When Labour came to power, Ben Judah believed the country had been suffering mainly from Tory problems. He learned the hard way, he wrote in The Spectator, that Britain's instability "stemmed mostly from British problems." What the country is living through, "Hvylya" reports, reminded him of France's Fourth Republic - those years when France "cycled through 22 governments in 12 years" and its party system was "wildly fragmented."
The diagnosis starts at the top. Downing Street, Judah argued, "isn't an Elysee, let alone a White House. It's a glorified Victorian private office, understaffed not just compared with its French and American counterparts, but even to Australia." In the most centralized country in the developed world, he wrote, this is "disastrous" - it leaves the prime minister without the staff to govern and creates "civil service blockages and departmental disputes." The result: "a paralysis of state."
Judah's prescription draws heavily on de Gaulle's playbook. Anglo-Gaullism would begin by creating a proper Department for the Prime Minister, then follow French wisdom on electoral reform. With Britain now operating a five-party system, he argued, the best path forward is Australian-style ranked-choice voting. "Can we hope for stability when either Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage could win hollow landslides on less than a third of the vote?" he asked. "Of course not."
De Gaulle's genius, Judah wrote, was treating postwar France "almost like a developing country in chronic need of modernisation." France in 1958 had just 45 miles of motorways and more than 20 percent of the population were still peasants. De Gaulle built France's first thousand kilometers of motorways, five new towns around Paris, the country's main airport and its first nuclear power plant. Britain, Judah noted, has "only 67 miles of completed high speed rail and some of the highest energy prices in Europe."
The essay also called for injecting Whitehall with "a generation of experts in the technological frontier of AI, biotech and beyond" - echoing de Gaulle's founding of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in 1945 to replace what he considered a sluggish civil service. But Judah was careful to distinguish Anglo-Gaullism from crude military spending. Any version "only hawking a message of salvation-through-defence spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal," he warned, "will fail." De Gaulle chose futurism over militarism - and 37 nuclear reactors built in the 1970s gave France a grid that is 70 percent nuclear-powered today.
Also read: how Germany shut its last nuclear reactors during a crisis - and why the reason cuts deeper than policy.