Of course there have been periods in the past when everything seemed to be getting terrifyingly worse – one thinks of the times before each of the two World Wars, or the Cuban missile crisis – but the present day must be one of the scariest. Autocracy and illiberalism are gaining ground in the world; crude nationalism is resurgent; Russia invades an independent country; there are massacres in the Sudan; and even Israeli Jews – up until now history’s quintessential victims – are ditching what must be regarded as the best aspects of their religion (which could be the Jewish cult that became Christianity, cleansed of its Pauline addenda), and are now behaving as a colonialist power of the cruellest kind. On a more parochial (British) level, we have the ‘nasty’ party in our politics becoming even nastier, whatever the result of its imminent leadership election, and being pushed to further nastiness by a new proto-Fascist party on its Right. That’s after having so screwed things up in its last fourteen years in office that it’s difficult to see how the country can return to decency. And then of course there’s still our criminal Fourth Estate.

On the domestic front Corbyn had some of the answers; and also a larger popular vote. But he also, of course, had that awful Press to contend with; and I’m not sure that his pacifism would have helped him today re. Gaza, Lebanon and the Ukraine.

In those earlier periods of doom and despondency, at least there were glimmerings of hope. (See my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, ch. 11.) Not so much now.