The departure of Cummings is a chance for the government to reinvent itself

Editorial: For Britain’s sake, let’s hope the Conservatives can start afresh

daily-cartoon

A coincidence, maybe, but the simultaneous disintegration of the Trump administration in the White House and the Johnson “team” in Downing Street is a remarkable phenomenon. Only a few months ago, these propellants of the radical populist wave of 2016 looked to have the 2020s ahead of them in which to extend their project, such as it is.

The parallels can be pushed further. In America, Steve Bannon, the architect of Trumpism, has long since left the White House, and faces charges that he defrauded donors to a crowdsourcing fund for the wall on the US-Mexico border. Now Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings, the brain behind Brexit and the Tories’ election victory, has left government, his plan having been to transform the venerable Cabinet Office into a Nasa-style mission control. 

Soon President Trump himself will be gone. How long will the prime minister last? The high watermark of populist nationalism has certainly passed, and the previous election victories of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, though messy and far from emphatic, presaged the beginning of the end for popular nationalism among the advanced democracies. The west will, after all, not slide into the authoritarian model of Russia, Turkey, or China, where democracy is, at best, attenuated. The remarkable rise of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand suggests that niceness might even become trendy. The broader lesson would seem to be that populism might be a great way to win power, but a poor way to govern.