The State Of This...

... Conference on National Conservatism

The National Conservative conference in Westminster – site of the popular fightback against the elite – is getting a lot of attention from people who pay a lot of attention to things like that. In fact, it is worth investigating because it is a little glimpse of the future. Not the future of the country, but the future of the Conservative party.

The list of speakers is a veritable roll call of the beleaguered. It’s a living paradox – a conference full of speakers who never shut up about how they are silenced. What’s the collective term for a bunch of pretend victims? A whinge, perhaps. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman, David Goodhart, Frank Furedi, Daniel Hannan, Matthew Goodwin, Tim Stanley, Douglas Murray, David Frost, Melanie Phillips, Toby Young. It's a full house of monotone moaners. I’m surprised they didn’t ask Lee Anderson to round the whole thing off. Oh, I see that they did. He’s doing the final plenary.

This morning the comment sub-editors at The Times neatly satirised their own columnist by writing the headline “National Conservatism is not a fascist plot” above Melanie Phillips’s piece. Well, they are right; it’s not. It is nowhere near serious enough for that. It fails to be sinister because it is all so tremendously, ambitiously stupid. But it is stupidity with a purpose because, once the sensible Mr Sunak and the sensible Mr Hunt fail to win the next election, they will be jettisoned and this is the crowd that wants to win control of the Tory party. Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman will line up in a bid to be the first ever female Iain Duncan Smith.

That is a joke I have adapted from Braverman herself who hilariously suggested that Keir Starmer was so woke he might identify as a woman. It was, relatively speaking, a rhetorical peak. It is hard to imagine anyone sinking lower than Douglas Murray’s complaint that the Germans had “mucked up” nationalism for the gentle Brits by going a bit overboard. Of course, using the holocaust as a gag line is offensive. I think it best, though, not to engage with him and instead to write it off as irretrievably stupid.

What you see on stage is the Conservative party in a terrible state. In fact, there are two states, one analytical, the other psychological. The analytical state of the conference is simplicity. The country has gone wrong and it is all so easy to return it to righteousness. We just need to go back to who we were and what we thought once upon a time. Men should marry women and stay married. Every problem is a binary contest between goodies and baddies.

This is then delivered in a state of acute exaggeration. Brexit caused an epidemic of exaggeration in British politics (on all sides, it has to be said) but the victimised right has a terrible case. The National Conservatism website risibly suggests that the democratic world is confronted by “a rising China abroad and a powerful new Marxism at home”. That will be the world’s emergent super-power on the one hand and a bunch of middle-class climate protestors on the other. But they can’t help themselves. Every problem is a disaster; everything is going to the dogs.

This state of exaggeration is why the sensible people in the Conservative party should be terrified at the spectacle. Not because of the content of what people are saying – not all of which is off the wall – but because of the scary intensity with which their views are held. They exaggerate how bad things are. They exaggerate how much it matters. They exaggerate how much anyone else cares. They exaggerate how much everyone else shares their view. It’s like talking to an evident fool who happens to say something that, in other circumstances, you agree with. But there is something about the way they say it, and the way that everyone they know says the same sort of thing in the same sort of way, that makes you recoil. That’s what the electorate will do if this lot capture the Tory party. In the end they are not sinister because they are (electorally speaking of course) a parade of complete losers.

Suddenly, the collective noun is clear. They are all crazy, but the madness is not so much in what they do as the way they do it. It’s a Bananarama.