The British right would rather back Donald Trump than back its country
The Conservative threat to national security
Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Russell Brand - the worst of England arrives at the Republican convention
You cannot be a British patriot and support the re-election of Donald Trump. I am sorry if this bald statement sounds too absolute but there are no grey areas when it comes to the future of our security.
Trump represents a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom and Europe. If British (or French or German) conservatives support him, all the insults thrown by the right at the left from the French Revolution via the decades of communism to the post 9/11 struggles with radical Islam will be thrown back at them. They are traitors, fifth columnists, enemies of the people.
Trump and his vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have said that they will abandon Ukraine. They will allow Russia to keep the territory it has seized, cut aid and revitalise Putin’s ambitions to rebuild the Soviet empire. Trump’s re-election will provoke the biggest crisis in European defence since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
When Kamala Harris told the Democratic National Convention last week that autocrats were backing Trump she was telling no more than the truth.
“I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim-Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump. Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favours. They know Trump won't hold autocrats accountable—because he wants to be an autocrat.”
As if to prove her point, Russian propagandists denounced Harris as “crazy” and “a monkey with a grenade” . They denigrated her husband – as “the US cuckold number one" and poured out sexual abuse. Meanwhile, the Russian foreign minister has put it on the record that Vance’s stated opposition to further aid for Ukraine was “what we need.”
Donald Trump may not be the Manchurian candidate but he is the Siberian candidate, and above all else he is Putin’s candidate.
I accept that Conservatives who want to defend their country would have to swallow the liberal triumphalism a successful Kamala Harris campaign would bring. I accept, too, that it is hard to see longstanding principles and prejudices defeated for the sake of the greater good.
But conservatives of all people used to know that life isn’t fair. Once they boasted of their tough-mindedness and their willingness to make hard choices. Those of us old enough to have endured the Thatcher years will remember that they boasted of little else.
But if Tories ever made hard choices that hurt their supporters, and looking back on the late 20th century I doubt they consciously did, they have gone soft now. Brexit radicalised and infantilised the right, allowing it to believe in the words of England’s premier babyman “my policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”, which in this instance means Conservatives can lie themselves into believing that they can have Donald Trump and the defence of Europe.
Speaking of Boris Johnson, he has already endorsed Trump. Of course he has. He lacks the strength of character to do anything else.
The prospect of a Trump victory leaves the “global wokerati trembling so violently you can hear the ice tinkling in their negronis”, he wrote in his all-too-imitable style in January. Obviously, if Trump can do that he must be supported. A Trump victory would upset the BBC and the Economist, Johnson continued, and so and once again it must be a great thing.
The one unqualified achievement Johnson left amid the wreckage of his career was support for a free Ukraine. And yet now he sucks up to Trump and pretends, as he has his cake and eats it, that Trump will somehow convert himself into an ally of Ukraine and Europe.
Liz Truss also backs Trump declaring him to be the best defence against the “real threat of Western society and civilization being undermined by left-wing extreme ideas.” Even though, in her flitting moment of power she also supported Ukraine.
It is remarkable how little the betrayal on the right is discussed. We now have two former Conservative prime ministers, Nigel Farage, the leader of a supposedly patriotic radical right party, and commentators on the Times, Telegraph and Unherd all supporting a foreign politician who threatens the security of this country. When it comes to a choice between freedom in Europe and owning the libs, they choose owning the libs every time.
Even though, and this is a point I want to emphasise, they are not British libs. Trump is not going to ban abortion in the UK or attack and punish the excesses of the UK left. A Trump administration will purge the US civil service and give jobs to right-wing and far-right-wing cronies, but leave the British civil service untouched.
The UK’s pro-Trump right is living vicariously and getting its thrills by proxy. It is finding wish fulfilment in the politics of a foreign country in much the same way Western communists found happiness in the politics of the Soviet Union during the 20th century.
And like western communists, they are betraying their country for the sake of a fantasy.
To put that thought another way, we are witnessing the Americanisation of the British right.
Money plays a part and deserves far more attention than it receives. Sycophantic British rightists can make fortunes in the US as long as they kiss Trump’s backside. As so many Republican politicians have found out, you cannot do business on the American right and oppose Donald Trump. Tugging the forelock is the price of admission. There are perfectly good conservative arguments against a corrupt demagogue. But you just cannot make them.
A fair proportion of the earnings of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson come from speaking to US right-wing foundations. American money funds British thinktanks and comment sites. Beyond the money lies the hope of transatlantic reach and fame that the web and social media brings.
In my world of journalism, it is noticeable how few authentically British conservative voices there are. Whether you agree with them or not commentators like Simon Heffer, Charles Moore, Matthew Parris, Fraser Nelson and Julie Burchill are unmistakably a part of our culture. You can’t imagine them appearing in US publications. They could only be British.
They have one more thing in common. They are old. They grew up in a national print culture rather than the US-dominated world of the Web. Now if you read the Telegraph or Unherd you see commentators whose concerns and style of writing are as much American as British. With a few tweaks, every sentence they write could appear on American sites.
It's not that British right-wingers want to legalise the sale of assault rifles and ban abortion. But all kinds of positions that were once commonplace have vanished as the right has Americanised. Conservative Arabism, for instance, and support for the Palestinians has all but gone. As in the US, to be right-wing is to be pro-Israel.
To pick another example, from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson you could find Conservatives who worried about global warming. All of a sudden under Rishi Sunak the concern evaporated like mist under a burning sun.
If I were advising the Tory’s opponents, I would tell them to hammer at the danger the right now poses. Because of blind stupid prejudice and infantile fantasies, it is supporting Donald Trump, a politician the overwhelming majority of people in this country deplore, and who openly discusses undermining our defences.
It should not just be journalists pointing out that the right is now a threat to the nation it once boasted so often and so loudly about loving.
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Very good piece. Only this month the New Criterion editor Kimball hosted a conservative dinner in the cellars of Berry Bros for the local right: Starkey, Pryce Jones, Heffer, Shawcross, Roberts etc etc. Apparently there was a major row over Ukraine which the US delegation wish to betray and most of the Brits didn’t. Nobody writes about such networks. Why don’t progressives have similar?
It all comes back to Brexit