Send out the clowns

Ben Wildsmith

It’s always a gut punch when a talented newcomer turns his back on the organisation that has nurtured him. Supporters have watched his rise with mounting excitement, coming to pin their hopes for the future on the gifted youngster who could turn their fortunes around and return them to the glory days of old.

So, when Louis 30p-Rees-Zammit quit his role as Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party yesterday, to head up Donald Trump’s election campaign, we all felt it in a very personal way.

Sorry, it’s been a long week.

HMS Tory continues to chart a course directly towards the Red Sea with a self-destructive determination that long since defied rational explanation.

Catastrophe

That Lee Anderson now feels possessed of sufficient political heft to wobble the Prime Minister via the medium of flouncing is stark evidence of approaching catastrophe for his party.

He is a monstrous figure. The press reaction to him since he rose to prominence has been to minimise his malignancy by enjoying the comic potential of his absurd posturing and coarse rhetoric, I’ve been guilty of it myself. In times as desperate as these, however, peripheral figures can quickly be co-opted by the ruling elite as it tries anything to save its skin.

Anderson’s appeal to voters is a barely-disguised xenophobic attitude, accompanied by skilful insinuations that he’d like to go a lot further if he had the chance.

The sort of stuff that people used to lower their voices to say has found its way into the national dialogue via chancers such as Anderson, Jonathan Gullis, and, regrettably, Andrew RT Davies. The ever-gurgling sewer pipe of Tory politics has, in recent years, been re-routed through its drawing room.

Anderson’s appeal within the party, however, reveals much about how unmoored it has become from reality. The shock result of the Brexit referendum posed a conundrum for Conservatives. On one hand, voters were clearly no longer content to do as they were told by their betters. David Cameron’s paternalistic grandeur came off as complacency at a time when the financial crisis had knocked chunks out of the lifestyles of many.

Tory voters, though, were naturally prone to the jingoistic advances of the Johnson/Farage Leave campaign. The surprise was lifelong Labour voters backing Brexit in the face of almost total opposition to it from the party they supported.

Misunderstanding of this set of voters has driven much of UK politics ever since.

Referendum

In the aftermath of the referendum, Labour’s perceived willingness to subvert the result hardened support around it and the resultant willingness of Labour Brexiteers to vote Conservative in 2019 has, it turns out, been the Tory party’s undoing. Instead of recognising the Brexit vote as an anti-establishment kick up the jacksie of a torpid political class, the Tories have allowed themselves to believe that vast swathes of the electorate had transformed overnight into Alf-Garnett-esque racists who could be courted with xenophobic rhetoric, regardless of how competently the country was governed.

Lee Anderson’s trick has been to personify this phantom working class in broad enough terms to bedazzle the grandees of a party that couldn’t recognise him as the musical hall sham he is.

You cannot, thankfully, win UK elections by appealing solely to bigots. Whilst those voters exist, most of them have enough sense to require at least basic competence from their politicians and ladling on lashings of fascist-adjacent rhetoric won’t cover up the stench of a country that has been mismanaged into dysfunction in every respect.

They won’t learn, though. Anderson, Gullis, Braverman etc. know right well that Sunak’s election hopes are already doomed. After Labour win, they are banking on the party lurching yet further to the right and straight into their arms. If it does, then Conservative politics is finished as a credible force in the UK.