columnist, not because he has the contacts to provide inside information, although he has those, or because he is a thoughtful writer and wise thinker, although he is that, but because he feels the clenching of the British soul like a wound. It has produced Politics: A survivor’s guide (Atlantic, £20), the best account of the UK’s crisis I have read.

His body collapsed in 2019. Behr was in his forties, married with a young family. He lived a comfortable, middle-class life without knowing that he carried a hereditary heart condition. Returning from a run to his home in Brighton, he felt his body tighten. He fell onto the sofa clutching his chest, panting and wincing, “my face flashing red and white”.

Before the heart attack the UK’s rolling crisis provoked a mental collapse.