Last weekend, I did my best impression of a Shire Tory. I was at Henley Regatta, the world’s most prestigious rowing competition (spectating, not participating). The town – Henley-on-Thames – is a bit like Dalkey in south Dublin: close to the capital, with a kind of ambient sense of wealth hanging in the air. It was once the seat of Michael Heseltine and, more recently, Boris Johnson. This is Conservative heartland. These people hoped that David Cameron would be prime minister forever. If you want in on establishment Britain, I suggest that the 35-minute train journey out of Paddington Station, London, is a very good place to start.
What an upset, then, when last summer this seat – held by the Tories since 1910 – was lost to the centrist upstart Liberal Democrats. Suddenly this leafy, riverine, bourgeois utopia was no longer Conservative heartland. And the truths that the Tories believed were incontrovertible (such as that no matter how bad things got, England’s rich southeast would stay loyal) were revealed to be much flimsier propositions than anyone in the party headquarters had ever bargained for. The stickiness of their appeal turned out to be not so sticky after all; the “matter of fact” was, instead, contingent. So what’s the moral here?
We are biased towards trusting the status quo will endure. We are not very good at understanding that what is happening might not continue to happen. This basic psychological disposition is hard to override. And it’s why the Conservatives were caught off guard in Henley-on-Thames in June 2024 by the Liberal Democrats. It’s also why Cameron put erroneous faith in the idea that his country would not vote to leave the European Union – “things just don’t change that much”, you could hear his internal monologue whirr when he pulled the referendum trigger. It is also why sensible experts in January 2022 just could not believe that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine with that level of force. Until he did.
It’s a human instinct. But as a tool of political analysis, it’s about as sophisticated as a dog that believes it has been abandoned every time its owner leaves home: “the immediate state of affairs are the only plausible state of affairs”. I suspect my labradoodle, Dougal, would have failed to recognise that Henley was vulnerable to falling to the Liberal Democrats, too.
This summer I’m taking a Maga approach to reading: self-serving and isolationist
Ireland is learning what Britain has already discovered: the status quo does not endure
Oasis: You can’t write. You don’t care. No wonder you’ve gone a long way
How to work smarter: get up early, do your work diligently, have a long lunch, go home
And so to Ireland, which is staring into Donald Trump’s abyss, and wondering why on earth we ever left the economy so vulnerable to the whims of one irrational actor. As an economic model, Ireland’s in the 21st century worked. Rescuing the country from the economic doldrums and transforming it into one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan nations handed us a kind of centrist political stability that was the envy of much of the Continent (and latterly Westminster). But designing an economy on multinational corporate wealth works only so long as there isn’t a lunatic in the White House hellbent on blocking multinational corporate investment. When there is someone like that in the Oval Office, it doesn’t look like it makes much sense at all. No matter how glib that may be to point out.
A few caveats: some predicted Ireland’s fiscal miracle could all end in tears, and several commentators warned last year that the country’s next economic crisis would come not from within our own borders but from Washington. Trump, economist Stephen Kinsella said last year, would be “the most obvious source” of upset; the shock could even make Ireland’s earlier period of austerity “look like an episode of the Care Bears”, he told the podcast The Entrepreneur Experiment.
And it is not just Trump, but Europe that threatens Ireland’s cushy deal right now: it is clear the glittering highs of this model will not endure forever. Ireland is exposed on two fronts.
Here is the strange thing. Ireland is a country very used to vertiginous social change – the 2010s saw that rapid and radical liberalisation with the gay marriage and abortion referendums that we are all too used to vaunting. And there’s recent experience of severe economic crisis followed by recovery. With this experience we might expect Ireland to be unusually alive to the fact that upheaval and disruption lurk around corners (even if we cannot predict exactly what shape it might take) and to organise our political structures accordingly.
This is not a call for pessimistic thinking. I have lost track of the number of times that I have to remind myself that pessimism, like optimism, is deterministic. Believing everything is destined to go wrong is one simple way to ensure it will. But it is a self-reminder (as much as anything else) that the status quo is not permanent, no matter how much we will it to be.
The Tories were not fated to rule over Henley forever just as Ireland was not always guaranteed a best friend in the White House.
