Good morning. There’s a new lefty elite running Britain, and they hate you because they think you’re a racist. That is the central contention advanced by the scholar of populist politics Matthew Goodwin, and if the idea was already looming in the Overton window before his attention-hoovering new book came out, it is now hauling itself onto the balcony and clambering through.
This week, the former government equality tsar Trevor Phillips wrote that “the political and media elite” have achieved “institutional capture” across swathes of the UK’s governing apparatus. The Spectator magazine devoted its cover to the “new elite” and how “the woke aristocracy” is on a “march through the institutions”. And Liz Truss, who was quite recently the prime minister, claimed that her monumental unpopularity was not the result of incompetence, but of an elite “coordinated resistance” that “reached into the media and the broader establishment”.
