You may not have heard of Nat Wei, AKA Lord Wei of Shoreditch. Until very recently, the 46-year-old Conservative peer – ennobled by David Cameron, for whom he once did some work on the concept of the “big society” – had certainly escaped my attention. But when he published a brief article on the activist website ConservativeHome, he became the kind of human firework that sometimes briefly illuminates the political sky, before once again falling into obscurity.
There may be rot at the top and, especially after this weekend, huge questions facing Boris Johnson and Nadhim Zahawi (and others) about money, power and entitlement, but Wei’s message was that his comrades ought to buck up. “It really feels like many in the party have already begun to throw in the towel,” he wrote. “Which is unfortunate because the country actually needs us to take action, innovate and solve problems.” Predictably enough, one of the issues he chose to explore was that of “out-of-control wokery in tertiary education” – which, he said, might be tackled using truly ingenious methods.
The key was to link the repayment of student debt to how graduates fared in a special test, in which they would “achieve the highest scores for tolerance of other viewpoints, lateral thinking, and critical thinking”. For those who got top marks, there would be debt “forgiveness” – while defenders of no-platforming and toppling statues would presumably have to pay for their education through the nose. It did not seem to have occurred to Wei that people might just lie and take the money.
This may look like the kind of nonsense wearily scrawled on to a flip-chart at the end of a Tory awayday, but it chimes with no end of stuff that is now swirling around Conservatism, and has been for some time. An idea’s ludicrousness, moreover, is now no barrier to its conversion into actual policy. Only a few days after Wei’s piece appeared, the online safety bill currently passing through parliament was amended, thanks to the Conservative backbencher Natalie Elphicke, to outlaw the portrayal of people illicitly crossing the Channel “in a positive light” – supposedly to clamp down on online advertising by people traffickers, but with profound implications for organisations that campaign for the rights of refugees, let alone free speech.
These stories fit snugly into the rightwing side of the so-called culture wars, but the kind of thinking they represent has a longer pedigree. Whatever Conservatism’s objections to the big state, when past Tory politicians encountered something they deemed beyond the pale, their first instinct was often to try to simply legislate it out of the way, however absurd their actions. In the 1980s, the infamous section 28 forbade councils from “promoting” homosexuality, as if the size of the gay community rose and fell according to the level of municipal marketing spend. At around the same time, broadcasting restrictions meant the voices of spokespeople from 11 organisations in Northern Ireland – most notably, Sinn Féin – were banned from TV and radio channels, meaning actors were employed to stand in for them. Note also the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 – which, in its ridiculous pursuit of rave culture, contained specific police powers relating to music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.
But there is a crucial difference between then and now. During the Thatcher years at least, these things sat alongside comparatively clear and coherent government thinking on the economy, public services and all the other political basics. Now, with Brexit’s promises in tatters and an administration mired in panic and decay, Conservatism has reached the point of being all about its prejudices and paranoia. The result is the credo personified by Suella Braverman and her reign at the Home Office: flailing authoritarianism, extended to its logical conclusion by new curbs on rights to strike and protest, that turns today’s silliness into tomorrow’s deadly serious plan. Flying refugees to Rwanda, for example, is not just nasty, but preposterous; it is also government policy.
One of the reasons that Rishi Sunak tends to look nervous may be that he has been placed at the top of a political community that increasingly lives for this stuff. On a bad day, he looks like a tech exec pulled out of his beloved California and dropped into the bar of an English golf club, just as the regulars have got on to ranting about bringing back hanging. As his unsuccessful campaign to be elected leader by the Tory membership proved, he tries to join in, but it rings hollow. They may be on to their fourth prime minister in less than four years, but the grassroots Tories who are habitual watchers of GB News and less-than-secret admirers of Nigel Farage are still awaiting a leader who is one of them. If – when – the government loses the next election, they may well get their chance.
Conservatives have one enduring behavioural tic: they tend to mistake deep and complex social change for leftwing and liberal conspiracy. The truth the Tories now face is that even England’s shires and suburbs are increasingly liberal, and broadly “woke”. Among millennials, the old Tory certainty that people shift rightwards as they get older has no foundation at all: voting figures suggest that today’s 35-year-olds are the least conservative in history, and may well be like that for the rest of their lives. Before Brexit, such Tories as Cameron and George Osborne sensed those changes and talked of modernisation and “liberal Conservatism”; now, some of the loudest voices on the right seem to have decided that this was a dangerous heresy.
Two or three times a week, I peruse the Daily Telegraph, just to gauge where all this is heading. It recently ran a piece by an academic who reckoned that “a clear majority of British schoolchildren are being indoctrinated with cultural socialist ideas”. Promoting a report he had authored for the mainstream Tory thinktank Policy Exchange, he raged on: “The vast majority of young people support remain, and only a third of remainer youth” – quite a turn of phrase, that – “say they would date a leave supporter.” These things, he concluded, are a threat to “the very essence of British civilisation”, and he urged Conservatives to act.
Here, once again, was an invitation to the kind of zealotry that the vast majority of British people – including those who vote Tory – would think weird and mad. Where are the ideas for reviving a party that has run out of inspiration, and is shedding voters of all ages? The force that once considered itself the natural party of government is becoming a cult of bitterness, denial and trivia; the most pitiful aspect of the Tories’ predicament is that so few of them show any signs of doing anything about it.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
