Late one night in 1958, a man named Liu Bingshu whispered to his wife, the mother of their four young children, “There is no escape. I could be taken away … If I can come back, we will see each other again.” Liu would soon be the victim of a massive policy change by the Communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. Just a year earlier, Mao had famously demanded that “a hundred flowers bloom,” actively inviting criticism and suggestions from the public. But those who spoke up were soon labeled “rightist” enemies; the party estimated that they amounted to 5 percent of the population. Some half a million intellectuals, including Liu, were ordered to undergo “reeducation.” Thousands were dispatched to three labor camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. The deadliest of them was Jiabiangou, where less than half of the inmates are reported to have survived. Liu’s family never saw him again.

This intimate and devastating nighttime discussion between Liu and his wife has been preserved because Liu’s oldest son, 12-year-old Liu Tianyou, woke up and overheard it, and decades later, in his modest apartment in Gansu, the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming recorded his memory. Ai spent two years interviewing dozens of Jiabiangou survivors as well as the families of victims. She traveled to the former camp site and filmed the shallow graves with skulls still poking out of the sand. In 2017, 60 years after Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Ai released her seven-hour film: Jiabiangou Elegy.

People such as Ai Xiaoming—Chinese filmmakers, writers, and artists, those who are looking to uncover and expose the darkest episodes in China’s history, often at great risk to themselves—are the subject of the long-time China correspondent Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks. Johnson considers these individuals to be engaged in the ancient Chinese tradition of producing yeshi, or “wild history”—accounts of the past that strayed from official dynastic court history, or zhengshi. In the China of today, Johnson contends, this practice continues with a sparse but committed underground insisting on yeshi in the face of a digitally reinforced version of zhengshi.

The Communist government considers the official narratives of the past sacrosanct, and control over them as essential to the maintenance of power. Attempts to challenge any aspect of the accepted history of Communist rule have become particularly dangerous in the past decade, under the rule of Xi Jinping. Johnson himself was among a group of foreign correspondents who were suddenly expelled from the country in 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak and growing animosity between the Trump and Xi administrations. Especially at a time of renewed repression, Johnson argues, the fight against collective amnesia is an important front line. The work of these documentarians is to better understand the past, but it has also become “a battleground for the present,” Johnson writes.

In this sense, Johnson’s work is not unlike that of his subjects: They ask their audiences to shift their vantage point and to reconsider an overlooked group or a sanitized past to truly comprehend the country they live in. Johnson captures a range of grassroots historians carrying out this work, including the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who conducted oral-history interviews in order to piece together the destruction of her native land during the Cultural Revolution, and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, who documented the suffering of peasants in the enduring regional famines in rural Shaanxi province in northwestern China.

Every ideology creates its own origin myths. Mao and his fellow idealists canonized their memory of brotherly love in Yan’an, the Communists’ homebase in the 1930s and ’40s, which in reality was dominated by fierce power struggles punctuated by executions. Americans don’t have to search far to find examples of such airbrushing, like the belief in the unwavering fair-mindedness of the American Founding Fathers, many of whom were slave owners. Recent years have seen a global “memory boom,” Johnson writes, an attempt to correct the record. And in China, this push has its own urgency: The government sees self-reflection and criticism as a form of lethal weakness, justifying its oppressive policies and persecutions. For the country to break free from the cycles of injustice and violence, zhengshi and yeshi have to first make peace.

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the mid-1950s, which swept up Liu Bingshu and so many others, Mao launched a series of utopian experiments. The Great Leap Forward, a crash industrialization program, soon led to the Great Famine, from 1959 to 1961, in which an estimated 45 million people starved to death. The Cultural Revolution soon followed; Mao, uncertain of his grasp on power, declared that enemies of the regime were preparing for a counterrevolution. In July 1966, he urged students and other young people to attack authority figures around them. The next month, in Beijing alone, more than 1,700 people were killed. The upheaval ended only shortly after Mao’s death, in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping rose to power as Mao’s successor, he was confronted with the seminal task of reframing the deadly chaos from which the country had just emerged. In 1980, he convened a committee to work on a draft resolution about this turbulent recent history. But Johnson writes that Deng was reportedly livid when the committee submitted its first draft, because he found the criticism of Mao far too blunt. Deng himself had suffered under Mao: He had been purged twice. His oldest son was tortured and had jumped off a building, becoming paralyzed. However, Deng felt that to reject the legacy of the Great Helmsman so thoroughly would undermine the Communist Party’s own legitimacy.

[Read: The China model is dead]

Ultimately, a more conciliatory version was distributed to a few thousand senior officials that September, triggering complaints that the draft had failed to address the period’s mass fatalities. Deng managed to prevent a full-blown denunciation of his predecessor, and nine months later, the resolution was officially ratified. It acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was a costly error and blamed it on the “anti-revolutionary” Gang of Four, a faction of party officials who had become notorious during that era. It reaffirmed Mao’s status as “a great leader and mentor,” vaguely concluding that “his contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary.”

President Xi Jinping, who has led the country since 2013, has sanctioned this paving over of difficult history. And he has explicitly pointed to the Soviet Union and what he calls its “historical nihilism” as a cautionary tale. Xi saw the Soviet leadership’s decision after Stalin’s death to allow a degree of criticism of his reign and its bloody repressions as the beginning of the end of Soviet power. The permission to reassess history in this way, Xi believes, opened the floodgates to demands for increased liberalization. To get ahead of this “historical nihilism,” on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, in 2013, Xi instructed party members to see Mao in his historical context. “We can’t use today’s circumstances,” he said, “to measure our predecessors.”

Over the years, party commentators have echoed Xi’s thoughts. In 2018, the Central Committee journal Qiushi published an article on “historical nihilism” and blamed Nikita Khrushchev specifically for his infamous 1956 secret speech in which he acknowledged some of Stalin’s crimes. Khrushchev “failed to analyze the historical background,” the article argued. “And disproportionately focused on Stalin’s shortcomings and mistakes.” The author also warned against the subversive “information explosion” that the Soviets underwent. In the 1960s, memoirs from victims of Stalin’s Gulags, petition letters, underground journals, and books by dissidents circulated in a period known in the Soviet Union as “The Thaw.” “We must unequivocally oppose and resist historical nihilism,” Xi said at a Central Committee meeting in 2021. The same year, party theorists called on the public to “dare to struggle against” this “historical nihilism,” which one of them said was aimed at “removing the spinal cord” of the Chinese race.

One of the survivors Ai Xiaoming followed in her documentary was Zhang Suiqing, who took it upon himself to erect a tombstone of sorts for his less fortunate Jiabiangou peers. In 2013, he obtained approval from local authorities. When the modest memorial was finally built, the officials changed their minds and had it dismantled. What happened to Zhang’s project is reminiscent of a passage in Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel, Time Shelter, about post-communist Bulgaria. When a character set about trying to build a museum dedicated to the role of the country’s state security, he met endless obstacles: “We don’t want to divide the people,” he was told. “It wasn’t the right moment,” others said. Finally, he gave up, noting, “You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”

With charming modesty, China experts from the United States and Europe sometimes call themselves “students of China.” Ian Johnson has been “a student of China” in the best sense of this phrase. In his first book about the country, Wild Grass, published in 2004, he traced the possibility of liberalization at the turn of the century, by pursuing—literally, by train and taxi, or down a hallway—underdog figures who became accidental activists as they tackled problems such as police brutality and the overtaxation of farmers.

Those who have read Wild Grass may feel a wistfulness for it while reading Sparks: For many, the hopefulness of the early 2000s has evaporated. The country feels much further away from the sense of potential he was describing then. Johnson’s writing, too, has changed over time, shifting from the conventions of narrative long-form to a more documentarian style. His cast of characters has grown and no matter how brief the appearance is, he diligently notes each person’s name as if he, too, is fending off erasure. The landscape has widened, and he insists that readers see China the way he sees it: how the sprawling geography, history, and people who animate it are intricately intertwined. In Dao County, one of the worst sites of the Cultural Revolution, an elderly man, Tan Hecheng, showed Johnson around. Tan spent four decades researching and documenting the thousands of local killings. At a scenic spot by a local river, he showed Johnson saber marks on the parapet of a bridge—a sickening trace of the executions. Johnson sees not only the physical wounds of the past but also the psychic toll on the historian: “His mind is overloaded with horrific images. As he gets older, they overwhelm him, becoming more real than ever.”

[Read: How China sees the world]

Authoritarians have an instinct to try to control a nation’s historical memory. This impulse emerges out of fear. They are convinced that their power will be weakened if they allow a more accurate and nuanced vision of the past, worrying that discussions of guilt, accountability, and reparation will be required if they get too far. But such a binary calculation in dealing with a nation’s history is “the opposite of thought,” as the novelist Zadie Smith recently put it in an interview. When Ai Xiaoming’s film was released, she and her subjects were harassed by the authorities. “Aren’t today’s events enough for you to believe the veracity of the Jiabiangou stories?” she asked on WeChat in 2017.

“Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would not have been Tiananmen,” Huang Zerong, who went to prison for publishing an underground journal, told Johnson. In the imprisonment of Huang and the harassment of Ai, the vicious cycle repeats. China’s underground historians use writing like a time shelter: Through manuscripts saved in drawers, informal lectures on tucked-away staircases, and magazines circulated by PDF file to evade the government’s eye, they want to memorialize those who came before them and to deliver a message to the future.

The former prime minister's plans at his new home had been threatened by the presence of great crested newts.

Caesars are back, big caesars and little caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and developing nations. The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed strongmen strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings and plotting a comeback after a humiliating fall. And we thought it couldn’t happen here. How can these uncouth figures with their funny hair, their rude manners, and their bad jokes take such a hold on the popular imagination? How can anyone bear to listen to their endless resentful rants? Surely, they can’t get away with this? People will see through them before it’s too late.

But no. Here they are again, and in numbers. Look who’s leading in Argentina’s presidential race: Javier Milei, a former tantric-sex coach with a wild mop of dark hair and Elvis-impersonator sideburns, known as El Peluca (“The Wig”), who stumps the stage to the backing of a hard-rock group. El Peluca promotes monetarism, free love, and the sale of human organs; claims that climate change is a hoax; and wants to burn down the central bank and close the ministry of education—in short, a ragbag of eye-catchers, because eye-catching is what the would-be caesar is all about.

The little caesars of today seem to get along quite nicely without any systematic ideology worth the name. For what consistent line have Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and even Britain’s Boris Johnson been operating on, beyond a shouty sort of nationalism and a carefully advertised hostility to immigrants—a mixture familiar from ancient times? The great Pericles himself instituted a law barring anyone not of Athenian parentage from claiming citizenship (his own, foreign-born mistress fell foul of the law).

[From the September 2016 issue: Why are some conservative thinkers falling for Trump?]

Yet why should this surprise us? Dictators of one sort or another have been an ever-lurking threat throughout history. They interrupted and betrayed the constitutional traditions of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic: Peisistratos, Critias, and the Thirty Tyrants in Athens; Sulla, Marius, and Julius Caesar in Rome. As early as the time of Thucydides and Plato, the word tyrannos had mutated from a neutral term for “king” into our modern pejorative sense of “tyrant.” Absolutist rulers broke up the city-states of medieval Germany and Italy.

Nice-minded people may shy away from lumping together the excesses of a petty charlatan with the horrific deeds of a mass murderer. How can there be any comparison between a Johnson and a Putin? But only a dullard could fail to notice the painful similarities in their methods: the unabashed mendacity; the contempt for law, parliaments, and due process; and, above all, the relentless propaganda, inflaming old resentments and provoking new ones. “Propaganda, propaganda, now it all depends on propaganda,” Adolf Hitler declared at a tense moment during the Beer Hall Putsch. The putsch failed. But the lesson was learned, and not just by Hitler.

Big caesars may come to power by outright lawless violence or by more or less legitimate means, as Louis-Napoléon, Benito Mussolini, and even Hitler did, and then consolidate their dictatorship in a so-called self-coup or autogolpe. Little caesars go only as far as they need to within a reassuring constitutional framework, which of course they cynically abuse by fixing elections, neutering parliament, and manipulating the courts. “Tinpot dictators” says it nicely. Yes, caesars occupy a broad spectrum, but the caesarist style is always much the same.

It is an uncomfortable thought that caesars may pop up in any country and under all sorts of economic and political conditions. Which is why so many of us prefer not to think it. We would rather look back on any such experience as an unlucky blip that left scarcely a scratch on the body politic, mere “kerfuffle,” as Boris Johnson notoriously brushed aside Trump’s impeachment and acquittal on charges of inciting insurrection against his own government.

But the damage is real enough. In Britain, the tendency on the political right is to concede, at most, that Johnson was too chaotic to be prime minister, too much of a joker to get anything much done. But it was largely Johnson’s personal achievement to smash the U.K.’s legal and political ties with Europe and cripple its continental trade. Less noticed are Johnson’s Five Acts, which came into force last year: restricting the right to judicial review; dissuading the poor from voting by requiring ID at polling stations (which even Johnson’s ally Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg described as a form of “gerrymandering”); bringing the Electoral Commission under the direct control of the government; granting the prime minister the unrestricted right to dissolve Parliament; giving the police the right to ban “noisy” protests; and, of course, stringent (but so far wholly ineffective) immigration controls. These measures bear a strong family resemblance to the repressive Six Acts of Lord Liverpool’s government in 1819, and are likely to be remembered with equal loathing.

[Read: Ancient Rome’s collapse is written into Arctic ice]

Those who continue to indulge the memory of Johnson as an overpromoted but endearing clown who kept us amused for a while should also recall his power-grabbing and obnoxious style of government. He purged the party of 21 senior members of Parliament, including two ex-chancellors of the exchequer. He sacked some half a dozen top civil servants in defiance of constitutional tradition. He expanded the Downing Street apparat from a few dozen to more than 100 functionaries. He diluted the ministerial code, so that offenders might escape with a reprimand instead of automatic dismissal, and then proceeded to let off or ignore a string of gropers and chiselers. And he repeatedly lied to Parliament about Partygate, which forced him to slink out of office in a humiliating exit never before experienced by a British prime minister.

Last year in the U.K., the Year of the Three Prime Ministers, may not have been as bloody as A.D. 69 in ancient Rome, the Year of the Four Emperors (two of them were murdered and a third topped himself). But it was a uniquely excruciating moment in our modern political history, when chaos collapsed into farce, and at ruinous expense to the nation, while the world looked on in amazement and contempt.

And how has America fared? There was nothing original about Trump’s agenda. Protectionism, hostility to foreign entanglements, persecution of immigrants (the title of Most Hated Immigrants passing over the years from the Italians to the Irish to the Jews, to the Chinese, to the Japanese, to the Mexicans)—all of this has been the staple fare of the American right since the 19th century. What is original about Trump, as is true of all caesars and would-be caesars, is the technique: the tweets, the rallies, the bullying, the nicknames, the floodlights, the slogans.  

A caesar creates his own visual culture and basks in it. Emperor Augustus had the text of his boastful brief autobiography, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, cast in bronze or carved in stone and then erected in public spaces all across the empire; today you can still see surviving fragments of this huge exercise in global PR. Ever since, the caesar has been a pioneer in the use of new media, including the inventions of printing and photography, the development of advertising, later cinema, radio, and television, and finally—perhaps most potent of all—social media, which gives him unrivaled direct access to every voter. Trump said quite frankly, “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here.”

[Helen Lewis: Here lies Boris Johnson]

The caesar’s delight in the visual image is no accident. He thrives in the moment; he is the enemy of long-winded statutes and codes of law and practice, and is the king of the photo opportunity. He is an endless source of stunts, gestures, masquerades: He may appear in the guise of a Greek god or a Roman emperor, or a construction worker or a fighter pilot, never resting in his efforts to convince the public that life is simply more vibrant, more fun when he is around. His verbal messages are deliberately simple, aimed at the lowest common denominator in his audience (a method extolled ad nauseam by the author of Mein Kampf). These communications also necessarily involve a good deal of distortion of the truth. Caesars are shameless liars. After two millennia, scholars have cottoned on to the fact that Julius Caesar embellished or invented large parts of his history of the Gallic Wars. Napoleon’s communiqués were so overblown that “to lie like a bulletin” became a catchphrase.

Caesars know how to intimidate as well as charm, to frighten and shock, often by the use of foul language. Remember how Johnson scuppered Theresa May’s deal with the European Union by repeatedly denouncing it as “polishing a turd.” When, in the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell was attacked by judges for his lawless actions, he reportedly vilified them for invoking “Magna Farta,” and called the Petition of Right “the Petition of Shite.”

Only a caesar can get things moving by making the circumstances abnormal. Otherwise, the new “national conservatism”—or the less pleasant inflections that its name brings to mind—is likely to remain the niche pursuit of a disgruntled minority. Yet the one thing that the movement’s Statement of Principles does not mention is leadership, because its promoters know that this is an indecent subject. The yearning for a strongman cannot be openly admitted. But they can’t do without him.

[Rory Stewart: What to do when your political party loses its mind]

Only a caesar has the chutzpah to break the rules, and to break open the treasury, as Julius Caesar did to grab the gold and silver needed to prosecute his war against Pompey, and Trump did under his emergency decree 9844 to grab the billions of dollars to build his Mexican wall, which Congress had denied him. By contrast, the idea that there is some hidden continuity between the conservatism of, say, Margaret Thatcher and today’s new right is fantasy. Thatcher was bossy and overbearing, and she made quite a few bad mistakes (her attempt to impose a poll tax, for one), but she was a stickler for the rules—as well as being a qualified lawyer, not a profession followed by most caesars—and she was deeply distressed when she was thought to have broken the code, as, for example, over the Westland Affair.

Political analysts are rather reluctant to consider the phenomenon of caesarism. They prefer to think up new abstractions, or revive old ones, to describe the political tendencies of our day: authoritarian populism, white nationalism, illiberal democracy, neofascism. These terms may convey the broad outline of what we see around us, but not the motive force: We get a good idea of what the cart looks like, but where’s the bloody horse? Without the spark of a caesar, the rumbling discontents are unlikely to catch fire. Caesarism isn’t just a cute trope; it’s an ever-recurring danger. The crucial thing is to spot the incoming caesar before he crosses the Rubicon—and above all, to stop him from doing the comeback-kid act. Nobody said it was easy.

But it can be done. This is an age of caesar-toppling, too. In the past three years, a U.S. president has been impeached twice, before and after being thrown out by the voters, and a British prime minister has been forced to resign by mass defections among his own ministers and then forced to leave the House of Commons by the Privileges Committee. The constitutional checks and balances worked. Accountability kicked in. We must never fall into the complacency of assuming that we have reached some liberal-democratic nirvana. History goes on, and it is still ours to make and remake. If applied with a little persistence, the rules can always break the rule-breakers in the end.

The former PM airs concerns as firms seek clarity over the government's commitment to the rail link.

An audit opinion says due process was not followed when the government approved the bill for the former PM's lawyers.

For three years now, I’ve had a recurring dream. I am walking into the British Parliament, which seems to have become a cathedral. Passing beneath coffered ceilings, Gothic wallpaper, and sinuous brass work, I arrive at a marble version of the debating chamber, in which I can see my sometimes-antagonist, the Conservative member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, lying in what appears to be a bishop’s surplice on one of the pews. When I step in to join my other colleagues, a large man in a tailcoat intercepts me, indicates courteously that this place is no longer for me, and escorts me out.

I had thought that I was reconciled to my break with Britain’s Conservative Party. My dreams suggest otherwise.

That break was sudden. Four years ago, Boris Johnson became prime minister. Almost overnight, the liberal-centrist tradition of the Conservative Party, which I had championed, was replaced by a right-wing, anti-immigrant platform for populists who reveled in stoking culture wars. The new prime minister threatened that MPs who tried to block his hard-Brexit proposals would be expelled from the party. Twenty-one of us chose to do so. He was true to his word: We all lost our seats. The party that I had served in Parliament for nearly a decade, and latterly for several years as a government minister, disinherited me. Friends turned against me.

Reckoning with Johnson’s legacy has made me very conscious of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and I often wonder what general lessons can be drawn about alienation from a political party as it shifts from the center-right to the extreme. I can hardly claim to have found a formula, but I am beginning to believe that conservative populism can be defeated and that there is a route back to the center ground of democratic politics, where I believe most voters naturally are.

I was once a Labour Party member, but my years working in Iraq and Afghanistan alienated me from Tony Blair’s technocratic triumphalism. I was drawn to David Cameron’s Tory Party because I felt it better reflected my instincts about tradition, country, the wisdom of local communities, restraint abroad, and prudence at home. But perhaps because I had been a civil servant, I still largely viewed becoming a politician as a practical administrative challenge, rather than an exercise in party politicking.

I became a member of Parliament in 2010, when Cameron led a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. We campaigned and voted together not only for localism, but also for gay marriage, net-zero emissions growth, and far more spending on international development. When later, as a government minister with responsibility first for prisons and then for the environment, I moved to reduce the number of people incarcerated and double the U.K.’s expenditure on tackling climate change, I did not feel any friction with my party.

[Read: Why would anyone become a politician?]

Of course, I was aware of other traditions of Toryism: I had colleagues who still supported the death penalty, tough restrictions on immigration, and draconian laws on crime. Margaret Thatcher might have mistrusted people like me—liberal Tories whom she perceived as “wets”—yet she always included some of them in her cabinet. Thirty years after the end of her leadership, the Conservative Party still had room for us.

Even after the Brexit referendum of 2016, and the election of Theresa May as prime minister, Tories of all stripes—“one nation” centrists, admirers of pageantry, libertarian free-marketeers, Catholic conservatives, advocates for same-sex marriage—continued mostly to vote in a single bloc. Colleagues more right-wing than me nevertheless invited me to speak to their constituents, traveled with me on international trips, and included me in conversations about their favorite subjects: the Victorians, military history, and Christianity.

In retrospect, I see that the unraveling began in October 2018, when I became one of the most prominent supporters of Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposals for a moderate “soft Brexit.” I had voted to remain in the European Union, but in the aftermath of the close result in the referendum (Brexit won 52–48), her approach seemed the only sensible course of action—a way to forge a compromise between bitterly divided Remain and Leave voters. But in the eyes of hard Brexiteers, my decision marked me as a careerist and a traitor.

Three MPs with whom I felt I had a friendly and respectful relationship attacked me in the press as “a laughing stock,” a hypocritical “huckster,” and a “narcissist.” The Daily Telegraph, the champion of the Tory right, claimed that when I was in Afghanistan, soldiers had nicknamed me “Florence of Belgravia” because of a supposed “propensity to want to compromise with the very terrorists who were killing British troops.” (I had in fact established a nonprofit, Turquoise Mountain, which restored a section of the old city of Kabul and supported women and men producing traditional crafts.)

Despite the rising intransigence of the Brexiteer wing of the party, these factional fissures need not have been fatal. The collapse came not when the right showed its teeth, but when the center enabled the right’s worst excesses.

The problem began at the top. All of my fellow cabinet ministers had spent two years studying Brexit. They had endorsed May’s moderate approach because they understood that a no-deal scenario—which would have involved the U.K. pulling out of the EU with no agreement on trade, market access, or the status of Northern Ireland—would be catastrophic. But some of the most senior people in the party were ambitious to replace May as prime minister and began to deny the risks of “no deal” in order to win over the support of party members who were significantly more right-wing than the general population (for they would be the electorate in a leadership election). May resigned in May 2019.

At this point, I decided to put myself forward for the party’s leadership election. Surely, I reasoned, a candidate of the center could still beat the leading contender of the right, Johnson? The public knew, I believed, that he was an insubstantial clown, with a rackety private life and rickety personal finances. MPs understood that he would use evasions, half-truths, and lies to mobilize a right-wing voter base and further polarize an already divided country. His Brexit proposals were incoherent and dangerous. But I soon realized that I’d underestimated the hold populism had taken on the party: Johnson was winning the support of moderate MPs, who saw him as their best electoral prospect.

“How can you possibly support him?” I asked a Yorkshire MP whom I had previously trusted.

“Because he is a winner.” Trying to ignore the obvious implication that I was a loser, I objected: “But he will make a terrible prime minister.”

“No one will be prime minister if we don’t win the next election.”

Johnson, of course, became prime minister. Many of those who backed him were rewarded with a seat in his cabinet—and then went out to the television studios to defend his blunders, his gross carelessness, and his ever-more blatant lies. Before it came time to vote on his no-deal Brexit proposals, in September 2019, some 100 Conservative MPs had seemed determined to take a stand against him. In the end, this number dwindled to just 21, though among us were six cabinet ministers, two former chancellors of the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill’s grandson. Together with opposition-party MPs, we had the votes to block his plan.

[Read: The party’s over]

At other times, voting against your party and government had been an acceptable part of British politics and parliamentary procedure—in fact, in the context of our first-past-the-post electoral system and unwritten constitution, it was a precious guarantee of independence for the legislature and a way of maintaining a broad coalition of opinion in Parliament. But the Tory Party in full populist ferment was not interested in constitutional conventions: Johnson responded by expelling us from the Conservative Party caucus, then he dissolved Parliament and called an election. In so doing, he decreed that only MPs who were prepared to back a possible no-deal Brexit could stand as Conservative candidates—thus ensuring that we rebels could not reenter Parliament.

The price of our opposition was exclusion from political life. I watched from this exile as Johnson proceeded to abolish my former Department for International Development, slash the overseas-aid budget, break his international legal obligations to the EU, flout his own pandemic regulations, and generally heap one scandal or shame upon another.

My failures to beat Johnson in the leadership contest, and to prevent him, as the prime minister, from leading a hard Brexit and the rightward lurch of the Conservative Party, were the most painful of my life. After losing the leadership race, I spent 11 days in a silent retreat, during which my chagrin at Johnson seemed to translate into an intense pain in my left knee.

Johnson got his comeuppance when, deserted by cabinet colleagues, he was forced to resign in July 2022. But he left his brand of right-wing populism deeply embedded in the party.

[Read: London’s mayoralty—Britain’s last political refuge?]

It has taken me a long time to acknowledge how and why my center-right tradition failed. But I am beginning to grasp how the Tory Party I signed up to spent too much time making technocratic arguments about policy, which offered no emotional connection for voters. The political class to which I belonged upheld a system that distanced us from a proper sense of shame at how bad things in our country had become.

Politicians like me were slow to acknowledge our past mistakes: how market orthodoxies and globalization had led to stagnant incomes, inequality, and lost industries; how the fantasies of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan were brutally exposed; and how the rise of China undermined our complacent assumptions about prosperity, democracy, and global security. These were the failures that populism exploited, and we could not defeat populism by defending the system that created it.  

We need to reject the old ideas and develop new ones: trade and industrial policies that evaluate investments for more than simply financial returns, and that consider their consequences for the environment and social justice; climate-change policies that do not hit the poorest hardest; economic policies that deliver results for the middle class without reducing foreign policy to domestic self-interest. And we need to convince a polarized world not with sermons but with political deftness, emotional connection, an inspiring moral vision, and a bit more ease and humor.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this realization. Many are the false steps before the glimmers of progress in learning how not to be a politician.

Andy Johnson says culling deer is necessary to keep numbers down.

Government officials raised fears about the former PM's conduct during the pandemic to Buckingham Palace.

There is much to be learned about power and the press from the fact that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once evaded a reporter’s tough questions by hiding in an industrial fridge.

The reporter, Jonathan Swain of Good Morning Britain, ambushed Johnson at Modern Milkman dairy, where he was stopping for a folksy photo shoot in December 2019. For months, Johnson, a former journalist himself, had refused to be interviewed on prime-time breakfast television. If Johnson wouldn’t go to Good Morning Britain, then Good Morning Britain would go to him. Swain, broadcasting live to a national audience, surprised Johnson and asked him if he’d be willing to spare a few moments for an interview right then and there.

“I’ll be with you in a second,” Johnson said, hoping Swain would go away.

“I have an earpiece in my hands, ready to go,” Swain offered.

Johnson then proceeded into an industrial refrigerator to wait it out.

“He’s gone into the fridge,” the host Piers Morgan helpfully noted as Johnson hunkered down behind an enormous metal door.

[Kathryn Cramer Brownell: The problem with Fox News goes way, way back]

It was political theater at its finest. But it was also indicative of the adversarial spirit of Britain’s television media, which show little deference to authority. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss was toppled after just 49 days in power, a demise accelerated because she was humiliated in a series of “car crash” interviews, a standard term in British politics for when a politician is taken to task live on air. In one of the most memorable Boris Johnson interviews, the journalist Eddie Mair set the stage with objective facts about Johnson’s past misdeeds, then asked him the following question: “Making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted: You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Johnson sputtered and tried to change the subject, but the damage was done.

Here in the United States, by contrast, our leaders have plenty to answer for, but with few exceptions, American TV-news hosts lob softball questions at politicians rather than play hardball. When the politician is evasive, the interviewer too often moves on, letting the politician slither away. Ron DeSantis managed, for nearly three years, to evade giving a straight answer to the simple question as to who won the 2020 presidential election: He finally acknowledged, only last month, that Donald Trump lost. Unlike Boris Johnson, Trump has never had to hide in a fridge.

Last week, however, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan did something unusual in American TV news. In a now-viral interview with the slick Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Hasan decided to just keep asking the same questions until he got an answer. Ramaswamy was caught off guard, no doubt because the style of questioning was so different from what he had previously experienced on the campaign trail.

I’ve lived in Britain for 12 years, and in that time, I’ve come to realize that there is an enormous gulf between British and American broadcast political interviews. British journalism tends to approach broadcast interviews from a skeptical premise of, to quote the late British journalist Louis Heren, “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”

By contrast, American broadcast political interviewing too often defers to power, is allergic to aggressive pushback, fails to follow up, and treats questions that expose a politician’s ignorance of basic facts as though they were a violation of social norms. Why, for example, has no American television interviewer ever asked Trump to locate Afghanistan on a map? A decade ago in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf lamented the breezy questions from 60 Minutes to President Barack Obama. But the issue became even more obvious in the face of Trump’s firehose of lies, whose output frequently went undisputed, particularly on fawning right-wing media outlets. Maria Bartiromo, a pro-Trump sycophant on Fox News, grilled Trump in May 2020 by asking him, “I’ve never seen anybody take a punch and then get right back up and keep punching. I mean, where does this resilience come from?” In a similarly “tough” 2020 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked to name any of his priorities for a second term. When he failed to name even a single one, Hannity just moved on.

But even outside the propaganda of the pro-Trump mediaverse, journalists in the mainstream American TV press can be ineffective at holding power to account on air. In one high-profile case from 2019, Chuck Todd, then the host of Meet the Press, faced significant criticism for letting President Trump spend much of the interview repeating blatant lies and falsehoods mostly unchallenged.  

Consider the interview that drew the most political blood during the Trump era. It was conducted by Jonathan Swan (not to be confused with Jonathan Swain of Boris Johnson–fridge fame). Swan, an Australian journalist who was working for Axios, interviewed Trump during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. What Swan did—which few have done so successfully before or since with Trump—was follow up, counter with facts, and refuse to move on after Trump’s throwaway lines.

“There are those who say you can test [for COVID] too much,” Trump claimed.

“Who says that?” Swan asked.

“Just read the manuals, read the books.”

“Manuals? What books?” Swan asked, perplexed.

“When I took over, we didn’t even have a [COVID] test,” Trump later boasted.

“Why would you have a test? The virus didn’t exist.”

Swan’s interview went viral because it broke from the standard American interview script—a script that Trump has mastered. Swan didn’t just ask Trump for his opinions but instead followed up with facts when Trump trotted out vapid, meaningless lines. As Swan’s face showed his complete puzzlement, his interview captured what many of those watching were thinking: What in the world is Trump talking about? (Swan’s expressions quickly became a popular internet meme.)

But Swan is, notably, not American, and had cut his teeth as a reporter in Canberra, not Washington. In fact, two of the most effective adversarial journalists in contemporary American media are CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC’s Hasan, both of whom are British. Amanpour worked her way up within CNN, but Hasan trained in Britain’s aggressive press culture, and both established their career far outside the D.C. Beltway.

As Rob Burley explains in his new book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?, British political interviewing wasn’t always so adversarial, and politicians didn’t always lie or deflect. They had no need to: Up through the late 1950s, British media interviews were little more than broadcast press releases, and accountability was regarded as a job for Parliament, not the press. Prime Minister’s Questions, a bizarre spectacle that takes place every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, is a televised political jousting match, where elected officials challenge, debate, and make fun of one another, and try to score political points by cutting their rivals down to size, in many cases set to that very British soundtrack of jeers and harrumphing. (It’s an extraordinary contrast to American governance by C-SPAN, in which American elected officials are usually delivering their speeches to cameras but in a completely empty chamber.)

[David A. Graham: C-SPAN isn’t all good]

The British journalist Robin Day changed the culture of British political broadcast interviewing in 1958 when he broke from journalistic convention to ask the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, polite but pointed questions. The norm of reporters’ deferring to powerful men shattered, and politicians in Westminster began to accept being grilled not just in Parliament but also on the airwaves.

Then, in 1997, Jeremy Paxman, at the time the host of BBC Newsnight, set a new standard for combative interviews. Paxman has long been a household name in Britain, known for an attack-dog style of journalism that struck fear into every politician he ever interviewed. In the 1997 interview, the politician Michael Howard refused to answer Paxman’s yes-or-no question about whether he had threatened a senior civil servant, but Paxman refused to back down. He asked the question 12 times in a row, spanning a minute and a half of deliciously uncomfortable television as Howard squirmed, hoping that Paxman would do what most interviewers do: move on. Paxman didn’t, and the result is now regarded as perhaps the most famous British political interview of all time.

British political media have produced a pantheon of adversarial legends—Paxman, Brian Walden, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Emily Maitlis, and Beth Rigby, to name a few—figures who are renowned for dissecting their political guests, exposing lies and hypocrisy with surgical precision. (The Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew, in 2019, sealed the royal’s fate as a modern pariah).

The Today program on BBC Radio 4 sets the British political agenda more than any comparable American show—and its “10 past eight” interview slot is often a ritual morning dressing-down of whichever government minister dares to go on it. Why would politicians subject themselves to this? Surely few relish the thought of being interrupted, cajoled, and contradicted live on air. But politicians who hope to rise have to meet the public, and the BBC stations dominate news coverage: From 2010 to 2020, 57 to 65 percent of Britons got their TV news from BBC One. Likewise, BBC radio stations have six times the news-market share of their nearest competitor.

“There is nowhere for politicians to hide,” Justin Webb, one of the main hosts of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, told me. “They can’t just go to a place where they talk to their own people.” Webb, who worked for the BBC in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush, noted that the dynamics are completely different in the United States, where Republicans gravitate toward Fox News and Democrats more frequently appear on MSNBC. This way, some can just avoid tough questions altogether.  

In Washington, politicians can penalize outlets that are too harsh by refusing to appear on their networks again—hence the concern about “access journalism,” in which interviewers avoid crossing invisible lines of deference to maintain cordial relationships with politicians whose presence raises their network’s ratings and revenue. In one instance, the head of CNN even directly intervened to remove references to a sexual-abuse case Trump had lost in court from the chyron banner scrolling underneath the live video feed, lest it would upset Trump before he appeared on the network.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

In Britain, by contrast, politicians who won’t subject themselves to cross-examination from a hostile press can be subjected to ridicule. Boris Johnson skipped a debate about climate change, so the TV channel hosting the discussion kept his lectern in place but put a melting block of ice on it to represent his absence. When he skipped a preelection interview on the BBC, they broadcast a monologue with the host, Andrew Neil, about the importance of answering questions—next to a conspicuously empty chair for the truant Johnson. When Trump skipped the first GOP debate last month, there was no empty lectern to highlight his absence.

The BBC, unlike most American broadcast-news networks, is nonprofit and does not break for commercials the way American news programs do. Reporters therefore have more time and space to follow up and press for answers, Webb said. Hasan of MSNBC acknowledges that added constraint on American cable news: “There’s definitely a pressure with ad breaks to keep interviews tight,” he told me. Prerecording interviews can help get around this problem, but doing so is not always viable. Still, Hasan suggests that the time constraints can become an excuse for pulling punches: “The number of times I’ve seen an interviewer have someone on the ropes and then say, ‘That’s all we have time for,’ or, ‘Moving on’—the phrase moving on is poison to me. It’s poison to a TV interview.”

But before Americans rush to import Jeremy Paxman and Emily Maitlis, be warned: Relentless adversarial journalism can have undesirable consequences. Politicians become cagey, always trying to sniff out an ulterior motive to even the most innocuous line of questioning. Even worse, to survive in British politics, government ministers must undergo rigorous media training, in which they learn how to be suitably slippery, never to become entangled in a gotcha moment by Webb or his colleagues. Tough questions sometimes yield few answers. Paxman’s notorious interview is a case in point: Even after 12 tries, his political prey still didn’t answer the question. Plenty of heat, yes, but how much light?

Politics may even suffer a chilling effect, as the more the field becomes defined by dangerous jousting matches between reporters and politicians, the fewer normal people will want to enter it. The profession could continue to appeal to the graduates of the Oxford Union debating societies, where adversarial witticisms are the currency of elite social capital, but turn off ordinary people who can think of more pleasant ways to enact change without risking national mortification. (Of course, even without the threat of constant adversarial interviews, most Americans find the prospect of entering politics repulsive, and few U.S. politicians give straight answers.)

Nonetheless, American broadcast interviewing needs more well-prepared follow-ups, more challenges from journalists who have done their homework, and, yes, more gotcha questions and fewer “what do you think of” opinion questions. We used to be able to take for granted that politicians knew basic facts about the world they were trying to help govern. That’s no longer the case. So, when politicians don’t know basic facts, exposing a dangerous ignorance is in the public interest. Doing so is not rude; it’s journalism. When Vivek Ramaswamy says that he would subject young voters to a civics test before allowing them to vote, for example, why not ask him some questions live on air to see if he could pass a civics test himself?

The Trump era made clear that the American model of broadcast political interviewing isn’t fit for purpose. It could benefit from a few British-style upgrades. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if, every so often, our most evasive American politicians had to cower in a freezer if they wanted to escape a journalist who’s willing to hound them until they actually answer the question.

Why would anyone want to be a politician? The pay isn’t great if you stay honest; the hours are long; the media attention you face can be brutal; your chances of getting anything done are slight unless you get to the very top. I should know. I was a politician in my native Canada for six years, and I have the scars to prove it. Although Americans think we are a kinder, gentler version of them, the fact is that our politics is just as nasty and partisan, and, after our Parliament Hill was occupied for three weeks by disgruntled truckers, sometimes just as wildly unpredictable. Social media has made it worse. When I used to meet constituents in the flesh, they were civil even if they weren’t ever going to vote for me, but digital disinhibition turns people into vipers. What some of my fellow citizens thought fit to say about me, and my opponents too, doesn’t bear repeating—and women have it much worse. Sigrid Kaag recently resigned as the leader of a Dutch liberal party, citing the “hate, intimidation and threats.”

So, truly, why does anyone bother?

A new memoir from Rory Stewart, How Not to Be a Politician, confirms why politics is a terrible way to live, but also why it continually lures ambitious people into the game. Stewart has written an unsparing and brilliant portrait of  his decade as a lawmaker, culminating in his failed bid to become prime minister. The lying, incompetence, and treachery he depicts are all so blatant that the book should be assigned to bright young things to rid them of any remaining illusions before they put their name on a ballot. But if Stewart has such a dim view of the whole enterprise, how can we understand why this gifted writer with a varied and unusual background, which includes being a Harvard professor and an administrator of an Iraqi province in the early 2000s, would choose to become a backbench member of Parliament for Penrith, a beautiful but remote constituency in the north of England?

In Stewart’s case, the usual mix of clichéd reasons apply—a desire to make a difference, do something that really matters, be part of history, serve the people, and, yes, get your name in lights. Fame certainly spurred him on, but for me, and for Stewart, I’m sure, something deeper than celebrity was at play: the belief that political success would give your life greater meaning and establish you, among those you respect, as a serious person. To all of this should be added the important fact that Stewart’s father was a courageous military officer, a distinguished member of the British secret service, and obviously an inspiration to his son.

You shouldn’t go into politics just to prove yourself—skydiving would be an easier path. One reason alone really justifies the effort, and all those slings and arrows: to get power and do something with it. Stewart did get power; he was a minister for the environment, international development, foreign affairs, and prisons in a ministerial career that lasted a scant five years. The portfolio range is staggering, and in each case he did his best to achieve something. But even when he was able to get his hands on the levers, it was often only to discover that getting things done is astonishingly difficult.

[Read: Here lies Boris Johnson]

Sometimes the obstacle was a fellow politician who would intrigue against him; sometimes it was a civil servant in his own department who would tell him, with a straight face, that what Stewart wanted to achieve was “above his pay grade”; sometimes it was, as when he was in charge of Britain’s international-aid program, uncovering that, with all kinds of good intentions, what aid programs from his country were doing was essentially shoveling money into bottomless pits all over the world. All of this led to the discouraging awareness, as he sat in splendid high-ceilinged offices created when Britain was a world power, that as a junior minister in a midsize post-imperial power that had just left the European Union, he could try to exercise his country’s influence globally, and nothing much would happen beyond a photo op.  

Calling your memoir How Not to Be a Politician suggests that Stewart does not intend this to be an initiation narrative, in which our hero passes through painful stages, from innocence to experience. Rather, the book often reads like a discovery narrative, the hero’s dawning realization that the game was not worth the effort, that he has been duped by his own ambitions to play at something that wasn’t a match for his talents. Stewart had some difficulty hiding this epiphany from his colleagues, and that created a problem. Nothing is more fatal to a career in politics than leaving the impression that you think you are too good for it. The lifers, the men and women who live for the chance to run and run again for office, always resent people like Stewart, who have the strange idea that they are equipped for the job simply because they’ve succeeded in civilian life and think their amateurish earnestness entitles them to promotion.

Stewart was quick to pick up on this resentment, and he did what he could to earn his colleagues’ reluctant respect. He also realized that despite being an old Etonian and a graduate of Oxford’s Balliol College, and having had a stint of military service in an important regiment, he was an outsider to the party establishment. His years as a writer, during which he trekked across Afghanistan, set up a charity there, and established himself as a critic of international aid and development policy, marked him as “not one of us.” David Cameron, the super-posh prime minister when Stewart entered Parliament, ought to have seen his qualities and rewarded him with more responsibility. Instead, as Stewart describes it, one old Etonian froze the other one out.

All of this may seem of interest only to those who are fascinated by the archaic and arcane world of the British class system, but Stewart’s difficulties in elevating himself inside the Conservative Party illustrate the larger truth about politics everywhere: Tribalism abounds, along with customs only those lifers really understand. The three abiding rules are as follows: You must be loyal, you must wait your turn, and winning is everything. Stewart was too intelligent to be loyal, to shut up and bite his tongue. He was too impatient to respect the order of seniority that kept him off of key committee assignments in the House of Commons, though he did secure a place on the foreign-affairs committee, and his persistence eventually won him promotion to a cabinet post. And he obviously didn’t think winning was everything. Principle had to count for something. He developed a deep anger about the way the MPs in his party, who knew full well about Boris Johnson’s reputation for incompetence, still chose him as their candidate for prime minister in the 2019 elections; after all, Johnson was “a winner.” Stewart challenged Johnson for the leadership role, tried to unmask the false promises Johnson had made to his party and his country to get Brexit done, and was handily beaten.

[Read: The worst, best prime minister]

Stewart’s time in office is a cautionary tale about the price a politician can pay when he tries to tell the truth. Brexit, Britain’s referendum decision to exit the European Union in 2016, is turning out to be a multifaceted disaster, and Stewart, who campaigned to remain in the EU, was one of those who tried to get his party and his country to understand what a mistake they had made and then to figure out how, realistically, to make the best of a bad situation. He lost the race for leader, fundamentally, because he told his party what it did not want to hear. Once Johnson won the prime ministership, he threw Stewart and other like-minded MP’s out of the party and went on to win the next election decisively, with assurances that Stewart continued to insist were simply a pack of lies.

If living well is the best revenge, Stewart has had his revenge. Since exiting politics, he has run an international NGO that gives direct cash grants to empower poor communities in the developing world, and he hosts The Rest Is Politics, one of the most popular political podcasts in Britain. He’s said he won’t run in the next British election, due in 2024, but at 50, he has plenty of elections he could run in after that. The odd thing about Stewart’s story is that, having unmasked the reality of political life in the modern media age, he still appears fascinated rather than repelled by it. This revealing memoir goes to show that once you’ve been there, in the ring, in the middle of the fight, you never stop dreaming of climbing back in. Who knows? One day, he may.