Over the past five years or so, one aspect of talking to the public about politics has become more and more pronounced. In the wake of some story or other, I will be dispatched to determine people’s views about it. For a while, the conversations will largely be pretty straightforward, touching on politics and power, people’s lives and the relationship – or lack of it – between them. And then, without warning, somebody will tip the conversation into altogether more exotic territory, centred on a conspiracy theory.
Not long after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I was in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe, listening to a somewhat earnest young man’s views about how the deceased monarch had been fond of drinking babies’ blood. On a visit to Birmingham in 2022, I listened to two loquacious pensioners talking about how Covid-19 was a fiction invented by the world’s rulers, and global death figures had largely been made up – opinions that blurred into a general sense that a lot of people still did not believe a word of what they had been told about the pandemic. The previous year, in fact, I had reported from parts of the city where community organisations were trying to get people to be vaccinated, in the face of large-scale public scepticism and hostility.
In late 2020, I had revisited Collyhurst, the deprived Manchester neighbourhood on the northern edge of the city centre. Covid restrictions were still in place and the streets were silent, but I had a long conversation with two twentysomething men whose opinions followed a familiar pattern. At first, they talked about the huge power and influence amassed by technology and e-commerce companies – manifested, they said, in the fact that the only work they could find was in local logistics warehouses. The conversation then moved to corporate and state surveillance: “Everything’s online, everything’s digital – they know exactly what everyone’s doing.” After talking about 5G masts, we then ended up in very familiar territory. “You know what the vaccine’s for?” one of them said. “We’re going to get microchipped, so when we go to airports or the doctors or anywhere like that, we can all get scanned.”
Last week, there was a splurge of headlines about an opinion poll jointly commissioned by the BBC and King’s College London. Its respondents were asked about a range of common conspiracy theories, from the idea that the pandemic was a hoax to the “great replacement” theory, whose advocates claim that white Europeans and Americans are deliberately being superseded by non-white migrants. The results were nothing if not consistent: for each of the stories, around 10% of people agreed that it was “definitely true”, with another 20% or so ticking the box labelled “probably true”.
“For some people,” said one of the academics involved, “conspiracy theories provide the main focus of political participation and the primary means through which they understand what is going on in the world.” Whatever the criticisms of this latest research, it echoes other recent poll findings: in February, for example, the opinion platform UnHerd published polling data showing that 15% of people “strongly agree” with the contention that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”, with another 23% “mildly” agreeing. An overlooked point, it seems to me, is bound up with that second, softer category: it seems that the conspiracy hardcore’s paranoid, hallucinatory view of the world now blurs into the beliefs held by a much bigger chunk of the population.
Among most politicians and political observers, there is still precious little understanding of all this. They still tend to operate as if the vast majority of voters’ views are much more orthodox: based on a latent leaning either left or right, perhaps tinged with a certain anger about the UK’s problems, but essentially traditional, uncomplicated and understandable. What now pours into many people’s social media feeds and out into the world, by contrast, is surely anything but. Everybody knows somebody who believes in shadowy cabals and covert global plots, and such people seem to form one part of a much wider range of opinions – united by a loathing of the political mainstream and a belief that all our institutions are irredeemably corrupt, commanded by invisible forces and beyond anyone’s control.
Self-evidently, a certain kind of politician will happily use the resulting soup of cynicism and delusion for their own purposes, and thereby make things even worse. In the US, Donald Trump is a master of exactly that game, and Robert F Kennedy Jr – a challenger for the Democratic nomination, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic, gun ownership and a completely fictional link between vaccines and autism – is following a comparable playbook.
Boris Johnson, too, understands how to destabilise the political conversation by citing plots and conspiracies, a habit that will doubtless surface in his new column in the Daily Mail. When the letter announcing his resignation as an MP made reference to a “witch hunt … to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result”, it was yet another sign of that increasing Tory habit of inventing stories full of fear – ostensibly about such fantasies as the “woke blob”, but cast in the same basic language as much nastier ideas.
Conservative politics, in fact, shows signs of being engulfed by this tendency, something evidenced by the fact that the rightwing TV channel GB News has often mixed its shrill take on current affairs with twitchy talk about “one-world government” and “vaccine tyranny”. The left, meanwhile, is not exactly blameless. A section of the enduring cult focused on Jeremy Corbyn claims that his defeat was not the result of millions of former Labour voters walking away, but a conspiracy authored by the “Israel lobby” – the kind of antisemitic cliche that finds an echo at the other end of the political spectrum. On a bad day, it feels like our politics now consists of a centre once again full of dull technocrats, with, on either side, wild cultures of prejudice and paranoia, which add to the apparently growing number of voices claiming that the mundane business of democracy is nothing but a sham.
Politicians who are focused on the comparatively dull stuff of policy and “delivery” will sooner or later have to at least talk about the sheer scale of 21st-century misinformation, and how it is twisting our politics. Doing so convincingly, however, will require traits that are currently in chronically short supply: an earthy, emotional approach to the job and a gift for the kind of storytelling that Trump, Johnson et al have put to the most obnoxious uses.
There is also a very important conversation to be had about the kind of societies and economies our politicians want to create. Whenever I have talked to people who either believe in conspiracy theories or have soaked up their paranoid view of the world, they have tended to fit into two broad categories. Some, to be sure, are hopelessly lost down online rabbit holes. But as that encounter in Collyhurst suggested, other people’s beliefs are often preceded by much more coherent stuff – about centres of power being hopelessly distant, corporate giants doing as they please and everyday life too often feeling fragile and meaningless. Take the first small steps to giving people a bit more security and certainty and the desperate appetite for conspiracy theory might start to die down, taking all those visions of microchips, faked figures and vampires with it.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
