ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

When the surge of support for populist parties across the West first registered with the commentariat, the obvious question was whether the centre could hold and keep the anti-establishment onslaught at bay. With the 2016 victory of Donald Trump, a candidate with very few philosophical or moral inhibitions, that concern took on existential proportions. It was not just mainstream centre-left and centre-right political parties that were threatened by populism, but democracy itself.

Today, it should be clear that the centre, in fact, does hold. Voters do not necessarily want to destroy the system. They are simply asking, sometimes very angrily, for a very different rhetorical and policy mix than the one that was long on offer. As the Times columnist and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein wrote recently, "liberals often confuse the centre ground with their own politics, and they are not the same thing." In reality, "voters will accept much more 'left wing' economic proposals and much more 'right wing' social ones than was commonly thought of as the center ground."

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