Tories on the verge of an electoral breakdown
Are the remnants of the Conservative party about to embrace the radical right
This week I interviewed Professor Tim Bale for the podcast. I love talking to Tim because he is not a pundit but the UK’s leading academic authority on the Conservative party. He bases his commentary on fact rather than prejudice (an eccentric notion that will never catch on).
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We ask:
Can the polls possibly be right when they show the Tories sinking to 150 seats or 100 seats or – God only knows – 50 seats?
Across the democratic world the radical right is replacing the moderate right. Is that happening in the UK? Has it already happened?
Has the Tory press driven the Tory party mad?
One point is certain that a hatred of modernity pushes right-wing people over the edge.
Here is a piece that I absolutely loved researching and writing because it wasn’t about everyday political stories but on the wider theme of how despair about your country drives you to betray it.
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Tinker Tailor Tory Traitor
Who is the author of this passage describing?
He hated the EU very deeply, he said. For a while, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime, he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing.
“The political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs.”
It’s not Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, or a columnist for a Conservative paper writing circa 2015. It’s from the final scenes of John le Carré Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where Bill Haydon tells George Smiley why he betrayed England to serve the Soviet Union.
I substituted “Europe” for “America. It’s not the EU Haydon hates, it did not exist in 1974, when le Carré published his masterpiece, but America whose global role as the superpower successor to the European empires Haydon loathes. (The magnificent 1979 dramatization Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is now on the BBC iPlayer, incidentally. If you’ve never seen it, I envy you.)
Haydon represents a recurring deformation of English life: radical Tory despair. It moves from doom-mongering to outrage to treachery, as conservatives convince themselves that modernity is so repulsive the only course is to smash it to pieces.
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