From Brexit to Johnson to Truss to Farage: the British right’s radicalisation spiral
Harder, faster, down, down, deeper and down
I have never seen the UK right look as dangerous as it does today. Like revolutionary movements throughout history, it is caught in a radicalisation spiral.
What is considered lunatic extremism one minute – crashing out of the EU, deporting refugees to Rwanda – is boring the next. Today’s extremists become yesterday’s men as the movement whips itself up and doubles down.
To understand radicalisation, ask yourself whatever happened to Boris Johnson? This ought to be his moment of vindication; the time when the right recognises that it should never have abandoned him.
In Johnson’s paranoid fantasies he was not forced from power because he partied in Downing Street while the rest of the country could not attend the funerals of their friends and family.
He was stabbed in the back by Rishi Sunak.
Go back to the summer of 2022, and you find that Johnson loathed Sunak so deeply he campaigned to put Liz Truss into power, a catastrophic move for this country for which he has never been held to account.
The Times reported that, “The whole No.10 team hates Rishi. It's personal. It's vitriolic. They blame Rishi. They think he was planning this for months," The Financial Times reported that a cabinet minister loyal to Johnson said his allies would ensure Sunak did not win the leadership contest. “Rishi will get everything he deserves for leading the charge in bringing down the prime minister.”
I could go on but you get the picture. Johnson blamed Sunak for his own failure.
And now Sunak, his enemy, has failed. He is leading the Tory party to what may be its worst defeat ever.
Surely now is the moment for the trumpet to sound and the party to call back its lost leader?
On paper, the case for believing in a Johnson resurrection is far stronger than I and other critics like to admit.
He won in 2019 with a comfortable majority. Even on the day he was driven from office for multiple scandals, the Tories weren’t that unpopular. Labour was five or six points ahead. Today they are 20 points ahead.
We forget that, after Truss crashed the economy and was forced out of office, there was a serious bring-back-Johnson movement. At least 100 Tory MPs wanted him to become leader again.
Now Johnson is nowhere.
It would be nice to think that the Tory party had recoiled at his behaviour. Undoubtedly, many Conservatives understand that he broke one of the fundamental rules of British life: that for all our disparities of wealth and power we are equal before the law.
Many but not all.
There are those who can’t see what all the fuss was about. As soon as they had the inside information on the date of the general election, men and women around Rishi Sunak were rushing to the bookies in a thoroughly Johnsonian manner to place their bets.
The truth is the right has moved on from Johnson.
It wants Farage now with his links to Trump and apologias for Putin. Jacob Rees Mogg, other right-wing Tories and indeed Rishi Sunak, talk of bringing Farage into the Conservative party, a man praised by the Kremlin for saying the West provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, and who is running candidates who are unashamed racists.
As they try to unite the right, Johnson is yesterday’s man. Like a Desmoulins or Danton on the steps of the guillotine, he must realise that the Brexit revolution no longer needs him.
It has a taste for stronger meat now. It has a taste for tearing up the human rights act, denying and minimising climate change, and questioning the foundations of the NHS.
A few days ago, there were reports in the Tory press that the Conservative party would call in Johnson to boost its flagging campaign but they never amounted to much and Johnson went on holiday instead.
He appeared to recognise his own redundancy. From Brexit to Johnson to Truss to Farage we have been watching a radicalisation spiral driven by lies. Those who can’t keep up are left behind.
I pick my words carefully and use “lie” cautiously. Respectable journalists steer clear of it, and not only because it can send you on a fast track to the libel courts. You can rarely be sure about what motivates another person.
Except in the case of the British right you can be sure they were lying because its leaders boasted about how clever they were being.
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings campaigned in the Brexit referendum with the lie that membership of the EU cost the UK £350m a week, and were proud of their tactic.
First, lots of people believed it – about half the population according to polls at the time. More importantly, it forced Vote Leave’s opponents to talk about British cash contributions to the EU rather than about the far wider trade and investment benefits we so miss today.
By refuting the Vote Leave lie, they spread the Vote Leave message.
Direct lying used to be rare in British politics, not least because liars feared their careers would be over if the lies were discovered.
Evasions, exaggerations, circumlocutions, half-truths, quarter-truths, misdirection, spin, avoidance, side stepping, question ducking, buck passing, braggartry, fantasy and grandstanding…were all fine. But direct lies were rare.
One mark of radicalisation is that lying is now the standard operating procedure for the Conservative party.
In this election it claims that independent Treasury civil servants have calculated that Labour will raise tax by £2000.
The Treasury has disassociated itself from the claim. Fraser Nelson, my editor at the Tory Spectator, who is hardly a screaming Trotskyist, has torn it to pieces, and the Office for Statistics Regulation has warned off the public.
The Tories don’t care. One can imagine Sunak and his advisers slapping each other’s backs and rubbing their hands with glee. They got the lie out, and forced their opponents and the media to discuss it. What smart operators they are.
But I don’t want to dwell too much on the debasing of public discourse in the UK.
The lies we tell ourselves can be far more powerful than the lies we tell others.
What 2016 did was change conservatism from being, at its best, a philosophy of the possible into a philosophy of the impossible.
The success of Brexit, like the success of Trump, was a fluke that made every right-wing desire permissible. Yanking Britain, not just out of the EU, but the Customs Union and Single Market, once seemed an impossible task: all of a sudden, the impossible became possible.
Whatever the right wanted it could have merely by wishing it. Or so it appeared.
In the 2019 general election Johnson won with an impossible manifesto. As John Burns-Murdoch of the Financial Times nicely put it the other day, he thought he could appeal to everyone at the same time.
“There was levelling-up for the ‘red wall’ voters in traditionally Labour areas, increased NHS funding for the left, net zero for the environmentally conscious, tax cuts for the Tory base and new restrictions on immigration to fend off the challenge from the right. The Conservatives’ great strength in the 2019 campaign was being all things to all people. But after four and a half years of repeatedly failing to deliver them, that’s a lot of different groups left disappointed.”
In 2022, Liz Truss offered an impossible economic programme, which had, lest we forget, the loud support of Tory party members and the Tory press.
Now as they stare at possibly the worst defeat in their history, the right is dreaming more impossible dreams and yearning for another dose of radical medicine.
They barely talk about Brexit, anymore than they hope for a return of Boris Johnson. They want more, they want better. Harder, faster, down, down, deeper and down.
You might say who cares about people who are heading towards a shattering defeat. But I have found it always pays to worry about the Conservative party. Conservative government is the default mode of British politics.
If you think they’re bad now, just imagine what they will be like when they return to power.
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I want to believe they'll be unelectable for a generation or more of they double down this way. But a nagging fear that Starmer and co inheriting an irreparable country might bring them back sooner is keeping me unsettled.
I think a sensible Starmer government would introduce PR for local government this first term (to match Scotland and NI) and have it in its manifesto for the next election. We need consensus driven policy making in this country; not wild swings from left to right to left again