To Great Yarmouth for the half-term weekend at my in-laws’. I have grown to appreciate this down-at-heel place over the years, but there is an unmistakeable pathos about the town that often leaves me in a bit of a melancholic fug. There are just too many old characters and reminders of an obviously better past.
Still, my children love it, and I try not to let my inner grump intrude on their fun as we walk into the neon nirvana on the seafront. But this weekend, I feared this Scrooge instinct might get the better of me as we entered a place I’d never been before: The Merrivale Model Village.
I did not have high hopes and within seconds my stress levels had begun to climb, as my youngest two began scaling the walls trying to play with the little model cars while my eldest dashed around the crazy golf course. But then, as we ventured further in, the strangest thing happened to me: my mood began to lift. In this curious corner of Norfolk, I had discovered the merry soul of old England.
“Hopefully in good health?” the Deputy Editor, Will Lloyd, asked when I messaged him about my discovery. “Still alive,” I replied, which is something. Looking back, I can trace the moment my spirits lightened, coming across the little model school with its sign outside: “Merrivale Primary School. Headmaster: Hugh Bendover”.
There was something about this gentle silliness that felt comfortingly old-fashioned and even a little subversive in today’s self-righteous climate. After a little laugh, we moved on: to a set of newbuild flats next to the golf course. Hanging from the lowest balcony was a half-naked figure, love-heart boxer shorts half-way down his bottom. Above him, a woman in her underwear arguing with her husband. Giggle. Above this scene of domestic disharmony: an entirely naked woman with enormous breasts putting out some washing. Cue more giggles. And then, on the other side of the golf course, a hotel: “Dimpled Balls Golf Resort”. I can’t remember the last time I came across such straightforward silliness.
On we went, guffawing as we ventured deeper into this strange Willy Wonka Land, an old seaside postcard joke brought to life: past the “The Old and Breathless Nursing Home” and the dilapidated dentists – “Turkey Teeth: New for 2025”. Merrivale even has its own Banksy: a replica of a model thatched cottage left by our artistic Robin Hood, scrawled with his name and “go big or go home” in red paint. I didn’t really get his point. If anything, it was the apolitical innuendo that felt more rebellious.
As we headed for the exit – “Way out, tea room” – I began to wonder why I had enjoyed myself so much. Part of the reason, of course, is that I’m just too susceptible to nostalgia. But there was something else about the model village that was gnawing at me. The whole place was a snapshot of a functioning and confident society, filled with prosperous seaside hotels, boating lakes, comforting in-jokes – even a working quarry. Merrivale was both a relic of a lost Britain and, in some strange sense, a vision of a better future.
What is so intellectually challenging about modern politics is how central these overlapping visions of past and future seem to be for both the right and left of British politics. On the radical right modernity has always been a form of restoration, from Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. For the left, progress historically meant moving away from history. Today, though, the longing for a better past appeals just as much to those on the left because so much has been lost. It is a reflection of how our current economic settlement has become, on some fundamental level, completely dysfunctional and unjust.
If there is one figure in the current government who seems to embody this tension most obviously, it is Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, who Pippa Bailey brilliantly profiles for our cover story on page 20. Phillipson has become a hated figure on the right of British politics for her apparent 1970s-style left-wing radicalism, wanting to return to a more comprehensive education system. She is simultaneously viewed with suspicion by many on the left for what they see as her cautious, conservative instincts. Which of these caricatures is more accurate? Let me know in the letters. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the last of my Great Yarmouth fudge.
[Further reading: Tony Blair is old Labour now]
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This article appears in the 18 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Class warrior
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentThe pinnacle of the old consensus was the Blair governments. Rather than celebrate them the left blamed him for a war that would have happened anyway whoever had been in office. The sin of the left isn’t nostalgia. It’s allowing the perfect to drive out he good.