Four weeks ago, Rishi Sunak was hoping he could find a way to return Lee Anderson to his job as the deputy chair of the Conservative party after Anderson’s resignation over the Rwanda bill, with the prime minister’s spokesperson letting it be known he still had “a lot of time for Lee”. He’s certainly spending a lot of time on him. A mere month on, Sunak seems to be hoping he can find a way to persuade Lee Anderson to return to the Conservative party. Meanwhile much of public life seems to be moving in a fast and febrile way at the moment, and a lot of people are rightly worried where it will end.
While the de-whipped Anderson flirts with joining Reform, Sunak’s appeasing position is that this celebrated “red wall”-whisperer’s comments about Sadiq Khan were “wrong” but not Islamophobic. By way of a reminder, Anderson used a GB News appearance to assert that “Islamists” had control of London and the London mayor had given the capital to “his mates”. No politician should speak like this. But by being utterly unable to say why the remarks were “wrong”, the electorally desperate Sunak gives the impression he’d like to have Lee back, not speaking exactly like this, but a bit like this, in fact, quite like this, not that we’d all say it in the same way, and, you know … Lee is Lee!
Not that what we might politely call incendiary carelessness is limited to this “side”. After supporters of Donald Trump notoriously overwhelmed security at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, you’d think anyone thoughtful who was organising protests outside seats of government would give extra care to their rallying cries. Yet Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign convening the protest in Westminster on the night of last week’s Gaza ceasefire vote, reportedly declared: “We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself.” Jamal has now said: “For the record when I called for people to come to parliament in such large numbers they would have to lock the door, I was calling for mass participation in the cornerstone of democratic accountability.” Yet why would one need to “lock the doors” against that? Many thousands of protests have occurred outside parliament down the years without explicitly creating the impression that it needed to lock its doors. It is a shame that Jamal is as unable to acknowledge the dangerous stupidity of his words any more than Anderson is.
But then this is what populism looks like, wherever in the spectrum it rears its head. It is aggressive, it is artless, it prefers a verbal boot to a measured argument – and it always ends in failure or worse. This week it emerged that three female MPs (both Conservative and Labour) have been issued with bodyguards and cars out of rising fears for their safety. Hardline activists who sneer that this “comes with the territory” lack foresight and humanity in a way that is not totally different to the way in which Anderson does.
After blow-ups like these, MPs often hotly defend the time-honoured “cut and thrust” of our politics, and I suppose there is a weak argument that parliamentarians throughout history were never happier than when bandying the unforgivable insults of their own eras. But the thing is, very few people heard or saw them. Now the low points of Commons “debate” and talkshow punditry are clipped within moments and sent endlessly viral on social media. Parliament and its members have never been as seen as they are now. And when the standards of leadership degenerate, why should the standards of the people be far behind?
By way of illustration in as even-handed a way as possible, let’s track one motif across the “cut and thrust”. Almost exactly two years ago, Boris Johnson bizarrely sought to defend himself against a new raft of Partygate stories by telling the House of Commons that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was director of public prosecutions. Starmer blamed this disgraceful slur by the then prime minister for the angry mob that accosted him outside parliament just days later. Yet the next year, Labour ran a social media ad that demanded: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” After the mob incident, Starmer had given an interview saying he’d never been called a “paedophile protector” before in public, and that “the PM knew exactly what he was doing” – suggesting he himself knew exactly what he was doing when his own ad in effect called Sunak a paedophile protector a year later.
All these sorcerer’s apprentices know what they’re doing, until they suddenly don’t and something very bad indeed happens. Time and again I think back to standing on College Green outside the Houses of Parliament in the light of the very early morning of 24 June 2016, and watching Nigel Farage meet the triumph of his political life not with eloquence and magnanimity, but with a provocative and sniping speech that – barely a week after the murder of Jo Cox – memorably included a pat on the back for the fact we’d got there “without a single bullet being fired”.
In the immediate wake of Cox’s murder, MPs from all sides briefly paid tribute to the late MP’s conviction that we have “more in common than that which divides us”. Yet so many politicians who probably thought they meant it at the time have spent the subsequent years dividing us even further. Why? Because it’s easier, because it’s a habit, because they can’t think of anything more constructive to do, and because it gets them instant attention. Every day they indulge in it is a day they are not solving any of the problems making people’s lives in the UK worse – and another sign that the era of displacement populism is upon us.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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