Anthony Seldon introduces the concept of the Effect series, the key questions and the fourteen wasted years accusation. This Effect book will be the eighth in the long line of academic and historical analyses dating back over fifty years of history to 1970 – and it builds on the conclusions and methodology of previous works in the series. One of these, The Coalition Effect (Cambridge, 2015), encompassed five of the years in question – allowing reflections to be made on the authors’ arguments in that volume, and for the impact to be judged in a longer time frame of government.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010 ushered in the idea of a new Conservative Party, repairing both image and electoral prospects. However, this chapter will examine to what extent that change occurred, and how much the Conservatives were united or divided by the same older questions of policy and ideology – particularly on Europe and the economy. The chapter will also analyse the development of the party’s structures, power and personnel, and contemplate what effects any change may have had.

A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

This chapter analyses the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, against Boris Johnson – the prime minister at the time of the office’s 300th anniversary. The two PMs bookend 300 momentous years of history, but what has changed about the office of prime minister? Comparing personal and political, the chapter examines the machinery of government, from patronage in Parliament to departmental power as well as the core driver for the role of prime minister. While the country and office have changed, some core functions and political realities remain the same in the British system.

Chapter 3 examines the first two years of major US combat operations from 1965 through 1966. Over North Vietnam, the Rolling Thunder air campaign failed to either isolate communist forces in South Vietnam or coerce North Vietnam to withdraw its support of the insurgency. Air power proved more effective in the direct attack of the North Vietnam Army and Viet Cong (NVA/VC) in South Vietnam. The US combined arms campaign thwarted an offensive aimed at dividing South Vietnam. Instead, well-executed allied air-to-ground operations compelled the enemy to disperse and hide.

The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

Like Johnson himself, the community of his devoted readers is divided in its attitude to the academy. Some Johnsonians are enthusiastic followers of the Great Cham striving to achieve the envied status of Johnsonianissimus without the taint of academic criticism; others are academics first and devotees of Johnson second. These humanistic scholars are often concerned with the text of Johnson, whereas the Johnsonians are concerned with his personality. A contest between these biographers, on the one hand, and those bibliographers, on the other, played itself out in the history of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, twenty-three volumes (1958–2018). The impetus for the edition came largely from Johnsonians, but as time wore on, the academics became gradually more influential, and their approach eventually prevailed. This chapter is a kind of archaeology of the edition and reveals this shift in emphasis over time and a difference between American and British approaches to literary criticism.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.

This chapter surveys the origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century literary criticism, as major poets were examined in the light of concepts such as ‘beauty’. The treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French critics, followed by Addison, Shaftesbury, and later thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given to Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of ‘belles lettres’. The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as ‘sublime,’ ‘taste,’ ‘genius,’ ‘originality,’ ‘imagination, and ‘art’ itself. An important element is the place of creative writers as aesthetic theorists, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary of aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has long had a reputation as the ‘first English dictionary’, despite the dozens of dictionaries that had appeared in the century and a half before Johnson’s. There are few ways in which Johnson’s book can be truly considered a ‘first’, since nearly all his contributions to dictionary-making had precedents in classical and European lexicography. He did, however, introduce some innovations in English lexicography, including grounding his wordlist in the works of English authors, discerning subtle shades of meaning in numbered senses, and providing extensive quotations showing the words in context. Together, these qualities made Johnson’s Dictionary, though not a chronological ‘first’, still the first English dictionary to be widely regarded as the standard of the English language.

Early eighteenth-century dictionaries departed from the hard-word tradition to include common words for a wider and expanding audience. Bailey s dictionaries (1721, 1730) provided comprehensive coverage of information of all kinds, not only linguistic, but were found lacking in clarity and lexicographic sophistication. Increasing desire for an authoritative standard for the language prompted Johnson s work on his dictionary of 1755. In this dictionary, he raised the standards of lexicography in regard to definitions (especially multiple ones), phrasal verbs, and other aspects, including the illustration of usage through the use of written authorities; however, he abandoned his hopes and intentions of fixing the language (prescriptivism) in the midst of his work, turning to a more descriptive model of English written usage. The change in method and approach occurred after the failure of his attempts to order literary and other written material he consulted into pre-ordained structures of definition. Concerns for proper speaking and spelling became louder throughout the century, because of the rapidly increasing and increasingly mobile population, as well as the Act of Union of 1707, uniting England and Scotland. Dictionary makers increasingly included guides to pronunciation and spelling in reaction to these concerns, and numerous pronouncing dictionaries appeared from mid-century onwards.