Political Observer’s Historical Recollections, of the once ascendant Micklethwait & Wooldridge!
Jul 12, 2025
This reader just has to recall those ‘Best-Seelers’ authored by Micklethwait & Wooldridge. These books were the measuring device of the toxin of Neo-Liberalism , and Bush The Younger’s ‘War on Terror’!
“The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus” (1996):
“A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization” (2000):
“The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea” (2003):
“The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America” (2005):
“God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World” (2009):
“The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State” (2014):
“The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West – and How to Fix it” (2020):
Editor: The Economist was once a much more powerful force via Micklethwait & Wooldridge publications. Reading the first paragraphs of this political essay the reader experiences the diminution of the power this newspaper, under the leadership of Zanny Minton Beddoes. Not to speak of the utter vulgarity of the framing and the use of Pop Culture Enterainment as source!
“The Inbetweeners”, a cult sitcom broadcast between 2008 and 2010, has a surprising hold over British politics. It followed the lives of four teenage boys, offering an amusing portrait of the often psychopathic cruelty of British teen boys decades before “Adolescence” did it on Netflix without the jokes. Will McKenzie, a nerdy boy holding a briefcase, arrives at a new school and within seconds is dubbed a “briefcase wanker”.
It is this phrase that lives on in Westminster, which is riddled with millennials who came of age when the sitcom was on screen. The hard left deride Sir Keir Starmer’s party as “Briefcase Labour”—technocratic dweebs more interested in policy than politics. Some mps, meanwhile, complain to the Sunday Times about “ultra loyalist briefcase wankers who have been practising their maiden speeches…since they were ten”. If only. A good government is an alliance between nerds and the jocks who used to bully them at school. In this government, the nerd:jock ratio is off. Far from too many briefcase wankers, Labour has too few.
Editor: That Starmer and his New Labour Party are an utter failure, is beyond doubt! While Jeremy Corbyn’s new party is being attacked by the usual reactinary chatter=boxes! But reader don’t waste your valuable time with the current iteration of the long dead Bagehot! See seek immideate relief with John Crace!
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/johncrace
Editor: The wan Ghost of Bagehot appears in the final paragraph!
Nihilism is growing among Labour’s nerds. Perhaps whatever achievements New Labour managed came about due to a wall of money, rather than all those pdfs. Such pessimism can become self-fulfilling. Labour is the last chance for sweeping incrementalism. Other more chaotic projects are waiting should the party fail. Sir Keir’s project is one of improving the lives of voters—little by little, spreadsheet by spreadsheet—in the hope they will both notice and thank the government. It is an uninspiring vision, but it is all they have. Only the briefcase wankers can save them now.
Political Observer.
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