Nick Tyrone's Blog

I love Gareth Southgate. Truly and deeply. And not because he dresses sharply, although that helps. And not because he seems like a caring, balanced guy, which is also a plus. I love him because he wins. I love him because he has turned around English football in a way that continues to be underestimated and verges on the miraculous. Ahead of tomorrow’s England v France quarter-final, in which France have to be the favourites, I think he’s the best manager England have ever had. Better than Sir Ralph, or Bobby Robson. The reason I believe that to be the case has a lot to do with what he inherited; the state of England when he took the reins, and what the previous decade of English football had been like.

I bring all this up mostly because there is a section of English football fans who seem to love to hate Southgate, or at the very least, do him down all the time. This seems to mostly stem from cultural matters; specifically, the England players taking the knee. This annoys me for three reasons. One is that the people who are doing this are usually the very same ones who go on about how the left politicises everything and why can’t they just be open to other points of view and not demonise those who hold different beliefs to themselves. Then they turn around and despise one of the most successful managers England have ever had, all because of his politics. And what’s worse than that is, it’s not like Southgate is even that woke (although I’ve lost track now of what that word is even supposed to mean). He’s mildly metrosexual at best.

The second reason the baseless criticism of Southgate gets to me is that I personally don’t care about the politics of the England manager. I don’t care if they are UKIPy as heck, loved Brexit, use words like “wokerati” – genuinely, I don’t give a toss. As long as they win, I just don’t care. I suppose there are theoretical limits to this. If England had a manager that was an outright Nazi, I don’t think I could look the other way. But seriously, it would have to get to that level for me to begin to care about the England manager’s politics. And I think the people who are always going on about the “marketplace of ideas” should be the first to agree with me on this one.

The final reason I loathe the doing down of Southgate for political matters, both real and imagined, is the decade of English football prior to him becoming England manager. It was really, really, really dire and it feels like all of those on the right calling for Southgate to get his P45 have engaged in a bout of collective amnesia so deep and so wide, I find it baffling.

England’s football dark ages began shortly after the 2006 World Cup. England had made the quarter-finals of the last three international tournaments, but could get no further. After they went out to Portugal on penalties, again, the FA called time on manager Sven Goran-Eriksson’s period as manager. A brief note on Sven: he was the first foreign manager England had ever had. The team improved greatly under him, but never got to that next stage. The FA were certain the team had more to give and the right manager would get it out of them.

They hired Steve McClaren, going English again, which was a disaster. England failed to qualify for the 2008 Euros in dramatic fashion – needing a draw against Croatia at Wembley, England were beaten 3-2. That scoreline greatly flatters England as well; Croatia were up 2-0 inside of 15 minutes and cruised the rest of the way (they had already qualified). After McClaren left, they went foreign again, deciding that the Sven model wasn’t so bad after all. They hired Fabio Capello, a man with a stellar managing record in club football, having been at the helm of AC Milan, Real Madrid, Roma and Juventus.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work out either. England qualified for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa but were desperately uninspired at the tournament. In fact, the 0-0 draw against Algeria is the worst football match I have ever watched in my life. England looked messy, disorganised, bereft of a plan. What followed was Germany tanking England 4-1. Everyone remembers this match for Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal which should have been given, but that’s just a distraction technique. England would have still lost the match, even if it had counted. Again, the 4-1 scoreline was flattering to England – Germany could have scored six or seven with better luck.

So bereft of options were the FA by this stage, Capello was allowed to stay on. Eventually, it all became too much and he left. It felt like the FA basically gave up at this point in time. They were broken. Ambition was notably scaled down. They hired Roy Hodgson, a very likeable bloke who even at the time was verging on national treasure status, to guide England to respectable failure. It seemed like the idea now was that if England could get to the knockout stages of the tournaments and not be too embarrassed when they got there, that was all that was required. The delusions of grandeur, of going on and winning tournaments, were parked.

For a while, this worked. It was a strange period for English football – the tabloids, who not all that long ago used to treat every tournament as if it was England’s to win, became much more subdued. It was like the nation of England collectively realised our football team was not as good as we had imagined for so long. The 2012 Euros saw England get to the quarter-finals and lose to Italy on penalties. Very good, very Robson era. Unfortunately, the 2014 World Cup was a lot worse for England. They went out in the group stage without a win, getting throughly beaten by Italy and Uruguay along the way.

Yet England hadn’t reached rock bottom yet. In the 2016 Euros, England got through to the final 16, only to face an Iceland team made up of non-professional footballers. There were cheery stories in the English press about what they all did for a living (I think one of them was a baker and another postman, from what I can recall). England were going to win this 4-0 and then get destroyed by France in the quarters. If that had happened, who knows, Roy Hodgson might still be England manager.

England lost to Iceland 2-1. It is perhaps England’s greatest ever loss in international football, with its only rival being the loss in the 1950 World Cup to America. That was it. The Hodgson era was over. And the FA was completely out of options now. Forget about winning tournaments, England were in danger at this stage of slipping out of the second tier of footballing nations and into the third; relegated from being amongst the likes of Sweden or Greece, teams that if they really got it together and had all the luck in the world, might get to a tournament final, and being more like Kazakhstan or Macedonia, where just getting to a tournament at all is success.

That’s why they gave Southgate a shot. I mean, why not, how could he be any worse than the others, right? Give him a couple of years and then go foreign again. Who knows, maybe third time lucky.

What happened instead is nothing short of miraculous. Southgate got England to the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup, a match that England could have won with a bit of luck. That’s extraordinary, and the brilliance of it isn’t talked about enough. To go from losing to Iceland to a World Cup semi-final in two years is managerial genius at work.

Then he went one better and got England to the finals of a major tournament, something England hadn’t managed since 1966. Now, we are on the verge of a quarter-final against France that if England were to win, who knows how far we could go. England have looked like one of the best sides in the tournament so far, with the exception of the USA match which England at least got the point they needed from.

And yet, there are parts of the right that don’t seem happy with all of this. Have they forgotten the dark ages already? It appears they have. They sometimes employ the “It’s not Southgate, it’s the players” excuse, but I’ve heard all that before. I was around to hear about England’s “Golden Generation” that never came good. No, this is down to Southgate. England’s success is his success. That’s why I love the guy. And even if England lose to France tomorrow, the FA would be mad not to do everything to hold on to him as manager. If he does go, England could be staring down the barrel of another decade of defeat – without the miracle of a Gareth Southgate to come along and rescue them next time.

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Just to get started here, I am not going to predict the outcome in full. That would be a fool’s errand. There are way too many variables to even begin to pull together something that anyone in their right mind could psephologically feel confident about. However, I think there are three broad ways it could go on Thursday and what I do feel more confident predicting is what happens in each scenario in terms of their effect on British politics.

The first one goes like this: Labour does solidly but nothing mind-blowing – a gain of somewhere around 100 seats net, maybe slightly less. The Tories remain about level, and perhaps even gain a few. The Lib Dems underperform compared to expectations. The Greens gain a handful of councillors and announce that this represents a new dawn in Green politics for Britain.

What will happen if this plays out: the right-wing media will rejoice, saying that the country has clearly forgiven Boris Johnson for Partygate and now we can finally “move on”. Johnson will almost definitely lead the Tories into the next general election, whatever goes down next. Meanwhile, the left will go into full blow Keith mode, saying the local election results clearly demonstrate that Starmer can’t win a general election.

What this result will actually mean: not a lot, really. This is a very predictable outcome in many ways. The places where the locals are being held this year are where Labour already have a lot of seats and so gaining loads and loads will be tricky. If Labour makes modest gains, if anything it probably shows they really are on track to be the largest party at the next election unless the Tories make some sort of miraculous recovery along the way. In other words, ignore the hype.

The second way it could go on Thursday is what I call the “Lib Dem dream” – this is where Labour roughly stand still, the Greens do okay and then declare a new dawn for Green politics in Britain, but crucially where we get the Tories losing loads of seats to the Lib Dems.

What will happen if this plays out: there will be a panic amongst the right-wing press about what might happen at the next general election. They will suddenly become interested in the Lib Dems again, having to dust off their rolodex of outdated Lib Dem contacts to get in touch with. For whatever reason, losing seats to the Lib Dems scares Tories more than losing them to Labour. I think this is because the latter just indicates a roughly predictable ebb and flow within the two party system, whereas a Lib Dem breakthrough threatens the two party system itself. Starmer, incidentally, will be pilloried if this happens, with the left doing the same thing as in scenario one, going on and on about how many seats Corbyn would have got when in fact he was notably crap at winning local seats.

What this result will actually mean: this one would be more interesting than scenario one in that it might suggest that the Tories really do have a “blue wall” problem with the Lib Dems they need to think about. But it would inevitably be massively overhyped by all sides – it’s one thing to take local seats and win by-elections in these Tory friendly waters, another entirely to take Conservative seats at a general election, as the Lib Dems inevitably find out at every general election. The polls will still be in Labour’s favour and they will still be roughly on track to be the biggest party after the next GE, although strangely, almost no one in Westminster will be telling you that.

The third and final scenario is the one feared most by the Tory bubble: the Conservatives get slaughtered, losing hundreds of councillors across the land, several key councils, mostly at the hands of Labour but the Lib Dems and Green get a few themselves. The Greens announce a new dawn for Green politics in Britain.

What will happen if this plays out: the Conservative party and their attending media will have a nervous breakdown. Some will try and play the “under these circumstances, Labour should have done a lot better’ card, but it won’t wash. It will be clear to even some mega-fans that Boris Johnson has become an electoral liability. Whether they get rid of him or not is another story, and I don’t have enough insight into the collective, current neuroses of the Conservative party to tell you one way or another. Starmer will bask in the glory while the left manages to construct a narrative around why gaining loads of seats at the local elections is somehow actually bad for Labour.

What this result will actually mean: this would be the most significant result as it really would give us some indication that things are going horribly wrong in Tory-land. Although I would warn about overhyping even this result. One only has to look at the local elections in 2017 for a lesson on how not to project these sorts of results onto what will happen in a general election. The 2017 locals happened only five weeks before the snap general election called by Theresa May to increase her majority. The Tories gained 563 seats and Labour lost 382. The Lib Dems lost 42. Everyone in Westminster – myself included – felt certain this was an indication that the Tories were on course for a crushing victory in the general election that was mere days away. Instead, we all know what happened, with Labour gaining 30 seats and the Tories losing their majority.

In other words, whatever happens on Thursday, the best thing to be said about it is don’t take it to mean more than it really does. If the Tories can win over 500 seats in a local election five weeks before losing 17 MPs in a general election, it really does show you that locals and general elections are very separate beasts. It’s much better to pay attention to the national polls which almost everyone in Westminster is strangely telling you to ignore at the moment.

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In the summer of 2014, Boris Johnson announced he would be running at the next general election to become the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, having been selected by the constituency association to do so. This was significant for several reasons, not least being the fact that the then London mayor had promised several times during his campaign to be re-elected in 2012 that he wouldn’t attempt to run for parliament during his second term. So much for Boris Johnson and campaign promises – although this almost certainly wasn’t the first example of him trying to have his cake and eat it too.

I commemorated the announcement back then with a poem written using the cut up method, first made significant use of by William S Burroughs in the early 1960s. Essentially, you take several different snippets of text from varying sources, mush them all together and hope something profound comes out the other end. I cut together Boris Johnson’s statement signifying his intent to run for parliament, the first half of Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968, a random section of text from Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, and to round it all off, what was then the “Top 10 Things to Do in London” list that sat on the visitlondon.com website.

I was reminded of my 2014 poem this week for two reasons. One is that Professor Chris Prendergast of King’s College Cambridge, while doing a podcast promoting a new book he has out entitled Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, kindly mentioned it in relation to the current Number 10 crisis and of course, Proust himself.

The second reason is that what with the birthday cake story beautifully dovetailing with Johnson’s “cakeism”, not to mention linking it via baked goods with Proust’s madeleine, the time seemed right for another cut up poem about Boris Johnson involving a section of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For those of you unaware, the narrator in Proust’s classic novel bites into a madeleine and it instantly brings back scores of memories from his childhood, the taste and sensation of the cake instantly summoning up a plethora of images from his past.

In response to all of this, I’ve written a new cut up poem about Boris Johnson, this time incorporating:

The section of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu detailing Proust’s narrator biting into the madeleine.Random sections from Marina Hyde’s article, “Boris Johnson has finally gone full Marie Antoinette – only he’s hogging all the cake” in the Guardian.Snippets from Boris Johnson’s interview with The Sun in 2016 in which he described his approach to Brexit cakeism.A random recipe for a birthday cake, taken from the BBC website.

Here it goes. Is it a profound exploration of the Britain of today? Or random artsy fartsy gibberish? I leave it to you to decide:

Fluffy. Add the cream cheese and the power of expansion which would have memory returns. Quite how long Conservative MPs are willing to bake in two batches, time can only tell. Put so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, we were either obliterated or have been liberated to champion free trade round a deal that is exhilarating for this country. A shudder ran through me and a circle covering the whole world of cake tins went in lightly around church time. “We are all him”, the parliamentary party answers.

Boris Johnson promises you “global such and such in the interval, without tasting the sponge, it springs back when you press it,” and Europe becomes gloomy. The forms of things, including the only one who actually gets cake in Downing Street’s version of Marie Antoinette’s ridiculous little scallop-shell of pastry, electrically whisked (note: use a table top mixer) until pale and illegitimate. Add that their image has dissociated itself from the batter.

My aunt Léonie used a deal that liberates us to eat cake, one that just drags everything down to his level. “We are pro-secco, but the cooled blob of icing that sits in the cabinet won’t fully incorporate”. Reality seems to sit soft on the sponge’s top, covering the whole base. You can have your cake and eat it, but only if you press it lightly. “Lightly,” he whispers again to the Downing Street junior press officer.

Oh, to make Britain once again be made of pastry, the slight of the round world, where the only one who actually gets cake is him. I wanted to say good things about all three layers, scattering over some extra sprinkles in the interval without ever tasting them, on the trays that have lost the power of expansion which would have made the great motor of free trade buttercream purr. Meanwhile, indulge him that other matter, the one where Realism appears to you as “Global Britain” but in icing shapes. By beating the butter, you put it out of its mind, nothing memories, so long abandoned and trade I don’t recognise this day in her. “The spoon is in the icing” says the lonely cabinet member to no one in particular.

Boris Johnson promises sugar until combined and fluffy. Fluffy, once again. Add the cream cheese and “The People’s Government” but you then get the Downing Street version put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything scattered; we were either obliterated or had been so long dormant back then. Circle covering the whole base. Then serve.

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In amongst the “It’s all a Remainer plot” and “They all thought it was a work function” excuses being trotted out by those desperate to keep Boris Johnson in Number 10, we also have the old “He just needs better people around him” chestnut making the rounds. Yes, this is the notion that if only Johnson had a better team in Number 10, he’d be an amazing prime minister. Of course he would, yeah, sure thing.

Beyond the mere ridiculousness of the premise here, namely that someone who is supposed to be politically leading the country would somehow get magically better at this job for which he is evidently unfit if only his coterie of advisors was of a better standard, there is an additional problem. Even if this theory were somehow true, I don’t think Johnson could get better advisors. As in, I don’t think better people would or could work in Number 10, or at least, they wouldn’t without massive caveats Johnson wouldn’t or couldn’t provide, or they would be going into the job with ulterior motives that would further rot Johnson’s premiership from the inside.

I think there are three basic types of people Johnson could in theory get to work for him in Number 10 – and here’s why all of them are basically no goers.

A genuinely competent person from outside of the Conservative party

There are two massive problems with this idea, as much as it remains the best avenue theoretically available. One is that this government has alienated everyone outside the Conservative party to such a degree, it’s genuinely difficult to imagine such a person existing who would take the job. Two, the Tories are in full on batshit crazy mode, so the idea that they would countenance someone so not of their ilk they aren’t even Conservatives to advise Johnson doesn’t seem realistic. But even if these two massive limitations could be overcome, there are still huge obstacles to this possibility working.

Anyone who would be good enough to even be considered for any role in Number 10 would want assurances that Johnson wouldn’t be able to give. Are there any more stories about parties looking to pop out and hurt us? Johnson wouldn’t be able to promise such a thing wasn’t possible. Will the prime minister act in a more prime ministerial way? Even if Johnson was willing to do this, which I doubt he would, would anyone who fits the description of “genuinely competent person from outside the Conservative party” believe him?

I just don’t see how this option would work, as in, I cannot think of anyone in Britain who fits the job description and yet would take a job at Number 10 under this prime minister and these circumstances. And I stress before going on, this is still the best option available by miles and miles.

2. Hire a generic Tory

This would be someone within the ranks, probably fairly young, who would jump at the chance to work in Number 10 for a Conservative prime minister. Someone with no strings attached and who would give no thought to future career prospects. This would come with several advantages. One is that this person would probably be loyal, so you could trust them. Two, they wouldn’t make any demands on the PM, meaning he wouldn’t have to step outside his comfort zone.

The problem is, if the point of this exercise is to “Get better people around the prime minister to save the premiership”, then this fails at all the first hurdles. This expressly isn’t someone better by definition. Also, if the idea is to shake up Johnson and get him to do things differently, then someone who is just overjoyed to be in Downing Street isn’t going to do that. It will simply be business as usual, and given how business is going, that’s not good. The point is, this should be a non-starter; if the idea is to get better advisors around the PM, then this isn’t a solution at all.

3. Get someone from the top ranks of the Conservative party in to fix things

This option is probably the one Number 10 is most seriously considering, and on paper it might look like the best answer, but it comes laden with massive problems. No one who is a rising star in the party will want to hitch their wagon to this failing government – at least, unless they are simultaneously making sure that they have a big in with whomever is going to be the next Tory leader. And there is one easy, sure-fire way of doing that, which is by acting as a mole inside Downing Street. So, this person would leak the hell out of everything they came across of interest while on the inside, to whomever they are banking on to be the next leader or, even smarter, to everyone they think might have a shot at being the next leader.

This would sink Johnson’s premiership even faster than it is already going down. It’s a recipe for disaster.

As you can see, the “He needs better people” theory doesn’t work, because even if Johnson could magically transform into someone competent – which, to stress again, he cannot – there is no one who would take the job of being one of these magical new advisors who isn’t either useless or scheming. Sorry, Tories, there is no realistic solution to the Boris conundrum other than the very obvious one, the one staring you in the face. Either bring him down soon or let the electorate do it in just over two years time. Those are the only choices you have left.

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I’ve wanted to write this one for a while, mainly because it seems like in our polarised age everyone has a view on the mainstream media or legacy media or “the dreaded MSM” depending on who you are, ones that are rarely in tune with reality. Either the MSM is warping all of our minds or it’s perfect the way it is or it’s too left/right-wing – very rarely is it talked about as it actually is, with some attempt at objectivity. I’m going to give that a go here. I think I’m a reasonably good person to attempt this because a). I have written for several mainstream publications as a journalist and appeared on every major news channel at some point but b). I remain an outsider to it all in the truest sense, having not got into journalism when I was in my early twenties, something that I’ve found sort of bars you from the club.

I will start by talking about the positives of the current mainstream media, or more accurately, I will debunk some of the myths its detractors try and stick to it.

No, the mainstream media is not an all-powerful entity. In fact, it’s slowly dying in front of our eyes

It is ironic that for all of the hype that we hear about the MSM having a corrupting influence on society and politics, from left-wingers claiming the right-wing bent of the media causes people who wouldn’t otherwise to vote Tory, to the right-wingers who insist the mainstream media is just a haven for metropolitan liberal elite Remainer woke trans-activists who want to reshape society using the writings of Michel Foucault as a bible, the mainstream media has actually lost a massive amount of influence on society across the last two decades. As we have splintered into partisan blocks of interest and easy access to audience for outsiders has grown exponentially, both factors spurred on enormously by social media, the MSM has withered. Every newspaper in the country has relatively struggled since the turn of the century, when circulations where unimaginably massive by today’s standards, and by switching to being mostly online, publications have sometimes consciously but mostly unconsciously aped the practices of outsider media. A simple way to put this is: more and more people get their news from YouTube these days, and the MSM is still unsure of what to do in the wake of that fact. Keep your USP as being the source of solid, unpartisan news or try and beat the vbloggers at their own game? Most mainstream outlets try a mixture of both, with predictably mixed success or lack thereof.

This has resulted in most print media becoming more and more partisan as they lose influence, chasing the sun as it sets. However, there are some media outlets that do retain a lot of influence over what stories pierce public consciousness. The big one in the UK is the BBC, which brings me neatly to my next point…

2. Most large scale mainstream media outlets are trying to stay balanced as much as they can do. The problem is, this has become pretty much impossible

We’ve all heard the complaints from the right that the BBC is a hive of metropolitan liberal elite blah blah blah over the years, while simultaneously hearing that it’s practically a pro-Brexit propaganda outlet from Remainers or a machine for grinding down support for Corbyn from deluded socialists. How can it be all these things at once? Because it is trying its best to be “non-partisan” and “balanced” in an age where these are no longer entirely meaningful definitions. People live in completely different realities from each other now, so how is the BBC supposed to represent all of that in a “fair and balanced” way?

Take Brexit. Now, just to get this out of the way for those unaware, I am a big old Remoaner of the most extreme type. Do I have problems with the way the BBC handles some Brexit-related stories? From time to time, yes. But the BBC isn’t for me alone, it’s for a country spread across four different nations as well as all of the different realities talked about above. Frankly, I should be annoyed with the way the BBC handles somethings now and again, if they really are trying to do the balance thing correctly.

And yes, I know this opens up loads of difficult questions – that is, in fact, exactly the point I’m making. For instance, climate change. Does the BBC take a position that the science is irrefutable and everyone agrees that we are in a climate crisis? Or do they take a more nuanced position of the same assumptions? Or do they represent everyone equally, with climate deniers given airtime? Look, I know what I would do if I was running the show – I’d give climate deniers a wide berth, for a start. But to say that doesn’t have an ideological bent – that a position like that doesn’t come laden with ideological assumptions – is naive.

Everyone thinks they are a centrist and that their view of the world is the correct one. When things are as polarised as they are, how do you represent everyone in that sort of a country if you’re the BBC?

Right, I think I’ve rebutted as much of the negatives thrown at the MSM as I can without making this epic in length. What I will do now is try and explain what I think are the real problems the mainstream media has.

The intermingling of the political class and political journalists is too great

This is tough to write about since it is nowhere near as easy to explain as many assume. Frontline political journalists and politicians are pretty cosy with each other in this country. There is even a reasonable amount of go between the two groups, with journalists successfully running for elected office and MPs retiring to write columns. In order to get stories, political journalists need access, meaning they require politicians, preferably senior ones, to give them off the record accounts of what goes on within the halls of power. Without this access, the journalists in question would have very little to write about that was in any way novel – in other words, something a reasonably intelligent, well-informed blogger could do.

This means political journalists and politicians spend a lot of time with one another. They become friends. Without question, this results in some stories not coming to light because of these kinds of relationships, which might otherwise be in the public interest. However, the important thing to note here is that this doesn’t signify that the MSM is all-powerful, in bed with the elites as a demonstration of its strength. In fact, the way these relationships between journalists and elected representatives operate is a reflection of the weakness of the mainstream media itself.

The fact is, politicians have more ability to sway the MSM in 2022 than they did in 1996 for the simple reason being the mainstream media is way, way, way less powerful than it was in the 20th century. The journalists are kind of clinging to their position as being influential, with the wavering of it meaning they are ever more covetous of their positions. As mentioned, they rely heavily on reporting inside information, which means every time they get a story which may be newsworthy, they have to consider, “Is making this public worth possibly blowing a whole bunch of invaluable contacts?” For those of you on the left who are finding this difficult to absorb, think about it in Marxist terms: if the system creates a situation where the worker is better off smothering a story as opposed to exposing it, what do you think is going to happen on a more regular basis?

Yes, the members of the political class and journalists intermingle in a way that can be looked upon as unhealthy. But I can’t underline it enough, it’s because the MSM is too weak as opposed to too powerful. When the newspapers had real power back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the balance was about right. It’s become unbalanced because the media as a whole has got weaker in the intervening years.

2. The current manner in which the mainstream media operates actively encourages political viewpoints to get ever more extreme

The way in which the mainstream media is virtually indistinguishable from outsider media is that both worship at the altar of the almighty click. You need to get traffic, sessions, page views – these are the things that drive your ad revenue, thus your ability to survive as a business. These are just the rules of the game now.

And it’s also true that the same rules which apply to outsider media apply to mainstream media in terms of getting those clicks – the more extreme the viewpoint, the more attention a post will receive. It’s slightly more complicated than this, but only slightly more. When you write an article that is edgy and may offend certain people, you get rewarded by both those who agree and those who disagree, i.e. everyone. Those who agree amplify the article by praising it, while those who disagree amplify it by quote tweeting how bad it is, responding on social media talking about how awful the views expressed are, etc. Meanwhile, the article goes viral as a result of all of this attention, positive and negative. Whole careers in the media over the last decade have been based on this tactic.

The way this works has cajoled the MSM into reflecting extreme views with increasing regularity. It has pushed the boundaries of political debate to what would have been considered the edges even ten years ago.

I used to be amazed at how I would meet a journalist who regularly posts fairly extreme stuff only to find their viewpoints in person are much, much more moderate. Not any longer, particularly after I’d done some paid political journalism for MSM outlets myself. Many times I’ve pitched an article idea only to have it rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, because it isn’t edgy enough. Then you pitch again, upping the “edge” factor. Sometimes, it’s only your third iteration that is deemed in your face enough for consumption. You end up sounding way more extreme than if the first idea had been taken up.

But again, and I stress, there is a logic involved here. Whenever I have written a reasonable, detailed policy related article, it is remarkable how much less engagement it gets when compared to something that is either a take down of a particular politician, or a write off of a political party’s strategy. You often hear that people are tired of “personality politics” – except, the evidence demonstrates the opposite is true. This is the only thing people are always interested in. The MSM is just giving the people what they want. If “Hey, things are complicated, there are no easy solutions” sold well, most outlets would be happy to put that out there.

There are other problems I could delve into here. The fact that political journalists tend to be from upper-middle class background with Oxbridge educations could be discussed, making diversity of thought rarer than it should be. The decline of local news and local reporting adding to the bubble-like nature of what tends to make the news. You could easily write a book about what’s wrong with the MSM in Britain alone, in fact. However, I think the two problems I talked about at length are the two biggest issues, at least in my opinion, based on what I have personally witnessed and experienced.

To round up here, there are lots of things the mainstream media does very well. There are great political journalists out there, doing fantastic work. And the things the MSM does poorly are pretty much all a reflection of its comparative weakness as compared to the turn of the century. The only problem is, the problems seem pretty much insurmountable. Next time you complain about the mainstream media, do me a favour and think about what society would be like if it was totally gone. It’s then that you’ll realise how important having it around actually is to the correct functioning of everything.

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Before we start in earnest here, I want to say right off the bat that what follows is not a prediction. We live in completely bonkers times and I am not about to tell you what will happen at the next election because I really have no idea. In fact, all I’m going to do is lay out the hard evidence that exists about what the country currently thinks about the prime minister and his party, try and map it onto basic politics and in turn, political history, all in order to demonstrate that the Conservative party and a lot of the Westminster bubble are sizeably underestimating the amount of electoral trouble the governing party are in at present.

Despite the polls turning on the Tories, giving Labour leads of up to 9% recently, combined with actual electoral events like the North Shropshire by-election, there still seems to be a consensus amongst pundits that the Tories remain positioned to win the next general election, whether it happens in 2023 or 2024. I don’t believe the evidence supports this any longer. Again, that isn’t to say that the Conservatives can’t win the next general election, far from it; simply that if I was laying a bet tomorrow, I would put money on Keir Starmer to be prime minister after the next election. This is something I wouldn’t have done until very recently.

The fact is, the polling is brutal for both the Conservatives as well as Boris Johnson himself at the moment. It’s so bad, I’m actually struggling to know where to begin talking about it. Let’s start at the very top level – the last four national polls from the big pollsters show Labour leads of 7, 8, 5 and 6%. The last national poll to show the Tories in the lead was published on December 6th and that was only 2%. This isn’t some passing storm. Labour have established a solid poll lead now, something that will require a shift of some description to change.

Worse in some senses, the Conservative polling figures in those last four polls mentioned are: 32, 32, 32, 30. So, it’s not just that Labour have developed a solid lead, the Tories are consistently polling in the low 30s now, which is scary for them in and of itself. Particularly as they are doing so without there being a solid contender from the right taking a large portion of the vote off them in these polls, a la UKIP pre-2015. Reform’s numbers remain paltry; the Tories are losing voters to Labour and the Lib Dems, and mostly the former.

If there had just been a recent bad run of polls, some might be able to describe this as a passing phase. Governments always have problems mid-term, right? Miliband’s Labour had 10-point leads and look what happened to them? Except, there are three factors here to consider that cancel that argument out, in my opinion.

Boris Johnson’s personal polling figures, both at large and within the Conservative membership.The issue of how and if the Tories could realistically improve their numbers, even if they deposed Johnson.How the polling numbers at the moment are even worse when you break them down further, particularly geographically. They are losing voters precisely where they need to keep them in order to have any chance of winning the next general election.

Let’s be clear about this – Boris Johnson’s polling numbers are absolutely brutal. Dire, Clegg-esque, beyond redemption, if history is anything to judge by at least. Boris Johnson is really, really unpopular. The latest Opinium poll puts Labour on 39%, Tories on 32, a lead of seven for Starmer’s party. Except, when you add in the idea that Johnson will still be PM at the next election, this number changes in an interesting way. It becomes Labour 42%, Tories 30%, a twelve point lead. This is getting us close to 1997 territory in terms of figures; even on an electoral map that is much harder for Labour now, the Tories on 30% with Labour on 40+ gets Starmer a majority, even without recovering any of Scotland.

Worse than even that, however, is what that latter figure says in a larger way. A lot of voters are already pricing in the idea that Johnson won’t be there come the next election. Once that starts to happen, history suggests you are politically finished. I know, I know, Johnson is supposedly different and all of that, but he still can’t ignore political gravity of this magnitude.

In addition, a new poll has come out mapping how Tory members view the cabinet. Truss is ahead, as usual, with a +73% approval rating. Sunak is rising though, now on +49. Meanwhile, Johnson’s approval rating amongst members is -34, making him the most unpopular member of his own cabinet by a large stretch (only three of them have negative ratings, and one of them just, with Patel on -1.5%). Johnson’s personal rating with the wider public? -48%, which gets him into the sort of territory pretty much no one comes back from. He’s doing badly in the north, in the Midlands, everywhere.

Coming onto the second issue, the problem goes deeper than just Johnson. While Sunak is very popular and polling numbers suggest he would instantly improve Tory numbers, and Truss it could be argued (not by me, but plausibly by others) hasn’t had enough public exposure to be fully judged yet, that isn’t taking into account the huge elephant in the room. Both Sunak and Truss would presumably run their leadership campaigns on the basis of being economically orthodox Thatcherites. They would promise to steer the Tory ship back into the waters of fiscal tightness, eschewing all of this Boris-era rubbish about levelling up. This is what the Tory members want and one of the big reasons they have so turned against Boris Johnson of late.

Yet that would destroy the coalition that Johnson created completely. Why would red wall voters stick with the party if they went full on Thatcher? Particularly when ‘get Brexit done’ won’t work next time? Basically what I’m saying is, the Tories have huge problems with or without Johnson at the helm.

Finally, the Tories have massive issues specifically with constituencies they need to win in order to maintain a majority. Rural voters are turning off them in alarming numbers – a Farmer’s Weekly poll that has consistently showed support for the Tories above 70% now sees the Conservatives support in the 50s, having lost support to the Lib Dems. This would be a lot less scary for Johnson and co had the Tories not just been defeated in a by-election in a formerly safe, mainly rural seat by the Liberal Democrats in North Shropshire, and by a large margin as well.

What do recent polls that show declines for the Tories tell us about which voters are specifically turning off from the party and deciding to vote elsewhere? The elderly and Labour to Tory switchers in red wall seats look remarkably shaky for the Conservatives now. In other words, the Tories are losing farmers, pensioners and red wall voters, in both polling and in real life, as the by-election result tells us. In other words, massive cornerstones of the Tory vote are heavily wobbling at the very least.

The counterargument to all of this seems to be some combination of the following. Boris always bounces back, it’s in his nature. The rules don’t apply to him in the same way. Besides, Starmer has no charisma, so Labour can’t win with him in charge. Whatever is happening now with the sleaze scandals, the health crisis, you name it, come the next election, the people will vote for the Tories and give them another majority. The public haven’t forgiven Labour for Corbyn yet, that will take a few more elections at the very least.

To which I say, look again at the polling I’ve cited above, then look at the North Shropshire by-election result, then tell me what Boris Johnson is going to do to turn things around. Yes, I suppose he could suddenly become a great prime minister, but his own personal history suggests that’s well beyond him (and even his biggest supporters would privately agree). And Starmer may be a little wooden but crucially, he’s not scary in the way Corbyn was nor is he actively off-putting in the way Miliband was. Most people think he’s fine, if nothing else. Should the Tories inflict a very unpopular Boris Johnson on the electorate again – or make a massive turn to the right, fiscally speaking at least, under Truss or Sunak – the polling is already telling us that Starmer could well become the prime minister and in fact, should be thought of as the favourite to do so.

To close, I’m not saying Starmer is a lock to be in Number 10 the day after we all go the polls at the next general election or anything like that. I’m simply saying that a lot of pundits appear to be taking the current situation very lightly, still mostly banking on the Tories to turn things around, when the polls are suggesting the governing party are in a lot more trouble than that. Who knows what will happen at the next general election, but the idea that the Conservative party are the clear favourites seems muddled to me at the very least.

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I’ll preface this article by saying I’ve been thinking about writing it for a while now. I wanted to have it go out in a mainstream outlet, but it turns out none of them want this article particularly badly enough. The centre-right outlets I can understand, but it’s the rejection by the centre-left ones I find most interesting – do they not want Starmer to do well? Have they all but given up on the man completely already? Or is it me? It’s me, isn’t it.

Anyhow, that out of the way, I’ll start with the background before coming onto my thesis. I myself have complained about Starmer a lot in various places since he became Labour leader in April of last year. I have wondered about his overall strategy, about whether he has what it takes in the personal charisma sweepstakes to become prime minister, whether his approach to Britain’s exit from the European Union has been the right one. I’m saying this to make it clear that I see the problems with Starmer. But having said all that, I have also tried and think about it another way. What if, and I’m not saying I fully believe this, just that I think it is more likely to be true than any pundit, on the right or left, is admitting to right now, what if everything Keir Starmer is doing right now and has been doing over the last year is precisely the right thing and is in fact the only strategy that any Labour leader who wanted to win the next election could have possibly adopted? What if, contrary to how it seems from the perspective of late-November 2021, Starmer is on route to becoming the next prime minister?

When he became Labour leader, Keir Starmer was faced with several massive problems. One was the legacy of Corbyn and how it had turned off not just hundreds of thousands of swing voters, but a lot of what would have been considered to that point core Labour voters. The other was that the emboldened left were not going to quietly let Starmer move the party back towards the political centre – they were going to fight it all the way, making some form of civil war inevitable if Starmer wanted to try and make Labour electable again. On top of all that, the party had only 202 seats when Keir became leader, the lowest tally inherited by an incoming Labour leader since Clement Attlee took over in 1935.

I could spend several more paragraphs laying out Labour’s problems as of April 2020, but you get the point. Starmer faced a difficult journey ahead. What he seems to have decided to do was the following:

Have the pillar of Labour’s electability be the contrast between Starmer as dependable and trustworthy versus Boris Johnson’s chaotic bullshit.Surrender to Brexit. At every turn say that Labour wouldn’t reverse the 2016 referendum result if put into office.Hope for Tory sleaze to emerge and pounce on it hard.

It’s a simple strategy in many senses – most would argue too simple. I have argued it’s too simple myself over the last 18 months. Can’t Starmer and his people see that by refusing to touch Brexit in any way, they have cut off one of their best lines of attack aka, the fallout from BJ’s terrible trade deal? Can’t Labour see that treading water isn’t going to cut it when they have to gain over 125 seats just to have a razor-thin majority? Can’t Starmer do or say something ballsy for a change instead of always playing it safe?

To be fair to Starmer, he has started to talk about Brexit now. It is not in terms that pro-Europeans will like – make Brexit work! – but it is probably the right path for him to take for now. Passionate pro-Europeans will not want to hear this, but a lot of the country is not ready yet to revisit the Brexit wars of 2016-2019. I think one of the main reasons the Tories won so decisively in December last year was because so many voters just wanted done with the whole thing – at least, for now. Starmer has taken a line of attack that essentially goes, “Boris Johnson promised the sunlit uplands post-Brexit and instead, through his deep incompetence, delivered a deal that is unworkable”. This plays into pillar one of Starmer’s strategy (his competence v BJ’s shambles) and has the bonus of attacking what is perhaps the Tory government’s weakest point – the fact that most people think the deal they got with the EU was terrible. Hell, even the government who negotiated it think it’s terrible and needs undoing.

So, Starmer has made some minor adjustments over the past six months that have helped him. But that’s not really why I think his chances of winning the next election are greater than many will consider. Starmer had to show he was serious about anti-semitism. He’s done that, sacking shadow cabinet members who let the odd dodgy comment float online. He had to show he was serious about moving on from the Corbyn era, going as far as to remove the whip from the former leader himself. Starmer had to show that he could be that solid guy who could be a good foil for BJ’s messed up hair, just crawled out of bed after a bender style and I think he’s done that as well as he could have.

Okay, many of you will say here, but what about Starmer being about as exciting to watch as cardboard? Can’t he be even a little bit more charismatic? But this question in fact only justifies the strategy even further. If you have a guy who just isn’t showbiz, don’t try and force him to be. Remember “No flash, just Gordon” in 2010? It failed because while being semi-clever and catchy, it only reinforced Gordon Brown’s negatives – the slogan served to remind you that he came across as dull every time you heard it. It brought the fight to Cameron’s home ground instead of showcasing Brown’s world figure status versus Dave the lightweight.

In the same way, Starmer is never going to be as entertaining for most people to watch as BJ. But he doesn’t have to be. If the country is in a place where it is sick of Boris Johnson’s chaotic style of governing, Starmer has offered himself as someone solid and dependable.

Yes, this may not be enough for Labour to win next time out. In fact, if you asked me to place a bet on what I think will happen at the next general election, I figure we’ll get a Tory government with a smaller majority, so Tories on between 330 and 340 seats. But I still think Starmer is giving his party the best possible way of winning. Any other leader would either be more left-wing, more vocally anti-Brexit (albeit in a way that was still sort of half-arsed), or more “Laboury” (think Burnham here), the latter being about this silly idea that if only the Labour party were even more indulgent to its own idea of itself as the saviours of mankind, everyone would drop everything and agree.

Starmer may not win. He probably won’t, in fact. But I think he’s probably given himself the best possible chance of doing so. Yes, the strategy depends very heavily on the Tories making key mistakes. This is never a great thing to build a political strategy on, placing all your hopes onto what your opponent might do. It’s always better to be proactive. At least, if that’s available to you, but again, I don’t think it has been for Starmer. He has too much to do, too many wars to fight internally. If you don’t have the firepower to go on the offence, make certain your defence is as good as it can be. And I think Starmer has done that. It might be enough to get him into Number 10.

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All right, perhaps a slight exaggeration in the title – without wishing to give out spoilers already, yesterday’s speech by Liz Truss was of her usual standard, ie appallingly abysmal, and going over every single line might kill me. Besides, the Gov.uk website from which I’m pulling the text has about half the speech removed for political content anyhow, so how about this: I’ll cover the most important bits. I’ll decode it all so you know what this government is really thinking about trade at this moment in time.

For make no mistake, this was an important speech from the International Trade Secretary in that it lays bare a great deal of current Brexiteer thinking. That most of that is delusional in nature goes without saying, and is what you’ll see as I start to lay into the text. Which I’m going to do now. Promise. I’m stalling in that way you do before ripping off a plaster – you know it’s going to hurt and you should probably get it over with and on with the rest of your life, but the thought of the pain paralyses you. Okay, here we go. Liz Truss. I can do this.

‘It’s fantastic to be here this afternoon at Policy Exchange to talk about trade and to talk about Britain’s future as an open, enterprising economy where everybody shares the benefits of trade. And in order to recover from Covid, we need to make sure that we have thriving businesses who are seizing the opportunities of the future and creating jobs. At the Department for International Trade, we are determined to make sure that we enable those opportunities. That’s why we are building more successful trade routes, especially in digital and services, we’re driving an exports-led recovery and we’re bringing investment to every part of the UK.‘

I’ll give Truss some credit for laying out her stall early here. The meat of this speech is all present in the opening, in fact: just because we have created huge trade barriers with all of our nearest neighbours does not mean this is a protectionist government. No, no, no sir. In fact, we want the economic recovery from Covid to be exports-led and if that doesn’t work, it isn’t the fault of Brexit but rather, that British businesses aren’t ‘seizing the opportunities of the future’ we have so carefully paved the way for. Don’t blame the government when Brexit doesn’t work out. Blame the British business community who just couldn’t live in the new world.

‘Our trade strategy is grounded in the fundamental changes happening across the world; namely, that we are seeing a growth in the world’s middle class, and two-thirds of the world’s middle-class will be in Asia by 2030. Secondly, that we know that digital trade is becoming the dominant form of trade. And finally we can see a huge rise in demand for the kind of high-value industries that the UK excels in – we’re expecting that to double over the next decade.’

Truss is trying to say here in her own inimitable way that the trade of the future is Asian trade. This is just a riff on the ‘shackled to a corpse’ meme so beloved of Brexiteers – Europe is dying, Asia is the rising force, that simple. In other words, stop complaining about large trade barriers we have erected with an entire continent only 22 miles away and realise that there are going to be shedloads of Asians to sell to in the coming decades that will more than make up for this fact.

‘Understandably, after nearly fifty years of being in the protectionist EU, we lost our trade muscle memory that we’d built up as a sovereign trading nation. But we’ve been building it back: negotiating our own trade deals, defending our key industries and getting out on the front foot. Some people in the Twittersphere and beyond find this rather unsettling. But my view is now is the time that we need to dump the baggage of the previous debates and look forward to the future of trade, not the past. Many of these naysayers have thinly veiled vested interests to protect. They want the status quo rather than a dynamic future.’

Of course, the ‘protectionist EU’. That thing whose whole purpose is to create an open market across the whole of Europe, that protectionist EU. The idea here is try and make you forget about the immense level of protectionism Brexit has created because hey, the EU was protectionist anyhow, right? This paragraph even contains the ultimate in Brexiteer double think: having railed on an on about how trading post-Brexit Britain is going to be the freest thing ever for several minutes, Truss slips in the line, ‘defending our key industries’. What this means is: yes, okay, we’ll be protectionist, but it will be a special kind of protectionism, of the kind only something as wonderful as Brexit could provide.

This kind of thinking is what makes debating Brexit with Leavers so impossible. You start off by saying that Brexit has actually made Britain more protectionist than when we were in the EU. They respond by saying something along the lines of, ‘Good! We’re taking care of our own now! Wages will go up!’. You then point out that so will inflation, so everything will be more expensive and they say, ‘No, not with all of these new trade deals we’re striking! We’ll get better deals now that we’re out of the protectionist EU!’. There is no way to argue against this in any meaningful sense since the person you’re trying to debate with is making two arguments which happen to be the opposite of each other at the same time. Post-Brexit Britain can be ultra-protectionist and super-duper-free trading at the same time! You just have to believe hard enough.

‘There are some people here in Britain who have said if goods are not produced exactly according to the way they’re produced in Britain, we shouldn’t be importing them. But we’ve got to look at the logical results of those types of attitudes. It would mean British businesses losing out on overseas government contracts. It would mean British consumers paying higher prices in shops and it would mean huge swathes of developing countries losing out on their potential to become more successful.’

This one is easy to decode: if you’re worried about dumping and the lowering of food standards, you have every right to be. If we stick to ‘old ways of thinking’ on this, business will lose out. Brexit cut us off from just in time goods from Europe, so the only way to make up for that is to let countries sell whatever the hell they like in Britain.

By extending and deepening our trade routes, we can buy more of what we need at competitive prices. We are also broadening our range of reliable suppliers. That’s what the Trans-Pacific Partnership is all about. We currently import £28 billion of goods from those areas, but by joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we can do it on reliable terms.

Translation: we’re betting all the post-Brexit chips on the Trans-Pacific Partnership somehow replacing free trade with our nearest neighbours. The American trade deal, which Truss never mentions in her speech, is being killed off as an idea, slowly and quietly. Don’t worry though – Asian trade will save us. Really, it will.

The rest of the speech mostly backs up “ideas” I’ve already highlighted. There is a lot of guff about ‘digital trade’ without any real detail. So, I’ll just close with this:

I want Britain to become a nation of exporters again, and it’s not insurmountable, we did export £600 billion in goods and services last year. But only one in ten British businesses export. In Germany and Denmark, twice as many businesses export per capita, and businesses in Slovenia are three times as likely to export their goods.

Jeez, Liz, I wonder why Germany, Slovenia and Denmark have so many export led businesses. Maybe there is a common thing that ties them all together? Perhaps your department should look into that.

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A common complaint across all non-Tory politics at present is this: why can’t anyone mount an effective opposition against this shambles of a Conservative government? A lot of fire is directed at Keir Starmer, so let’s start with him and his party as to why it seems almost impossible to put up any kind of effective opposition to Boris Johnson and his crew.

Starmer has two issues as I see it. One, he is inexperienced. He only came into the Commons in 2015 and wasn’t really involved in party politics at all, at least as far as I’m aware, before he stood for parliament. At least, this is how I’m interpreting some of the mistakes he makes. He seems undercooked a lot of the time. But to be fair, a big part of why this is falls to the second issue, which is much larger.

Keir Starmer isn’t sure what to do now because the Labour movement as a whole isn’t sure what to do now. If you strip down a lot of the Progressive Alliance talk, you get to one wish that psychologically underpins it all – that Labour becomes something analogous to the Democrats in America, a very large tent political party that acts as a receptacle for every voter who doesn’t like the main right-wing party for whatever reason, which in this case is of course the Conservatives. This would mean everyone who is currently a Lib Dem, a Green, or even a disaffected Tory could not only vote for Labour, but even join the party.

This would take Labour a long way from where it has been in the past, even during the New Labour years. In order to get your head around this, imagine a Labour party that would not only welcome Rory Stewart, it would be a no-brainer for him to join. Okay, now imagine a Labour party in which Rory Stewart could become the leader. This would amount to something much bigger than a Clause IV moment for Labour. They would be renouncing socialism once and for all. They would have to become something akin to a centrist liberal party, something they have always assiduously resisted. To become ‘not the Tories’ would be a massive step for the party, unprecedented in their history.

And it’s one I don’t think any of the members, whether they are on the left or the right, really want to make. At least, not yet. Within Labour there is always this sense that if the party was to find its ‘true self’ again, having lost it somewhere along the way, people would vote for them again in great numbers. They see Wilson and Blair as having won by managing to re-invent the Labour party for the times they lived in, changing it just enough to keep it within the historical parameters of what the Labour party had always been, at least from a spiritual perspective.

Can they do this again? The problem is, I don’t think so. I think they probably need to radically change to win another majority on their own steam. Yet there are not even close to enough people within the Labour party ready to give up the old time religion yet. Maybe after a few more general election losses, should they occur, Labour people will be willing to think about other options. For now, they are going to cling to the idea that they can win without fundamental changes to what the party is and who it represents.

This is why Starmer seems so deer in the headlights all the time. His game remains what it has been from the start of his leadership: look smart, distance yourself as much as you can from the Corbyn era without making huge changes to what the Labour party actually is and then hope the Tories self-destruct. That’s it – that’s the plan. Labour can only win next time if people are so sick of Johnson and the Tories, they vote Labour out of spite. Perhaps Starmer and his people think that’s the only way Labour can win next time anyhow. Perhaps they are right.

As for other parties of opposition, it’s difficult to see how they don’t in the end make Tory government more possible as opposed to less. I suppose the Lib Dems aren’t trying to take over from Labour as the main party of the centre-left in the UK any longer, as they have been for intermittent periods throughout the last 20 years. They’ve kind of given up on all that and now are focused on a group of Tory-held seats in the SE of England, running seemingly on local issues, in particular housing.

Of all the leftish opposition parties, only the Lib Dems don’t seem to be in Labour’s way at present. It’s hard to see how the Greens do anything other than take votes off of Labour. Now, I’m not telling them not to do that – if people want to have a Green party, that is fair in a democracy. And those people who join the Greens don’t need to prefer a Labour government necessarily. I’m only pointing out how difficult all of this has become. We have a Labour party that won’t change enough to make the other parties of opposition stand down, and so, they stand in the way of Labour forming a government. And on it goes.

To summarise, Starmer has options, sure, but they are all pretty close to impossible for him to enact. So, he plays it safe in the hopes he and his party squeak through somehow. One day, British politics will be different. I hope to God we don’t have to wait too long for that change to happen.

While you’re here, check out my latest book:

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There is a myth that circulates currently on the western right that goes like this: while the left is close-minded, wrapped up in cancel culture and identity politics, the right have become the custodians of tolerance. While the left no-platforms those it disagrees with, the right will talk with anyone and everyone. So long as you disagree with the woke folk’s shibboleths, you can come and join the centre-right, as they are waiting for you with open arms.

Like any myth there is some truth buried in there. The left has become almost hilariously intolerant over the last few years, with any transgression from anything the left believes in being enough to have you shunned from the group. You have to agree with them on everything or else you can sod off. And in comparison, the right has been more open-minded than the left in terms of who it will speak to and who it will not.

But one, that is a very low bar and two, a great deal of this ‘open market of ideas’ stuff on the right is performative – intellectual cosplay, almost. When it comes right down to it, the modern right has as many shibboleths as the modern left does – it is just way better at playing this down than the left, who tend to wear their forms of intolerance with an open pride.

A great example in Britain is Brexit. If you don’t like Brexit, good luck being accepted on the right, even if you are technically a conservative or classical liberal. I, for instance, think Brexit was a terrible idea that will one day, in some form or another, be reversed. I’m also solidly centre-right on foreign policy, as well as a big believer in free markets and relatively small government. I don’t like socialism and think the left are foolish for pursuing it as the ultimate goal once again, after they had wisely turned their backs on it collectively several decades ago. Yet none of this matters – I couldn’t be a Tory, even if I really, really wanted to, because accepting Brexit as being good is now a minimum requirement. Whatever else you believe, the right will not accept anyone who doesn’t like Brexit in a fairly overt way. It’s become an article of faith – just like if you want to be a Christian, you have believe in the divinity of Christ, if you want to be part of the modern centre-right in Britain, you have to believe in the power of Brexit. Or at the very least, pretend to.

Then we move onto America, where parts of the right want to try and tell classical liberals that really, the Republican party is the place for them given the extremes of cancel culture on the left. Yet you only have to look at the numerous times the veil is lifted to understand the true nature of the American right. The Texas abortion law of very recent times is a perfect example. Seriously, guys, banning abortions for any reason after six weeks and then empowering citizens to be able to sue those who might be providing abortions, or even – and this is the truly Orwellian part – aiding people to find access to abortion, whatever the hell that can ever mean, and you want classical liberals to go along with you just because lefties were mean to JK Rowling? Sorry to be rude, but go fuck yourselves. You don’t really care about personal freedom and liberty, just the freedoms and liberties you happen to value at any given moment.

Yes, the modern left is besieged by problems, caught in a sort of religious frenzy on all sorts of issues. But the idea that the right is really, deep down, any better, is demonstrably false. And at least the left are sort of working from a place of trying to help people, however misguided that becomes in practice at times, whereas the right aren’t even doing that much. They’ve mostly given up on markets to embrace an ugly form of quasi-socialism that is neither practical nor well-intended; it’s just big state protectionism because they don’t know what else to do anymore. Which isn’t all that inspiring, if I’m being honest.

As I mentioned the horrific Texas abortion law above, I will mention to close my new book, “The Patient”, one of the major themes of which is the importance of a woman’s right to choose when it comes to her own body. It also covers xenophobia, medicalisation in the age of Covid and how we aren’t as liberal a society as we sometimes pretend to ourselves that we are. It’s here if you’re interested:

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