Politics is raw in Britain today. Remainers rage against Brexiters and vice versa. Pensioners are set against millennials; nationalists against immigrants; populists against elites; rural traditionalists against city liberals. Party politics is characterised by contempt and dogma. To his many enemies, Jeremy Corbyn is an extremist and will never be a legitimate national leader. To Corbynistas, his internal critics are bad losers and traitors to Labour. To many non-Tory voters and MPs, Theresa May’s government is an immoral experiment in austerity and pandering to prejudice.

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On seemingly every fundamental issue, the country feels even more divided than it did in the turbulent 70s and 80s. There are furious battles over free speech, minority rights, the size of the state, the shape of the economy, social and cultural values, even the truth and selection of relevant political facts. In many other democracies, from the US to Italy to Australia, politics has become just as tribal, fragmented and apparently out of control. Opposing factions no longer seem able to talk to each other, or even to agree on what they might talk about.

For the many voters who dislike confrontation and feel that democracy should be about dialogue and compromise, the new political disorder is frightening. Even the most self-assured political veterans are horrified and baffled. As Tony Blair put it in a 2016 interview: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.” The adjective commentators repeatedly use to describe it is “toxic”.

Yet not very long ago, western politics was not like this at all. For much of the 90s and the 00s, our politics was – by historic standards – extraordinarily mild, orderly and stable. There was broad agreement about what made a good government. Most mainstream parties were led by consensus-seeking, seemingly pragmatic, not obviously ideological figures such as Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Blair himself. Many voters seemed satisfied by them: all four premiers won re-election. Political life moved slowly and predictably: most western democracies seemed much the same from one year to the next.

This undramatic politics, moreover, was rooted in what seemed to many a persuasive analysis of the modern world. One of its key early texts was a 1994 essay by the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens. In Brave New World: The New Context of Politics, he argued that most societies were becoming more cosmopolitan, less traditional, less tribal, more individualistic. This more fluid, interconnected world, with its linked capitalist economies and common environmental crises, he argued, needed a politics that was calm and not divisive, “a public arena in which controversial issues … can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue”. Conflict, whether between ideologies, social classes, political parties or other interest groups, ought to become a thing of the past.

During the mid-90s, Giddens’ ideas were enthusiastically absorbed by New Labour, which was excited by their apparent modernity and saw them as a way to escape the left-right battles that had often bogged down the party. Giddens became probably Blair’s favourite intellectual. The revered sociologist and the young party leader, who was looking for a big idea to guide his premiership, distilled their political thinking into what they hoped would be a lasting philosophy: the third way.

Its outlook pervaded New Labour’s first general election manifesto, in 1997: “We aim to put behind us the bitter political struggles … that have torn our country apart for too many decades. Many of these conflicts have no relevance whatsoever to the modern world – public versus private, bosses versus workers, middle class versus working class.” Instead, a New Labour government would unify previously opposed interest groups and dispassionately solve the country’s problems: “What counts is what works.” Blair won a famous landslide. The following year, he declared that the third way was a “new politics for the new century”.

It didn’t turn out that way. Since the Brexit vote – a kind of civil war in referendum form – and the capture of Labour by Corbyn, one of the third way’s most implacable Labour opponents, many who believed in a more consensual politics during the 90s and 00s have responded with incredulity. For three years, the press and social media have resounded with centrist politicians, activists and journalists refusing to accept that Blair’s “new politics” may now be obsolete – that it was a passing phenomenon, rather than a permanent solution to the problems of the modern world. From less bullish believers in the third way, meanwhile, there has been a stunned silence. As a former New Labour minister who helped Giddens refine the third way put it to me: “A catastrophe has befallen my kind of politics.”

The return of anger and ideology to a political culture that was supposed to have outgrown them has been attributed to many forces: from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, from Twitter to the MPs’ expenses scandal. Much less attention has been paid to whether the seductive promise of a politics without conflict – and its reality in Britain during the 90s and 00s – also contributed to the third way’s downfall. Did the attempt to create a politics without conflict help create its opposite?

In 2005, the year New Labour won its third consecutive general election, Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist who had been living and teaching in Britain for more than 30 years without attracting much attention outside academia, published a short, sharp book called On the Political. Its anodyne title concealed an original and unsettling argument, which Mouffe had been honing for two decades.

Despite being a supporter of the radical left, Mouffe defined “the political” in a similar way to thinkers often associated with the right, such as Machiavelli: as an arena of competing interests and perpetual conflict. “Liberal theorists are unable to acknowledge … the primary reality of strife in social life,” she wrote. In a democracy, different groups compete for economic resources, and cultural and physical space. Politics, therefore, involves incompatible choices and dilemmas “for which no rational solution” – meaning objective solution – “could ever exist”. Such conflicts result only in temporary victories; then the balance of power between the winner and loser shifts, thanks to social or other change, and the conflict starts again.

Such unresolved battles, Mouffe argued, were not a threat to democracy, but its vital essence. “To be able to mobilise passions,” she wrote, “to have a real purchase on people’s desires and fantasies … democratic politics must have a partisan character.” A healthy democracy required “opposed camps with whom people can identify”: in order to be politically engaged, people needed to have a “we” and a “they”. And besides, any attempt to eradicate such tribalism by building a consensus was bound to fail – no consensus could include everyone.

Mouffe regarded New Labour’s third way as a prime example of such a doomed strategy. “Far from creating the conditions for a more mature and consensual form of democracy”, she wrote, it would lead to “exactly the opposite”. It would create a society where the conflicts that New Labour had tried to suppress, or whose existence it had denied altogether, would resurface, more vicious than before. Their antagonists would no longer see each other as legitimate competitors, but as “enemies to be destroyed”. In Britain and across the west, she warned, “conditions are ripe for political demagogues … [for] disaffection with political parties [and] the growth of other types of collective identities … nationalist, religious or ethnic.” In particular, she foresaw a surge in “rightwing populism”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chantal Mouffe. Photograph: Serena Campanini/AGF/REX/Shutterstock

With eerie accuracy, Mouffe anticipated today’s political world. But in 2005, her book was seen as too alarmist by the few people who read it. She told me: “I remember quite a few people saying to me, ‘Your model doesn’t work. The centre of politics is in charge. There are no populist parties worth taking seriously.’” At the 2005 election, Ukip got barely 2% of the vote. “And I would say, ‘No, you’re right, the moment for populists and ‘enemies to be destroyed’ has not yet come. But all the conditions are there.’”

Mouffe lives in an elegant but slightly austere flat in north-west London, an area long favoured by better-known leftwing provocateurs such as Ken Livingstone and the late Stuart Hall. When I interviewed her this spring, she seemed pleased that her warnings about the consequences of consensus politics were receiving some belated recognition. “What I said in 2005,” she said briskly, over strong black coffee, “has been proven right.” She is 75 now, still writing and teaching, and in person as in print does not mince words.

Yet despite her efforts, and all the disasters suffered by centrists in recent years, the dream of a less confrontational politics has not disappeared – in fact, the longing for such a politics is rising again. Often, this longing takes the form of a hope that today’s roiling politics can be calmed by rational, moderate people coming together.

A fortnight after I met Mouffe, in April, it was reported by the Observer, probably the newspaper most sympathetic, still, to New Labour, that the launch of a new British centre party was being considered by a wealthy group of former Labour and Conservative donors, led by Simon Franks, the co-founder of LoveFilm and an informal adviser to Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader. The group were said to be disillusioned by the “tribal nature” and “polarisation” of current politics. Their mooted party, the report went on, would have a “policy platform that borrows ideas from both left and right”. Its name had a consensual, bland-but-uplifting, perfectly Blairite ring: United for Change.

Since the spring, speculation about this and other new centre parties has grown steadily louder, along with constant laments in the media and elsewhere over the state of today’s politics. Meanwhile, inside Labour and the Conservatives, in parliament and in constituency parties, the divides between those who still believe in consensus politics and those who believe in confrontation have become ever starker. Behind their battles over Brexit and Corbynism lurks an ever bigger dispute: what should the tone and substance of politics be in a democracy?

In politics and much else, the early 90s felt like a time for fresh starts. “You have to think back to that feeling of liberation,” Giddens told me. “[Soviet] communism had disappeared just like that” – he snapped his fingers – “and now there was a new world.”

From South Africa to Northern Ireland, previously unthinkable political reconciliations suggested a new mood. It spread through journalism and academia: “Thanks to people like Giddens and John Rawls, [mainstream] political theory was basically supporting the idea that the more consensus, the better,” Mouffe remembered. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s profoundly divisive premiership was terminated in 1990. The clashes between left and right that had dominated politics during the 70s and 80s seemed to be quietening.

In 1991, as a rising and self-assured Labour MP, Blair surveyed the state of world politics for the magazine Marxism Today. “All fixed points on the landscape have changed,” he wrote excitedly. “Everything and anything can be thought or rethought. We start again.”

Though officially still the journal of the small and shrinking Communist party of Great Britain, since the late 80s Marxism Today had ambitiously been trying to formulate a whole new politics, in many respects a precursor to the third way. This politics, it was hoped, would be less dogmatic and tribal, and more attuned to what the magazine called the “New Times”: the huge changes wrought by the global free-market revolution over the previous 20 years. Like Giddens, Marxism Today saw this revolution as permanent, and believed much of it should be accepted; but the magazine also thought remedies needed to be found for the damage the revolution had caused.

The magazine considered most of the left, inside and outside Labour, to be hopelessly out of date in its worldview and strategies, compared to the Thatcherites – “the cavalry against tanks” – and yearned for a Labour leader who was not. The magazine’s editor, Martin Jacques, identified Blair as a talented politician who was looking for fresh ideas and agreed with at least some of the Marxism Today analysis, and got to know him. “I thought he was something new,” Jacques told me. “He had no roots in the Labour tradition” – Blair’s father was a Conservative – “and when he came up with lines like, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ [as shadow home secretary in 1993], it suggested he knew you had to think differently to how Labour had previously. I liked that.”

Blair’s crime soundbite secured him his first national attention, by cleverly making him seem both rightwing and leftwing at the same time, and in some ways neither – responding to crime simply as a social problem to be solved rather than a matter of ideology. He became Labour leader the following year. Presenting himself as an almost apolitical figure came easily to Blair, because that was how he often saw himself. As a young man, “I was never really into politics,” he said in an interview as prime minister in 2000. “I don’t feel myself a politician even now.”

During the early years of his leadership and premiership, Blair was encouraged in such thinking by another sceptic about politics, Geoff Mulgan. Mulgan was a precocious, intellectually impatient former leftwing activist, who had quickly tired of what he saw as the factionalism and dead-end thinking of most socialists during the 70s and 80s. He gravitated towards Marxism Today and then New Labour, working as an adviser for Gordon Brown and then Blair. In 1994, Mulgan distilled his British experiences and his wide knowledge of western politics and social trends into a book, Politics in an Antipolitical Age. It claimed that warring creeds no longer interested most voters, or served them well. “Politics has to return,” he wrote, “to the craft of managing divergent interests.”

The same year, Giddens published his own book-length rejection of socialism and the 20th century’s other grand ideologies, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. He argued that these creeds were too rigid and old-fashioned to deal with the 21st century’s environmental and social problems. Mulgan knew Giddens, who was a longstanding Labour supporter, and invited him into the New Labour inner circle to share his thoughts.

Both men sometimes wrote schematic, slightly bloodless prose – but their certainty and breadth of reference could be intoxicating to politicians used to Westminster’s often insular culture. And in person, they were disarmingly direct and informal. In the 80s, Mulgan had driven a tour van for Labour-supporting bands. Giddens’ father had been a clerk at London Transport. As intellectuals go, Mulgan and Giddens were can-do, pragmatic figures, which was attractive to a New Labour hierarchy that saw itself in the same terms.

Their vision of a more harmonious politics, minus the profession’s usual feuds and clashing ambitions, also fitted with Blair’s Christian faith, which made him an instinctive former of coalitions. “Tony likes inclusion,” Mulgan told me. “He always thinks, ‘Get everyone round the table, and we can sort it out.’” In a 1993 collection of essays by Labour Christians, Blair wrote that his politics was “based on a fundamentally optimistic view … that there is potential in [all] human beings”.

During 1995, Blair began deploying “the third way” as a catchphrase in speeches: sporadically at first, as a description of particular New Labour policies, then more regularly, to sum up how he would approach government. But what exactly did he mean? Blair, at the time a master of vague rhetoric, never quite explained. Political journalists scratched their heads, or sniggered at the portentousness of the phrase. Better-informed commentators wearily pointed out that variants of the term “third way” had been used for decades by anyone – from dissident Marxists to Italian fascists – who wanted to signal their rejection of existing political orthodoxies.

For three years, Blair used the third way like an advertising slogan, as an attractive but almost content-free metaphor for the supposed freshness of New Labour and the staleness of their opponents. Then, in 1998, he and Giddens decided to define the term more concretely. They published a pamphlet and a book, respectively, both titled The Third Way. “I recognised that [the phrase] had a slightly noxious history,” Giddens told me. “But I used it to get attention.”

Blair’s pamphlet was energetic but unfocused. It veered between vague statements about the value of society, more precise but predictable attacks on “the fundamentalist left” – which Blair is still making today – and warnings that “tax must be kept under control”. It often read more like standard centre-right rhetoric - of the sort produced by Europe’s many Christian Democratic parties - than a bold new political fusion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair greets crowds after Labour’s election victory in 1997. Photograph: Adam Butler/AP

Giddens’ book was more thoughtful and nuanced. As well as advocating consensus politics, it warned that third way governments would still need to make controversial decisions: to check the growing power of the financial industries, for example, and to require socially responsible behaviour from companies as well as benefits claimants. Yet both men insisted that accepting the global free market in principle – and thus effectively removing it from politics – was a central part of the third way project.

For the next five years, from 1998 to 2003, Blair promoted this and other third way orthodoxies at regular, widely reported, sometimes slightly self-congratulatory international summits in Britain, Italy, Germany and the US. Most of the attendees were leaders of nominally left-of-centre parties that had moved into more ambiguous political territory and were achieving electoral success seemingly as a consequence. Giddens sometimes also attended. These days, he plays down his involvement. “I was never an adviser [to Blair],” he told me. “I was just a member of these discussions.”

In June 1999, Blair and Schröder launched a joint third way manifesto (Schröder called his variant “the new middle”) at Millbank Tower, the mythologised New Labour headquarters in London where the party had orchestrated its general election victory two years earlier. “Social democrats are in government,” the manifesto began, “in almost all the countries of the [European] Union.” The third way seemed to have triumphed.

The next British general election, in 2001, suggested a new era of political harmony and equilibrium. Almost unprecedentedly, nearly 95% of parliamentary seats chose the same party as before, leaving New Labour’s huge majority from 1997 almost completely intact.

Yet there was one significant difference between the two contests. The 2001 turnout was strikingly low: the lowest for 83 years. Many commentators and Labour figures discounted this as a consequence of a one-sided election. The Conservatives were still offering voters tired Thatcherite policies, and were awkwardly led by William Hague. “The weakness of the Tories drained turnout,” says David Miliband, one of New Labour’s more thoughtful figures, who became an MP in 2001. “Politics was like one hand clapping.”

Giddens was relatively sanguine about the situation. In 2007, he argued that the “everyday democratisation” of decision-making by the internet – an optimistic view of the internet’s political role – meant that elections were becoming less central to voters’ lives. “A low election turnout,” he wrote, “does not necessarily signal dissatisfaction with a government.”

Yet by the early 00s it was also becoming clear that there was something unsatisfying about the third way. “‘Beyond left and right’ had sounded rather grand and ambitious,” says Jacques, “but it was not. It was a retreat. Its notion of the political was extremely narrow.” Without ideological categories, without a critique of the economic and social status quo, without defined enemies – apart from what Blair hazily referred to as “the forces of conservatism” – New Labour’s politics was thin. Government became mainly about competence, and measuring that competence. In 2000, the Blair administration had 600 official “priorities”. Even Blair himself occasionally criticised his government’s bitty quality. “Sometimes it can seem as if it were a mere technocratic exercise,” he said in a 2002 speech, “well or less well managed, but with no overriding moral purpose.”

The inadequacies of western political life at the third way’s zenith became a focus for political scientists. In a 2006 essay, Ruling the Void, Peter Mair described a “hollowing” of politics: voters had lost their democratic function, he argued, because so many issues had been removed from public discussion by New Labour and its foreign counterparts. In 2000, Colin Crouch warned that western countries were approaching a state of “post-democracy”, with elections simply shuffling the same governing elite. But the most vivid condemnation of third way politics came from the melodramatic German conservative philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in 2006. “What is called for [by governments] now are resilient bores,” he wrote. “What is expected of them is to sit around big tables to come up with the world formula of compromise.” Politics of this sort was “the most formless of monsters … whatever it touches becomes, just like itself, docile, characterless”.

Former New Labour ministers complain that such sweeping dismissals ignore the many achievements of their governments, such as the introduction of a minimum wage and the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. David Miliband says: “We were trying to measure progress in yards. People live in yards.” Mulgan adds: “Making relatively small promises, and fulfilling them, worked quite well, for quite a while.”

Mulgan also points out that New Labour’s managerialist approach was hardly confined to the party. “Blair came to power partly because he was aligned with the worldview of the business establishment,” which was increasingly liberal and cosmopolitan, and, like new Labour, believed many problems could be solved by careful data collection, customer focus groups and good public relations, and which valued results above all else – “what works”.

Yet the fact that former New Labour figures so often respond to criticisms of their governments with policy detail is revealing: it suggests they think the latter is the only criteria on which governments should be judged. Moreover, in government as in business, basing your public appeal on competence and efficiency is a risk. When some of Blair’s more ambitious policies, such as healing the dereliction and social problems left by Thatcherism across northern England, made slower than expected progress, or failed altogether, voters felt acutely let down, and New Labour found itself unable to appeal to emotional or ideological loyalties instead.

Even when policies did succeed, voters often did not believe they had, thanks to the distorting efforts of the tabloids. After giving the government a relatively fair hearing during its early years, when they had been wooed by New Labour and impressed and intimidated by Blair’s popularity – a ceasefire that reinforced the impression that New Labour floated above the usual political fray – the tabloids reverted to their traditional Labour-bashing as the initial Blair craze inevitably faded. His government suffered the consequences. On radio phone-ins in the early 00s, callers would routinely castigate it for failing to do things, such as reduce crime, that it was already doing. Politics might have become a more placid business in the eyes of third way theorists and New Labour ministers, but in newspaper offices and living rooms it still bubbled with ancient enmities and fresh grievances.

Rightwing populist parties had begun to make electoral breakthroughs in France, Austria and Italy during the 80s and early 90s. In each case, the populists moved into political space left vacant by mainstream parties congregating ever more tightly on the centre ground. In 1994, Giddens wrote worriedly about “neofascists back on the streets” of continental Europe. Ukip was founded in 1993; despite an amateurish early life, by the 2004 elections for the European parliament it was able to win 16% of the vote.

Yet the growth of this politics of confrontation did not feature much in New Labour’s internal conversations. Ed Miliband, who during the 90s and 00s was busy rising from Brown adviser to MP to minister, remembers: “Everyone would think that all the support for Jörg Haider’s [far-right] Freedom party in Austria, say, was a bad thing. But it didn’t feel very … present.” His brother David says: “There was a sense that Britain was protected, partly by what we were achieving in government, and partly by the electoral system.”

Others in New Labour convinced themselves that the third way had its own populist dimension. Blair loved to invoke “the people”. At the 1999 Labour conference, he attacked “the old elites … that have run our professions and our country too long”. He was a privately educated ex-barrister, and his MPs were more middle-class than any previous Labour cohort; yet, at first, this anti-establishment tone was not completely absurd. For much of the 80s and 90s, Labour had been largely shunned by Britain’s ancient centres of power, such as the City of London. Millions of those who voted Labour in 1997 did so in a vaguely rebellious spirit: to eject the country’s default ruling party and to elect a reforming government.

Yet as the Blair government lengthened, and its principal figures seemed more entrenched and entitled, this sense of New Labour as a populist insurgency steadily diminished. As one of its former ministers puts it, in revealingly bureaucratic language: “Government drains your narrative.”

Always an intellectually curious politician, Ed Miliband read Mouffe’s On the Political when it came out in 2005. “When she described the third way as trying to have ‘politics without enemies’, I remember thinking, ‘She’s got a point!’” he told me. “There was a side of the third way that said what was good for business was always good for the worker. Tell that to the Uber driver! You can’t wish away those battles.”

Yet in the mid-00s Miliband was a relatively junior New Labour figure. And not many in the government shared his reflectiveness. “Blairism didn’t have a self-critical culture,” says the political scientist Alan Finlayson, whose 2003 book Making Sense of New Labour remains one of the few clear studies of the often amorphous Blair government. “The Blairites were afraid of internal criticism, after all the left-right Labour splits during the 70s and 80s. And they were strangely anti-intellectual in some ways, in believing that globalisation was like the weather and that they had a unique understanding of the modern world.”

Both convictions meant that, often, New Labour politicians saw what they expected to see in favoured texts such as Marxism Today and Giddens’ books – mainly, that globalisation and Thatcherism had transformed Britain – while ignoring the messages those texts also carried about the potentially explosive consequences.

“The most fundamental flaw of New Labour was accepting neoliberalism,” says Giddens now. “They didn’t do what they could have done to restrict it. The contrast is striking with Blair’s interventionism in military matters.” David Miliband, despite being a more orthodox New Labour figure than his brother, partly agrees: “We didn’t appreciate that globalisation was too unequal, too unstable … Deeper things were happening to the economy than we realised.”

Finlayson argues that the third way’s blind spots about the downsides of capitalism were not an accident, but a choice – a sign of rightwing assumptions behind its “beyond left and right” rhetoric. “We shouldn’t let them get away with claiming they were non-ideological.” Ideology was certainly evident in the Blairites’ party management, which relentlessly marginalised the Labour left. One of the paradoxes – you could say hypocrisies – of New Labour was that in order to create a more consensual politics it first had to dominate those who didn’t believe in it.

For all the third way’s interest in modernity and almost scientific language, its architects and true believers were old-fashioned in some ways. They had been shaped, as most of us are, by how they saw politics around them as young adults. They had grown up with the idea that the left became too strong and aggressive in the 70s, and that Thatcherism, for all its flaws, had rescued Britain in the 80s. They did not fully appreciate that by the time Labour finally returned to power in 1997, let alone by the 00s, both of those forces had faded. With its weak unions and over-mighty banks, Britain was no longer a country that needed a government that curbed the left and revered business – assuming it ever had.

Yet New Labour and its third way gurus had too much confidence in their own judgment to adjust their thinking and policies when their picture of Britain as a free-market success story became out of date. They also had too much contempt for the left – obsolete, in their view, because it still believed in conflict and the left-right division – to take on board its valid insights into the brittleness of modern capitalism. “They fell for their own mythology,” says Finlayson. “They became trapped.”

The third way gradually dropped out of use as a New Labour term in the mid-00s. The 2003 Iraq war and its acrimonious prelude and aftermath, and the ever more obvious feud between Blair and Brown, made it steadily harder to sustain the notion that New Labour was practising a politics of consensus. Blair stepped down as prime minister in 2007; when he published his memoirs afterwards, he only mentioned the third way five times in 700 pages. Giddens did not feature.

These days, former Blairites rarely talk about the third way. Yet their faith in consensus politics remains. None of those I spoke to, except to an extent Ed Miliband, were prepared to accept that Corbyn had been right to make Labour a more confrontational party again. “Many people are simply in denial,” Mouffe told me. “I’ve seen it in academia: when people have defended a theory all their lives, it requires a lot of courage to say, ‘I’m wrong.’”

Tellingly, my interviewees often praised the French president Emmanuel Macron, in whose youth, open-necked shirts, and supposedly unifying politics echoes of the 90s Blair can be detected. “Macron – he’s a French moderniser!” said David Miliband, with a whiff of vindication. Mouffe agreed: “Macron is trying to do what Blair did.” Yet Macron’s sagging popularity, only a year into his presidency, suggests that consensus politics doesn’t seduce like it used to.

David Miliband insisted that the west’s angry politics today would be a passing phase. “Populism is popular,” he said, “until it gets elected.” Mulgan argues that the tone of politics in Britain – and by implication, other democracies – is “cyclical”. It was confrontational in the 70s and 80s, consensual in the 90s and 00s, and is confrontational again now. Each phase, his argument runs, eventually produces its opposite: consensus becomes stifling, and voters and politicians seek a rupture; confrontations become exhausting, and they seek calm. You could extend his argument to say that both types of politics are embedded in British democracy, with its love of Commons shouting matches and fierce prime ministers on the one hand, and its reverence for “British compromise” and “moderation” on the other.

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But Finlayson thinks any return to consensus will take a long time. “Politics has fundamentally changed. The centrists suffered a profound loss of legitimacy because of Iraq and the financial crisis. There will be no return to centrism until they address that.” He also argues that social media has fragmented politics for good. And he predicts that the diminishing ability of capitalism to provide a good life for the majority means that competition for resources will remain fierce.

David Miliband, the least optimistic of the former New Labour figures I spoke to, called this “the politics of a shrinking pie”. He went on, “When we were in government, the pie wasn’t shrinking, so hard decisions were shirked about how to divide it.” The third way skirted around the age-old, in some ways tired, political questions about who gets the power and wealth. That turned out to be an approach for the good times.

In her plain living room in north London, Mouffe talked gravely about the prospects for democracy in harder times. She did not envisage consensus politics playing a big part. “The main battle is going to be between rightwing and leftwing populism,” she said. “That could open the way to a more authoritarian form of neoliberalism” – the spread of Trump-style government by decree and deregulation – “or to a new, much more democratic politics.” Mouffe saw stirrings of the latter in Corbyn’s huge, argumentative Labour party.

But she went on, “Democracy that is in good working order – with conflict, but where people accept the existence of their adversaries – is not easy to re-establish.” She looked up from her black coffee. “I’m not that optimistic.”

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