Is the party over?

The old narratives are breaking down. The Tory party drifts, wartime tributes are sidelined and the political class clings to myths it no longer believes. Much of Britain’s establishment seems content to manage decline—quietly, politely and without purpose. Contra Brief is here to do something different. We’re not just chronicling what’s being lost—we’re setting the terms for what comes next. Clarity over cant. Reality over ritual. There’s a better conversation to be had, and it starts by seeing things as they are.

Comment

What did the duopoly ever do for us? Quite a lot, insists Iain Martin in Reaction, mounting a nostalgic defence of Britain’s battered two-party system. Against the rise of Reform and the apparent Tory death rattle, Martin casts the old Labour–Tory axis as a kind of national immune system-soaking up discontent, reinventing itself, holding the line against “saloon bar solutions.”

But the patient is flatlining. “Starmer v Farage” is now the main event, with Number 10 quietly hoping Reform will keep splitting the right. Labour plays along, tweaking its rhetoric on immigration. Not to beat the Tories, but to box out Farage.

Martin, usually a cautious Tory institutionalist, suddenly contemplates collapse. “We may be witnessing the eclipse of the Tory party,” he writes, invoking French conservatives reduced to electoral ghosts. Reform, meanwhile, are “set up to fail”—superficial, amateurish and peddling a tax plan that makes “Liz Truss look like a patient and prudent economic genius.”

But the unspoken admission is starker still: that the Tory party’s only remaining utility is as a cautionary tale. A rump in waiting, praying for Farage to implode, and hoping the punters won’t notice that “fiscally incontinent” is just the new normal.

The Polemic

“Alert! Alert! The gammon is in the vegetable box!” writes Ben Sixsmith in The Critic, skewering the left’s meltdown over Starmer’s recent anti-immigration pivot. The panic script is familiar: Britain is, was, and always shall be “a nation of immigrants”—“a living museum of immigration,” as the New York Times once gushed. But as Sixsmith coolly points out, this is “complete nonsense” as false “as saying Finland has a warm climate.” The genetic record, from W Bodmer to New Scientist, shows “extraordinary stability” in the native British population. A few centuries of Viking pillaging or Norman rule do not an Ellis Island make.

The meme itself is an American import—less argument than incantation, designed to render mass migration both inevitable and unchallengeable. It works rhetorically because it flatters, not because it’s true. Yes, migrants have enriched British life. So have the British. Pretending otherwise is less inclusive than it is erasing. Sixsmith, a migrant himself, lands it best: “It would be grossly arrogant… to behave as if Polish life is the product of migrants such as myself.” Yet this is precisely what liberal Britain insists on doing—rewriting history to mask policy failure. The “nation of immigrants” shtick isn’t just ahistorical. It’s exhausted. Now it sounds like a eulogy.

Full essay here →

Comment

A “poignant tribute” to one of Britain’s defining wartime moments was redirected mid-Channel—to clear the way for a migrant dinghy. As The Telegraph reports, a flotilla of 66 “Little Ships”, marking the 85th anniversary of Dunkirk, was ordered aside so Border Force and the French navy could chaperone a migrant vessel. The irony is brutal. In 1940, these boats helped rescue 300,000 men from Nazi-occupied France. In 2024, they’re shoved off course because a French warship radioed in to say: “There is a migrant [boat] close by. And we’ve been requested to give one nautical mile distance.” The flotilla complied. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much,” replied the French voice—perfectly polite, supremely indifferent.

Chris Bannister, who owns one of the historic vessels, called the diversion “a disgrace” that dishonours those who “sacrificed their lives”. But the symbolism speaks for itself: the old England of duty, sacrifice and defiance makes way—literally—for a new order, choreographed by bureaucrats in high-vis and navies playing Uber across national borders. As The Telegraph notes, it was the first Dunkirk crossing since 2015. Don’t be surprised if it’s the last. Why bother inspiring future generations with stories of courage and resolve, when the present can’t even stay the course for a morning without flinching? Britain remembers Dunkirk but obeys Calais.

Flashpoints 

The British dream is now full benefits, a council flat and a state-funded car: 47.6% of London households in social housing are headed up by someone born overseas reports Sam Asworth-Hayes in the Telegraph.

A world without Nigel Farage: The Economist profiles the Reform leader saying near-mythic survival through multiple brushes with death has become inseparable from his political identity, fuelling a career built on bold, high-stakes gambles that reshaped British politics.

Billionaire to open maths school for the most talented children: One of Britain’s biggest taxpayers is opening the country’s first specialist secondary school for exceptionally talented young mathematicians reports The Times.

How Islamism infiltrated Downing Street: David Rose writing in Unherd says Labour is facing increasing influence from Islamist-linked figures and organisations, some with past ties to extremism, as it attempts to stem electoral losses in Muslim-majority constituencies.

Quote of the week

Until next time,