Nick Cohen

After Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1989, Julian Barnes gave Salman Rushdie a shrewd piece of advice. However many attempts were made on his life and the lives of his translators and publishers, however many times Special Branch moved him from safe house to safe house, he must not allow the ‘Rushdie affair’ to turn him into an obsessive. When I interviewed him ten years ago he had learned to live without fear. No shaven-headed bodyguards accompanied him as he walked into a Notting Hill restaurant. His eyes did not scour the room for signs of danger. If the other diners knew who he was, they were too well-versed in the manners of the English upper-middle class to stare at a celebrity.

Liz Truss looks to be winning a decisive victory for cold-eyed conservatism. A victory for I went to the school of hard knocks and university of real-life conservatism. For I never asked for charity and worked for every penny conservatism. For public-sector workers are lazy and benefit claimants are scroungers conservatism. For get on your bike and get off my land conservatism. For no one ever said that life was fair and have you seen how many holidays teachers get conservatism. Most people can be provoked by the waste of public money into thinking like that for some of the time. Liz Truss appeals to people who think like that all of the time.

Admirers of one of America’s great modern historians sat up and paid attention when Liz Truss told the Times in December that she read ‘anything’ by Rick Perlstein. In May, we nodded along with the interviewer from the Atlantic magazine who ‘saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf and thought it was ‘exactly the sort of book I would have expected her to read’. For those who have never encountered his work, The Invisible Bridge is one part of Perlstein’s four-volume history of the United States from 1960 until 1980.

Unfriendly commentators can recite insults against the Conservative party in our sleep. It is a rolling shambles, populated by backstabbing fantasists and fanatics. Conservatives are so irredeemably split they removed Boris Johnson only to find they could not unite behind a replacement. Good government is impossible when the ruling elite is composed of shifting factions whose complex hatreds would baffle a historian of the Lebanese civil war. But a paradox of this government is that there are never splits about the concentration of power in the hands of the executive. Whatever else Conservatives revolt against, they support the Tory state as it continues relentlessly to centralise. And this from a party that once promised to give back control to the peoples of the UK.

The smirk on the faces of politicians and journalists when they talk about 'cakeism' shows how Boris Johnson degraded public life, and will carry on degrading it long after his overdue departure from Downing Street. The Munchkin civil war we call the Conservative leadership contest shows that 'cakeism' is the one part of Johnson’s legacy that will survive him.  'My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it,' he said in 2016. Instead of laughing at Johnson and saying his desire to have it all ways was one of many reasons to ignore him, they laughed with him as if he were Billy Bunter at the tuck shop. And they’re still going along with it now.

Carole Cadwalladr’s victory over Arron Banks is a triumph for free speech that has come at a cost no free society should bear. For the courts to rule on a passing remark she made in a 2019 TED talk and a tweet about the Leave.EU tycoon, who gave the pro-Brexit campaign the largest donation in British political history, has cost Banks somewhere between £750,000 and £1 million. Cadwalladr’s costs must be about the same, and it is very unlikely that the court will order that she and her supporters be reimbursed all their money. So we are talking about between £1.5 and £2 million for a single case. For three years, as a friend and colleague of Cadwalladr's, I've seen how lawyers have dominated her life.

Despite cable TV, streaming services and social media providing 1001 distractions, the Tory press charges on like an old, angry bull, its rage undiminished by the losses the technological revolution has inflicted on its readership and finances. You can fool yourself today that its power is back to its 20th century peak. The police had investigated Keir Starmer’s Durham campaign event and found he and his colleagues had broken no Covid rules. But day after day the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Express hammered away at the story – fake or otherwise – and the cops felt they had no choice but to reopen the inquiry. I could go on about the Tory press’s double standards and its bootlicking of the ruling clique.

As the British authorities debate whether to ban the propaganda channel of a savage imperialist power, Russia Today is making a decent first of banning itself. Workers have been walking out for a week. The invasion was too much even for staffers who had spent years demeaning themselves by licking the boots of a dictatorship. Even if Sky and YouTube had not effectively closed the channel by pulling it from their platforms, RT would have faced extreme difficulty in continuing to broadcast from London, one ex-staffer told me. About half his former colleagues had quit, including large numbers of production staff the Russians needed to keep the channel on air. One had a Ukrainian family and was sick at the slaughter his paymasters had unleashed on his relatives.

Tories occasionally like to pretend that they are not wasting their talents and lives defending a bottom-feeding demagogue. They lecture critics who damn Boris Johnson as a British Trump and tell us we have him all wrong. Fraser Nelson, my own editor here, once argued that, far from being a sponger and fraud, the Prime Minister was a liberal conservative, a centrist, indeed, who had absorbed and defeated populism.  I wonder what Fraser thinks now. I wonder whether Conservative MPs and Conservative voters realise what Johnson is doing to them. All power corrupts, but Johnson’s power corrupts all who defend him. To maintain it, Johnson is screaming desperate lies at those who hold him to account.

If by the end of today 54 members of the parliamentary Conservative party have not handed in the letters required to trigger a leadership contest — or if the cabinet has not told Boris Johnson he must resign — the Tories will have revealed their contempt for the public. The mob is fickle, they will be thinking. Granted, today’s opinion polls are dreadful — two-thirds of those questioned thought he should go. But their calculation will be that the voters can always be persuaded to ‘move on’. And no one is better than using a promise he intends to break, a stunt devoid of meaning, a bridge to nowhere or a phantom high-speed railway line to encourage the masses to shift themselves than Boris Johnson is.

The false notes in Netflix’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s Munich come in the final scenes. Jeremy Irons, who has been portraying Neville Chamberlain so well that you forget he is an actor, suddenly sounds like an old stager the director has forced to splutter lines he suspects will convince no one. Chamberlain is on the plane back to Heston Aerodrome after allowing Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia at the 1938 Munich conference. He is about to tell the crowds back home that he had Herr Hitler’s promise to work together to ensure that 'all Europe may find peace' – the vain and stupid boast for which history remembers him. His officials urge him to treat agreements with Hitler with caution. If he breaks his word, Chamberlain will look like a fool.

Failure corrupts as much as power does, and when the powerful fail they make others pay for their disappointment. To understand why this government lashes out at all who contradict it like a drunk throwing haymakers in a pub car park, remember that, by their own standards, today’s Tory ministers are abject failures. Nothing about their time in office has turned out the way they expected. Traditionally, the left accuses Labour governments of selling out. In front of the mirror, when nobody is watching, today’s Conservative ministers can accuse themselves.

For his critics, Boris Johnson offends the notion that the British are a sensible people so deeply we feel we no longer understand much of our country. How, we wonder, can so many voters support an obvious phoney? How does a prime minister who makes it up as he goes along get away with it? The fraudulent promises of rising living standards, the national self-harm of Brexit, the deliberate exacerbation of tensions in Ireland and the treatment of former friends in Europe as enemies have produced an anti-Johnsonian culture. Its brilliant satires and devastating newspaper columns are as ferocious and outraged as the anti-Thatcherism of the 1980s – and just as ineffective. A report released today by Labour Renaissance throws a bucket of cold realism over our fevered rages.

You are a journalist, a satirist, a campaigner, an opposition politician. For years you work to create the flash of light, the moment of revelation, when the veil falls and the world can see the wickedness you have fought in all its ugliness. And then… Nothing. You think you have exposed lies and corruption. You expect society will turn on the powerful now it knows the truth. But the only truth you have revealed is that the public doesn’t care and their leaders know it. ‘J’accuse!’ you cry. ‘So what?’ comes the reply. The mask is off. The state will treat genuine refugees as criminals. Next week ought to reveal the mendacity behind our asylum system.

In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade must begin a new story every evening. She must make sure that the sultan is so eager to hear its conclusion he postpones his plans to execute her. On they go, month after month, year after year, a different story every day. I want you to imagine Boris Johnson as Scheherazade. He is taking the stage at the Conservative party conference dressed in diaphanous silk harem pants, a velvet top with chiffon sleeves, a veil to hide his true expression, and with pearls taken from the jewellery collection of a Russian oligarch’s wife laced through his hair. Johnson, too, knows he must come up with a new story every day.

The Labour right is as happy as I have seen it in a decade. It thinks it has its party back, and the far left has rolled itself into a ball and tossed itself into the dustbin of history. This week’s media coverage of the fights and back stabbings at the conference is missing a fundamental shift in power. By making it impossible for a minority of party members to trigger a deselection, Labour has freed its MPs from the need to spend a large part of their careers talking to their comrades (friendly or not), rather than persuading the public that at some point it might make a refreshing change to elect a Labour government. By lifting the threshold of MPs needed to endorse a candidate, they have made it impossible for another Jeremy Corbyn to become leader – or so they think.

Conservative politicians appear willing to revolt on every issue: tax rises, China, lockdowns. But on the accumulation of power by their party they remain silent. The system is being rigged to their advantage, and on that shady objective they are happy to give the Johnson administration a free pass. Imagine a football club giving itself the right to decide when the referee can grant a penalty – or a gang of potential criminals having a veto over police investigations – and you will understand the impact of the government’s latest proposals perfectly. Its Elections Bill places the referee under the control of the ruling party and the cops in the usual suspects’ pockets.