Some of this story may sound familiar. Inspired by the free-market, small-state ideas introduced to British politics by Margaret Thatcher, a powerful group of Conservative politicians begin a drastic experiment. Orthodoxy is turned on its head; policies that seem to make precious little sense are enthusiastically rolled out. What they are up to triggers plenty of alarm, but their opponents are dismissed as cowards and throwbacks. Then, after a series of mishaps and disasters, the whole thing hits the skids – but the surrounding mess is so confounding that clearing it up will take years.
Over not much more than a month, that was the rough story of Liz Truss and her Tory allies. But over the past decade or so, a much longer and messier saga about the same fiercely ideological kind of Toryism has played out in Barnet, the suburban expanse that sits at the end of the London’s Northern line and contains such places as Hendon, Whetstone, Golders Green and Edgware.
