This is the Guardian.

I had the idea of the article in early 2019 when Theresa May was in power in Britain and Donald

Trump was president in America and they were both struggling in office and I had an idea that

although conservatism appeared to be in a kind of strong place in reality there were kind of

weaknesses underneath so I went to my editors and said can I write a piece about how conservatism

may not be as strong as we think it is and it may have deep-seated problems and they said to me

you sure about this is it's not Guardian kind of wishful thinking but I managed to persuade them

and that's why I did the piece. The article was really to explore the health of conservatism so

how healthier its ideas are they getting a bit stale is it still socially relevant?

Is it an appropriate philosophy for dealing with you know the problems of capitalism nowadays with

the climate emergency? Is it still working as a kind of electoral machine? So I wanted to kind of

explore those questions and what I found was that since the 1980s which is the kind of high point

of conservatism in Britain and America I would argue the era of kind of Reagan and Thatcher a lot

of aspect of conservatism had gone into decline or had become weaker more vulnerable and the pieces

of kind of exploration of those weaknesses. One of the things that I thought about a lot when I

did the article was how conservatism has become more kind of manic how it changes philosophies

quite quickly now leaders have changed quite quickly governments fall quite quickly and I think

particularly the last six weeks we really show that conservatism is kind of on fast forward and

it's kind of cycling through lots of different philosophies you know let's shrink the state let's

level up let's leave Europe you know let's do compassionate conservatism let's do nationalism

let's do kind of big business conservatism small business conservatism that in Britain and in America

I think the Republican Party and the Conservative Party have been rushing through all these different

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