Britain’s Conservatives are “where the Liberal Party was in 1923”, says James Orr, a leading figure in the so-called “new right”, on Amol Rajan’s Radical podcast. You can imagine the Liberals, then, looking at Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald and thinking: “Who does this guy think he is?” But MacDonald’s subsequent victory swept the Liberals away – and the Tories now face a similarly “existential threat”. For the first time, the “intellectual energy” on the right is coming from an increasingly credible new party. For the Tories, “maybe it’s over”.

What drives Reform UK is “the politics of national preference” – a focus on Britain and on taking (qualified) pride in our history and heritage. No one has done more to “catalyse” this idea than Nigel Farage. In the heyday of globalisation, free markets dominated everything: national interests were subordinated; borders, in effect, “dissolved”. But this led to massive deindustrialisation in America and Europe, and to millions feeling marginalised and dispossessed. And it led, after 2016, to a greater emphasis on “home” – on what the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton called by the Greek word “oikos” or, in the phrase he coined, “oikophilia: love of home”. It is this, not the old ding-dong between right and left, that’s now at the heart of transatlantic politics: a love of family, community and nation. For the new right, and indeed “Blue Labour”, the primacy of the home trumps freedom. The “great age of liberalism” in the West, which lasted for more than 200 years ­– and in which personal freedom was the paramount goal – is over.

🏡 Yoni Applebaum’s book Stuck has a striking statistic on the importance of home in politics. In the 2016 US election, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a six-point lead over Donald Trump among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown. Those living within a two-hour drive backed Trump by nine points, and “those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points”.

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Is the AI hype overdone?

The rest of today’s email contains an intriguing piece from The New Yorker on why the release of OpenAI’s new GPT-5 has fuelled a “creeping fear” within the AI industry: that the technology “might not get much better than this”. Which would mean, of course, that we may not all be doomed after all.

To read it – along with the rest of this week’s heroes and villains, and about Winston Churchill’s wardrobe malfunction on a water slide – please take out a paid subscription.

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