Special investigation: The strange case of Allister Heath

September 3, 2025: “Starmer’s Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny”

Nigel Farage has just been in Washington, telling the US Congress how free speech has been outlawed in Britain, but “even the Reform leader couldn’t fully convey in one session the full extent of Britain’s degeneration,” writes Heath.

“Britain, once the freest, most democratic country in the world, is descending into anarcho-tyranny,” he squeals. “Bereft of a moral compass, contemptuous of public opinion, uninterested in our glorious history of ordered freedom, the British state’s nomenklatura are presiding over an intolerable mix of chaos and authoritarianism, failing to tackle genuine criminality while persecuting respectable citizens for their thoughts and speech.”

One of those respectable citizens is, of course, Telegraph heroine Lucy Connolly, who was jailed after pleading guilty to calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned down. “US lawyers tell me her case would also have been thrown out,” sniffs Heath.

November 19, 2025: “Britain has a 75 per cent chance of going full banana republic”

Clever Allister has been crunching the numbers, and his sums show that Britain is going to Hell in a handcart. 

“There is only a 50-50 chance of a centre-Right government (Reform or Reform-Tory, discounting the possibility of a Conservative rebirth), and, in turn, at best a 50 per cent chance of that government succeeding,” he computes. “This implies a 75 per cent chance of Britain going full banana republic, and, on a good day, a mere 25 per cent probability of us enjoying a phoenix-style revival.”

Fortunately, Heath has the prescription to solve the nation’s problems! It just requires “an early dissolution of Parliament, the election of a Right-wing government with a solid majority, a hostile takeover of the British state and the implementation of a radical programme of change,” he writes. Anything else, he warns, and we’re heading for “a Labour-Green-Independent Corbynites-Lib Dem-SNP-Plaid Cymru coalition of chaos: time for a one-way trip to Heathrow”. But who will offer him asylum?

November 26, 2025: “Labour’s victory is total. Socialism is back”

Rachel Reeves’s Budget, delivered that week, was, Heath writes, “the day we all dreaded, a milestone in Britain’s descent into collectivism of the most repugnant kind”.

“We have just witnessed a monstrous Budget delivered by the worst Chancellor in living memory, an obscene mix of untruths and delusion, a farrago of bile, envy and nastiness that will vandalise our economy and ruin our society,” he wails over a Budget which froze income tax and National Insurance thresholds, abolished the two-child benefit cap and increased the national living wage to £12.71.

“Labour has declared war on social mobility, on petit bourgeois values, on the consumer society and on conservative Britain,” he adds. “They are about to find out that the rest of the country has no time for their deranged, embittered class warfare.” Won’t someone think of the exceptionally well-remunerated columnists?

December 3, 2025: “Starmer and Reeves are now a threat to British democracy”

Exactly a week after writing that their victory was total, and 17 months after they were elected to office with one of the largest majorities in modern history, Heath concludes that Labour has no legitimacy and must be removed from office immediately.

“I do not write this lightly, but Starmer and Reeves have become a threat to British democracy: they must go as soon as possible,” he tells his readers. “Our institutions cannot function if voters (and even the Cabinet and senior officials) cannot trust anything their PM and Chancellor says. The system can cope with ordinary political dishonesty, but not with this level of lying.” 

Heath was, it goes without saying, one of the media’s most fervent supporters of ardent liar Boris Johnson, writing, as he left office in 2022, that he had “rescued the country from a debilitating constitutional crisis after a series of audacious gambles, delivered a meaningful Brexit and thus salvaged the greatest democratic exercise in our history”.

December 10, 2025: “Labour is about to prove that Britain is ungovernable”

Full of pre-Christmas cheer, Heath treats his readers to his assessment of the state of the nation.

“Ruined by decades of political vandalism, the Britain we knew and loved, a land of stability, pragmatism, evolutionary change and ancient freedoms, is no more,” he writes. “Today’s UK is uglier, impoverished, volatile and disorderly. We’ve lost our level-headedness. Anger and frustration have become our defining emotions. Our institutions have atrophied, and we have been taught to despise our history.”

Fortunately, there is hope – but there’s only two years in which to achieve it! “There is a world in which Britain’s last chance is a Right-wing government in 2027, possibly a Reform-Tory coalition; if it fails, the country will be handed to rogues, communists and extremists,” he says. Happy New Year!

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January 7, 2026: “Impotent, useless Britain is the weakest it has been for 500 years”

US president Donald Trump failed to consult Keir Starmer before taking the decision to invade Venezuela and kidnap Nicolás Maduro. Many could think of reasons for this: that such operations need to be kept as secret as possible, and that Latin America is hardly Britain’s backyard. But Heath has his own.

“Eighty-one years after the end of the Second World War, the Western European era is finally over, killed off by welfarism, egalitarianism, risk aversion, demographic failure, over-regulation, environmentalism, pacifism and self-hatred,” is his explanation of why Trump did not give Starmer a heads-up.

“The best we can do is to beg an American power that is retreating to its core sphere of influence to protect us from Russia,” he harrumphs, having failed to pay attention to anything that has happened in the past year or so.

January 28, 2026: “Starmer’s oikophobia is erasing so much that is great about Britain”

Heath lambasts the PM, whom he accuses of “oikophobia” – a phrase popularised by Roger Scruton, a philosopher almost as mad as Heath himself, and which means someone who dislikes his own society and customs (which arguably includes Heath and pretty much all his Telegraph colleagues).

“What is wrong with Sir Keir Starmer?” he wails. “Why is he waging war on all that was once special about Britain? What has he got against our veterans, our pubs and farmers, our eccentricities great and small, our proud tradition of free speech and democracy?”

And what is the specific example that caused Heath’s gnashing of teeth? Starmer “doesn’t feel a sense of loss at the news that William Evans, London’s last independent gun shop, is closing after occupying the same St James’s store for over 80 years, blaming soaring taxes”.

February 11, 2026: “Labour’s lurch to the Left is the spark that will ignite a revolution”

Keir Starmer has lost his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and Labour-watchers predict the departure of the man who anchored the PM in the centre ground will see the real Keir march off into full-blown Communism.

But! “Labour’s misnamed soft Left – in reality, fanatical class warriors, radical urban progressives, anti-capitalist nutjobs and born-again Rejoiners – have misread the present moment,” he warns. “Their political myopia, their ideological blinkers, their lack of empathy or understanding for aspirational working and middle England is even worse than Starmer’s.”

Fortunately, he sees a saviour – the pamphleteers of Tufton Street will ride to the rescue of aspirational working and middle England. “Free-market think-tanks need to get their act together: we need a new Tax Commission, a new Bumper Book of Government Waste,” he writes. “Labour’s mad kulturkampf will hand the country to the Right, sooner rather than later. It must be ready. Action stations!”

February 18, 2026: “Vast forces are mobilising to stop Britain’s only real chance of survival”

The only thing that’s been getting Heath through the nightmare of a Keir Starmer premiership has been the thought of Nigel Farage entering Downing Street after the next general election. But now he’s fearing the pernicious left will try to stop his man from doing whatever he wants!

“It’s not just the volume of controversial and complex legislation required that could overwhelm a Right-wing Government,” frets Heath, taking off his specs to mop his brow. “The third sector has never been this powerful, and the universities, legal profession and the arts never been so Left-wing.” Might the ballet dancers stand in Farage’s way?

“The new government will face the equivalent of an army of clandestine agents and saboteurs embedded in every institution. Hostile civil servants and quangocrats will deploy any tool, any lie, to halt the counter-revolution, from lawfare to strike action.” Worst of all, “there will be attempts to replay the Liz Truss destruction playbook”, the one in which Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister was destroyed by, er, herself.

February 26, 2026: “This abominable by-election is a final warning for Britain’s democracy”

Casting his disapproving eye over the Gorton and Denton by-election, won by the Greens, Heath fears that the result is proof that 800 years of democracy is about to end. 

The Greens, who just elected a nice young female plumber in clean trainers “have reinvented themselves as a vehicle for a new Left that combines Marxism-Leninism, Third Worldism, critical theory, and other radical anti-Western and anti-bourgeois philosophies,” Heath declares. “They detest private property and family values.”

But surely lovely Hannah Spencer can’t pose a danger to the entire edifice of Britain’s parliamentary democracy, you might think? Not so. “The Panglossians, who believe that tensions will diminish spontaneously; that sectarian voting will wane as it did in England and Scotland by the 1970s,” thunders Heath, “are delusional.” Cripes! Are you ok, Al?