The Conservatives have slipped their moorings and are steaming ever further to the right

Greetings,

This is the last few days of my holiday. At the weekend I will announce plans to take Writing from London forwards, which I hope you like. In the meantime I am reposting my most interesting interview in the Lowdown podcast series. It’s with Prof Tim Bale, the UK’s foremost authority on the Conservative party, on why the party cannot return to the centre ground.

Beneath is a piece of mine on the eerie parallels between today’s Conservatives and the far-left groups I fought when I was younger.

If you like my journalism, why not consider supporting it for only £5 a month or £1.15 a week. That’s less than the price of buying a seat in the House of Lords. You’ll gain access to all articles, archives, and to the friendly comment section.

Best wishes,

Nick

You can listen to the Lowdown interview on the Apple player (see below).  We are also on Spotify, Android, Amazon, and via this link, on every podcast player humankind has invented.

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The Brexit Revolution stabs itself in the back

Waiting for a betrayal: Claire Fox and Nigel Farage (SKY)

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Communists helped the British radical right achieve their counter-revolution. Not ex-communists who found their revolutionary God had failed, and with a sigh began what Julian Barnes called the “traditional shuffle to the right”.  Not men and women, who despite themselves, saw the truth in the saying attributed to Winston Churchill (falsely as it turns out) that “if a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”

I mean actual communists, or people who said they were. Marxists who used arguments from the far left to inspire the Brexit right.