Conservatives

Who is the most divisive figure in politics? Last year the Daily Mirror claimed Lee Anderson was ‘the worst man in Britain’. This week the Conservative MP is managing to cause a headache both for Labour and his own party. Anderson is a grassroots favourite who even before he was made deputy chairman of the party was near top of the list when it came to the MPs local associations wanted to speak at their events. When No. 10 gave him the role back in February, the idea was that he would help Rishi Sunak in his appeal to the 2019 coalition – with Anderson a straight-talking red wall MP. This week there was evidence, too, of how his comments can make life uncomfortable for Labour.

Last September I was sitting in the crowd at the annual National Conservatism Conference, lamenting the fact that my hotel room had no hot water, when Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, took the stage at Miami’s JW Marriott for his plenary address. Nationalists and populists at the conference were suspicious of Dr. Roberts’s presence. The “New Right” had spent the past few years accusing the right-wing establishment, including the cache of center-right DC-based think tanks like Heritage, of selling out ordinary Americans for profit and influence.

The political world splits in two whenever fresh evidence emerges that Boris Johnson does not think that life’s rules and norms apply to him. One faction, the majority, humourlessly harrumphs about standards and brands him unfit for high office. Another tries to excuse the latest infraction. It’s a grey area. It’s not a serious matter. There’s a vendetta against him. Today we saw the latest case of Johnson finding it churlish to expect him to stick to the ‘network of obligation that binds everyone’ (a phrase that should be copyright of his Eton classics teacher, Martin Hammond).

In early May, I explored the left’s reaction to billionaire Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and his vow to make it a free speech platform again. Since then, Musk and his vision have repeatedly been portrayed as “right-wing.” It’s the damndest thing. Canadian Conservative politician Andrew Scheer picked up on this strange phenomenon back in April, saying that that the corporate media framing free speech as a “right wing value” was just plain weird. As though to drive home the point, Twitch’s Zachary Ryan called Musk a right-winger on Monday. And over the weekend, entrepreneur Samir Tabar had a question for a whiny Robert Reich: https://twitter.com/SamirTabar/status/1601984560345907200 Answer: since, well, now. The evolution of this trend is not new.

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely misunderstood. Trilling, a Columbia University professor and literary critic, wrote that at the time — this was 1950 — that there was no articulate conservative or reactionary thought in America, only conservative or reactionary “impulses” expressed “in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s point was not to criticize conservatism but to set up an argument for his work as a literary critic. Liberals, Trilling argued, needed to be challenged; they had grown complacent in the absence of a vigorous conservatism to spotlight liberalism’s deficiencies.

Liz Truss’s Downing Street press conference has made everything worse, as far as Tory MPs are concerned. As soon as it was over, a number of backbenchers who had supported Truss for leader were locked into a call with Thérèse Coffey, the PM’s closest friend in Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister. Those on the call said it was ‘like a wake,’ with even Coffey sounding ‘broken.’ ‘You could see the loss in her eyes,’ said one. Coffey reiterated the points the Prime Minister had made in No. 10, before taking questions. The ‘wake’ line is one you hear a lot at the moment.

Conservative governments have a habit of self-destructing: they die not in battle with political enemies but as a result of vicious infighting. It’s been less than three years since Boris Johnson’s triumphant 80-seat election victory, which seemed at the time to come close to condemning Labour to oblivion. Yet this week in Birmingham it was the Conservatives who have looked doomed, posing a far greater threat to each other than to Keir Starmer. In her conference speech, Liz Truss laid out a confident and coherent agenda. She is correct about the need to harness the power of free enterprise to kickstart growth, but she failed to prepare the ground for her agenda. Since entering No.

Tory conference has long been more stage-managed than other party meetings, but this year the official speeches from ministers have also been condensed into a very strange late afternoon slot lasting just two hours. The rest of the time is free for fringe meetings and plotting. Ministers and their aides have been told they have to keep their addresses to the hall announcement-lite, which makes those two hours feel largely pointless. Kwasi Kwarteng didn't announce very much at all, even though his two U-turns have dominated the day's agenda. This morning, the Chancellor dropped the plan to abolish the 45p rate of tax, and this evening it has emerged that he is also bringing forward his medium-term fiscal plan from 23 November – something ministers had been asked to hold the line on.

In a tetchy performance on The Andrew Neil Show, Tory party chair Jake Berry repeatedly insisted that everyone would have to wait until the Chancellor’s unveiling of his fiscal plan on 23 November to find out whether or not there would be spending cuts and when the government believes it will hit its 2.5 per cent growth target. Berry’s performance, which involved repeatedly trying to answer a different question to the one he was asked, made it even harder to believe that this line can hold. If every minister interviewed for the next six weeks sounded like Berry did just now, then it would be a disaster for the government. https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/1576607943277019137?

Is there a way for the government to get out of the mess that it is in? This is the question obsessing ministers and Tory MPs. If the government doesn’t set out how it intends to square the circle, it’ll be risking more market mayhem. But as I say in the Times today, it is very hard to see a way out of this that is both politically palatable and economically possible. Nervous Tory MPs are being told by one of Truss’s cabinet allies ‘the solution is to be very tough on public spending’ A rapidly growing number of Tory MPs think the government should abandon or delay the abolition of the 45p tax rate. They believe that this would show the market that they were now behaving more responsibly.

Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.” Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.

It’s no fun being canceled by a mob, but it is useful in one respect: it's an easy way to tell who your friends are. Recently, a young conservative writer, Nate Hochman, learned this the hard way after a hit piece appeared on the Never Trump site the Dispatch that was in part about him and comments he made while on a Twitter Spaces call last winter. Twitter Spaces, if you (like me, before this) are unfamiliar with it, is basically a group conference call platform. In the winter, Hochman hosted a Space about what role, if any, white supremacists like Nick Fuentes should have in the conservative movement. Fuentes then showed up and the Dispatch reported what happened next: The Dispatch obtained an audio recording of the Twitter Spaces conversation from an individual who listened in.