It’s getting to be like one of those England batting collapses – paradoxically both distressing and enjoyable in equal measure. Those of you that follow the noblest of sports will know that the catastrophe usually goes something like this: after the loss of an early wicket England will be moving along nicely at, say, 123-1 when Joe Root (for example) ‘throws away his wicket’ (as is true of all recreational activities, cricket conforms to its own language and internal grammar) and before you know it, they are 145-7 and unlikely to “avoid the follow on”.
At this point, even as an England supporter, it is difficult not to take a sort of perverse pleasure in the scale of the ineptitude unfolding before you. To paraphrase St. Augustine: there comes a moment when you just want it to be all over, but not quite yet.
Unaccountably, my thoughts turn to what I suppose we are obliged to call the ‘Tory election campaign’, which seems to bear more resemblance to a Heath Robinson-inspired contraption than to the well-oiled electoral machine of yore. Or one of those made-to-crash inventions put together by Compo in every episode of Last of the Summer Wine.
Some might argue that the Prime Minister threw away his wicket when, to the surprise of everyone outside the Downing Street betting syndicate, he called an early July election. In truth, the collapse predated this. The current Tory incarnation lost the room in March 2020 when, at the behest of a cadre of mediocre, Establishment ‘scientists’, its leadership confiscated our freedoms in service of some ‘precautionary principle’ – a chimerical scientific maxim which, in the Covid context at least, proved stubbornly resistant to definition.
The conservative instinct prefers liberty over tyranny and encourages scepticism when faced with a freshly emergent consensus. This instinct should be alive even (especially) when the consensus in question concerns a newly established ‘scientific’ orthodoxy which has been gifted the bully pulpit of the state to drown out any dissenting view.
The Johnson of March 2020 went somewhat in the other direction. The SAGE echo chamber was weaponised and used to propagandise and enforce a tyranny born of panic and questionable intent. The ‘nudge units’ and other dark mechanisms of the deeper state were deployed in an undeclared war against the people they are, supposedly, there to protect.
The consequent ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ might have been understandable as general exercises in arse-covering, but they were neither justifiable nor conservative. The abovementioned conservative instinct proved unable to find its voice.
This should have come as no surprise. It has long been the case that the Conservative Party has been puzzlingly indifferent to conservatism. Your typical Tory MP, with a handful of exceptions (Danny Kruger springs to mind), has shown himself to be intellectually incurious and historically ignorant. There is a rich tradition of literature, history and philosophy which is available for translation into practical policy. But that tradition seems of no interest to the Tory wannabe as he plans his ascent from special adviser to backbench MP.
What I unapologetically call the ‘genuine conservative’ would find in the writings which have shaped that tradition the linguistic resources necessary to resist the postmodernist lunacies which now define the contours of political discussion. Instead, language has been ceded to the Left, and whoever controls the language of the debate pretty much determines the outcome of that debate (think ‘Covid Inquiry’). Thus, when it comes to ‘Net Zero’ the language of apocalypse has overwhelmed the language of appropriate hesitancy; and when it comes to transgender lunacy the language of fantasy has drowned out that of common sense.
So, what to expect from the Starmer Government? Don’t look to the Labour manifesto for answers. A party manifesto is best viewed not as a collection of promises but as an expected manoeuvre in the electoral dance. It is of no more intrinsic significance than a single Knight move in a game of chess. The true Labour agenda is to be found in the background noise: the off-the-record briefings; the interview slip-ups; the gossip etc. (never underestimate the truths that are to be found in political gossip).
Putting this together I suspect that we have nothing to worry about, apart from the following: the implementation of vindictive and irreversible constitutional vandalism; the continued marginalisation of the Christian faith; casual intrusions into our private savings accounts; the denunciation of the common law and its replacement with internationalist diktat; the press-ganging of our children into the political process; and the abolition of laughter.
Come to think of it, that list is far from exhaustive. Suffice to say that the Left’s vision for the U.K. is likely to be enacted: a Kierkegaardian revolution, one which ‘leaves the buildings intact’.
Peter Hitchens argues that the irreversibility of this dystopia is a sufficient reason to vote Tory next week. I’m not sure I agree. For reasons I have suggested it is far from clear that Tory conservatism flags up anything more than an oxymoron. And it’s hard to play the role of father in the parable of the prodigal son when the son who returns looks nothing like the one who left.
The Tories were never going to win this election but might have perhaps done better had they selected as Prime Minister someone with a less managerial, more adventurous worldview. But instead of Ben Stokes on an Oval belter, they offered the electorate an out of form Geoffrey Boycott on a wet morning at Headingly.
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