Tom Egerton has worked with Sir Anthony Seldon on The Conservative Effect 2010-24: 14 Wasted Years?, The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister and Johnson at 10: The Inside Story. He is also the founder and editor of ‘The Political Inquiry’, a Substack providing independent political analysis and promoting new voices in politics.
Cherwell: Tell us a bit about your early life; what memories stand out to you, especially in relation to how your later career developed?
Egerton: When did I know what I wanted to go into? At the GCSE level, there’s nothing really on politics. There’s very little. Your whole interaction with the study of politics, with the practice of politics is tangential to other subjects, or what’s actually happening in the real world, or maybe family or friend connections, right? The big thing for me was, through history, I discovered politics, and I think that’s quite regular for a lot of lot of people; but also that shapes how you look at politics, if you discover it through a passion for history, through looking at the past, that really shapes how you see the world, how you see politics, what type of politics you want to go into and your views fundamentally.
Cherwell: And then you took those two together, and went on to study History and Politics at Warwick. How did your experience there shape you?
Egerton: Warwick’s an interesting place, right? Because it’s a very respected uni, but it’s quite a new uni. I think it’s aged very well, and they’re innovating there quite a lot. I think you need to do that if you don’t have the rich history and tradition of other unis, you have to forge it. I think that’s what they’re doing well. The History department has got a very radical history, but it’s still a very fascinating history. I think a lot of the professors there are top of their game for a lot of research. Their economics department is obviously very famous, especially because of their business school. Their politics and philosophy is pioneering in places as well. There’s a good humanities and social sciences bracket there at Warwick. E.P. Thompson was professor there and set up the History department. So it has this lineage there, but it’s kind of in conflict with itself. I don’t want to say too much on it, but because they utilise a lot of money from the Big Five investment firms and lots of insurance companies through their business school. I mean, it’s happening at all unis, but this one specifically, the conflict of a progressive, maybe anti-capitalist humanities side versus a whole department’s spending based on it.
Cherwell: Was it while you were at Warwick that you first met Sir Anthony Seldon?
Egerton: I think I met him before, but I properly met him at Warwick when I was Academic Officer for the Politics Society. I wanted him down for a talk because he wrote a book called The Impossible Office, and I thought it was a very good book. He comes down, and I host an event with him over a few hours, and it goes down really well, hundreds of people attend. I got him doing uni media and local media there as well, which was so gracious with his time, and then from then on, we kind of hit it off over the next six, eight months, texting, calling each other; he shows me bits of work, I give comments. Our relationship kind of built from there, working wise.
Cherwell: And then from there, you moved on to work with him on Johnson at 10.
Egerton: So that was the first time I worked for him. He basically just needed a researcher that he could trust and that he thought was good enough. I was very lucky to be given that opportunity by him. I came on as chief researcher for that project, under Anthony and his co-author, Raymond Newell, who is also extremely impressive guy; he’s in his mid-20s, and has already done two masters and a degree. Very impressive. He’s now at Hanbury Strategy. Definitely one to look out for. He’d also co authored May at 10 before, so he retained that team, and us three work together on that, and it went really, really well. Ended up, I think, being one of his most successful books, numerically, as well as quality and reviews. That was a fascinating process which took about a year, both on the ground in Westminster and working from home and meeting up as a team. Great, great experience.
Cherwell: And that’s how you laid the groundwork for The Conservative Effect, which is the one that came out most recently.
Egerton: Before that, I co-authored the second edition of The Impossible Office, because that needed a lot of updating. They already had three authors, and I came on as a fourth to update most of the recent Prime Ministers, and also do a lot of editing and corrections. That came out a bit after Johnson at 10, and then off the back of that, we had The Conservative Effect sketched out for a while, because it was more ‘can we get the people, can we get the timing right’? Because you have to plan these things at least a year and a half in advance. You just have to see what the government’s doing, because there was a big question mark over Sunak for six months, not whether he could actually win an election, but at least be more successful. Then you can’t really be sure on conclusions you’re starting to write about the book.
Cherwell: If it ended up being a Conservative win, the book would look a bit incomplete.
Egerton: Exactly. Well, it helped that it was probably the easiest election to predict a long time. Even a year before, when we were really kick starting the project, I don’t think it was a given. In mid-2023, I think, everyone thought the Conservatives would probably lose. But by how much? Will it be a hung parliament? And looking at how Labour’s vote share actually was in the end, you know that actually, weirdly could have happened.
Even if they’d won, I think the conclusions in that book would have stood up. What wouldn’t have stood up is our framing around that. But I think that’s why me and Anthony took our time with it and made sure we had some firm footing on it, because also, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got space for everyone in the book. If you’ve got top academics, you can’t be going around making silly conclusions or ones that won’t hold up.
Cherwell: You wrote a chapter in the book on external shocks; what was that experience like?
Egerton: It was an interesting chapter to write, because it was a summary chapter, rather than breaking new ground in a specific area. I was having to coalesce six shocks, which were all a bit disparate and to be honest, complex to explain in itself. It was challenging to do as a historical project. But I think it was important because not many historical books, especially contemporary history, realise the idea of shocks and how they categorise and explain the historical record, and how future revisionism relies on those shocks. For every governing period since World War Two, but even before then, external crises absolutely shape the governing record, because it’s all about the agency that a government has. There’s no point judging a prime minister or a government fairly if you’re not going to look at what wicket they’re playing on.
The chapter wasn’t designed to kind of explain away the failures of the last 14 years, but to give an insight into the external shocks. It’s important to emphasise, because I can see already that some people were taking the wrong conclusions from what I was saying, because obviously they didn’t read it properly. But the point is, is you can still be fair on what happened, but only by showing what happened can you give a more authoritative account on the failures.
Cherwell: You also founded and edit ‘The Political Inquiry’. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Egerton: ‘The Political Inquiry’ was an area to showcase some of my repertoire of early political writing and strategic thought, but it’s also a place that I’m now utilising to promote up and coming politicos, writers, strategists and historians who don’t break through into the legacy media easily, or can’t do because of connections or whatever. And it actually is a place to foster new, exciting potential, and different thoughts that don’t get the light of day, from a range of political ideologies.
Cherwell: How did you come up with the idea of it?
Egerton: I wanted a place to write. If you go to any legacy media and their commissioning editors, what you’re given can be quite constricting. If you’re early in your career, you can’t always have the space to write about what you want to write about, where your skill set is. I think giving the space for that is an absolutely vital thing if you want to develop political talent and also break through.
It’s not like I publish everything. I’m not restrictive, but I’m not going to publish any old stuff. I think some digital media that focuses on younger writers does. Not uni stuff, by the way; this is more like professional ones that don’t realise that you’ve got to have an editorial line. But if the editorial line is open enough, it can still work. But it can’t be completely open.
I think now that I’ve edited The Conservative Effect on a professional, academic level, you realise you cannot force a top-down opinion on someone unless you you’ve got a editorial line to begin with. If your very premise is that you haven’t got one, you can’t do it. So I understand where all the big legacy media newspapers come from, because they do have lines and they are mostly clear about it. But if you’re going to commit to not having one, you’ve got to be clear about it.
Cherwell: It’s probably a good sign of your editorial and academic objectivity that I haven’t been able to gauge what are your politics are.
Egerton: I’d say centre-left is probably a good wishy-washy way of describing it.
Cherwell: A Starmerite?
Egerton: No, not really Starmer. As you’ll see on ‘The Political Inquiry’ and in this chapter I just wrote, I’ve got question marks over Starmer. Less from an ideological point of view, because I think the perennial issue with the left is they focus on ideology as the be-all and end-all. Actually, sometimes if people focused on delivery and strategy a bit more, much more ideological left-wing goals would get achieved in government. But because there’s less focus on that and more focus on ideological battles from both wings of the party under the ideological spectrum, not much gets done.
Cherwell: In all the work you’ve done, who would you say is the modern writer who has influenced you the most?
Egerton: I think this is weird because I lean left, but definitely Dominic Sandbrook, of The Rest is History podcast. He wrote a five-part series on British political history ranging from the 50s to the mid 80s. They are really interesting attempts to bring political and social cultural history together, and then display it in a more accessible modern context. I say accessible; the books are 800 pages, but by accessible, I mean summarizing the academic groups and thoughts of these historical periods and presenting them in an interesting way. I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions, but I think it is a fantastic introduction to political history, and also the history of this country. It comes from a standpoint that many people disagree with, but I think it’s good to read something you disagree with, to find ways to better it. That’s the fundamental point of history, really.
If I did a project in the future, he wouldn’t like it because there’s not enough anecdotes in it, or social history. But hopefully in the future, my writing will be more broad based in terms of history, rather than just the analytical, high politics, economic side of things, which can dominate analysis too much.
Cherwell: Speaking of next projects, what are your aspirations for the future?
Egerton: From now, just simply more writing, more reading, more research, realising that your career is never made in the first 10 years. It’s about what you do as a young person to develop and finding something you love. If you just keep developing and putting yourself out there for opportunities, you’ll get something, especially if you really like the thing you’re going for. That means you’ll have something over anyone else who’s more experienced, if you have more passion for it. People in politics see that. I think a lot of people in the industry of politics or history, they see things as daunting. They shouldn’t. Most people don’t know half as much as you probably know, and they use their positions to kind of protect what they have. It’s all about young people breaking through at the end of the day, that’s what generates new ideas and makes the industry so interesting and creative at times. And without that, it would be dead. So for anyone reading, go and do that, just go and put yourself out there for whatever, and put the effort in.
I’ve got a book in the works on Labour’s governing political strategy, loosely titled ‘Victory to Delivery’, which I might turn into a doctoral thesis. I think the biggest issue for left wing governments in this country is how you transfer what are sometimes questionable manifestos or indecipherable mandates into governing policy and governing strategy that actually works and stands the test of time. I think people like Miliband etc. have thought about that a lot, and you’ll see him trying to build policies that last a long time and build consensus. I think it’s an area of thought on that needs a lot more research, because there’s barely anything. I mean, Michael Barber is the only person I can think that has a really impactful study on it; he set up the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Blair, and wrote about delivering in government. I’d like to work on something like that from a historical perspective, with a bit more of a political edge.
The Conservative Effect 2010-24: 14 Wasted Years? is published by Cambridge University Press, and is available now. Cherwell reviewed the book in July 2024.
