Rewind: We're about to witness the first "extremely online" Tory opposition
Ready your dank memes
To coincide with Conservative Party conference, here’s a paid piece I wrote earlier this year on why I think it is likely that the Tories are going to go completely mad. If you enjoy reading it, please consider taking out a paid subscription so that I can continue writing every single week.
And don’t worry – a brand new essay will be landing later this week.
The Conservative Party is staring down a dark path, and last weekend felt like a preview of the grim future ahead.
(These first few scene-setting paragraphs are a little out of date now, but provide context for the rest of the piece, which still stands up!)
Lee Anderson, the hard-of-thinking provocateur, lost the party whip after refusing to apologise for claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. That’s less a dogwhistle and more of a fog-horn.
Then on a trip to the United States, former Liberal Democrat/Remainer Liz Truss continued on her radicalisation speed-run. She didn’t just speak at CPAC, the conference for the most certifiable Republicans, but she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast1, and didn’t even blink when Tommy Robinson was described as a “hero”.
And what makes Truss’s actions more disturbing is that far from being disqualifying, this incident arguably improves her standing within the party, positioning her as a potential king-maker on the party’s right. Hell, you wouldn’t be completely crazy if you were to wonder if this could actually help position her for a second run at the Conservative leadership.
In any case, both incidents were illustrative of what has already become the conventional wisdom among Westminster watchers: That after they lose the next election, the Tories are going to go absolutely fucking mad.
In fact, I think at this point, everyone would be more surprised if the Tories somehow manage to avoid having their own period analogous to the Corbyn wilderness years. And despite trying to position myself as a mildly contrarian commentator, you’ll find no dissent from me on this analysis.
However, there is something more interesting happening here which is worth commenting on, and it’s more important than whether it will be Braverman, Badenoch or some other no hoper who will lose against Keir Starmer’s Labour in 2028. And that’s the question of… Why is this happening?
If we can all see with our own eyes that the Conservative Party is rapidly going insane, why can’t anyone stop it happening? Why are the next few years almost predestined to be utterly disastrous for the party? Does no one want to avoid the iceberg the party is steaming towards?
I think the explanation is that this lurch to the crazy won’t just be one solitary moment of madness for the Conservative Party. In fact, it’s a reflection of a new structural reality of our politics that is going to shape everything from now until the heat-death of the universe.
So if we want to understand British politics going forward, we’re going to need to understand a weird new fact about British political life.
The insanity cycle
On one level, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Conservative Party is going mad because as history demonstrates, when a governing party loses power it nearly always moves away from the political centre.
The obvious example to point to is Labour electing Michael Foot as leader in 1980, but the pattern holds more broadly: William Hague was broadly to the right of John Major in 1997, and Ed Miliband was to Gordon Brown’s left.
Then sometimes parties in opposition will become even more self-indulgent after further losses, as demonstrated by Labour electing Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. But it happens on the right too. After losing the 2001 election, the Conservative Party elected Iain Duncan Smith, effectively doubling down on things voters didn’t like about William Hague (too right wing, too bald).
However, there is a cyclical nature to this. Eventually political logic will typically re-exert itself, and the party will realise that it actually quite likes winning elections. Hence how Kinnock, Blair and Starmer dragged Labour back towards credibility with the electorate, and Cameron did the same job for the Tories in the run-up to the 2010 election.
Of course, what I describe above isn’t an iron law – I bet there are some good counter-examples. But just like the ‘rule’ that the governing party will perform badly in local elections, as an observed ‘rule’ of politics I think ‘the insanity cycle’ holds pretty true2.
And in any case, there’s coherent logic underpinning it: MPs that lose their seats are more likely to be moderates in tightly-contested marginal constituencies. This means that in a leadership election after a defeat, not only will any arguments predicated on ‘electability’ feel discredited – but the winner will be disproportionately decided by the hard-nosed ideologues who managed to hold on to their safe seats and have not personally experienced the pain of defeat3.
So given all of this, and the expected Tory wipeout next time around, I think a baseline expectation is that the Conservative party after defeat is going to look a lot more like Suella Braverman than Rory Stewart.
An unsatisfying conclusion
If I were a traditional pundit, this is probably where my analysis would end. I’ve come up with a logical hypothesis that explains using observed reality and compelling logic why it is that the parties that lose elections move away from the centre – or “go insane”, to use my provocative framing.
However, as compelling and handsome as I am, I don’t think this is a fully satisfying explanation.
While my fairly paint-by-numbers-political-columnist hypothesis has some explanatory power, I think it still doesn’t explain an important part of what we’re seeing: Why is this already happening?
Because even if we accept that governing parties will move away from the centre after defeat, that doesn’t really explain why the Conservative Party is tearing itself apart right now, and why the party is already facing pressure to move further to the right before anyone has even voted them out.
To explain this, I think we need to point to a much deeper structural factor. So let’s all channel our inner-Putin, and begin our real explanation half a millennium ago.
The posting to policy pipeline
It was back in 1517 when Martin Luther sidled up to the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, and nailed his “95 Theses” to the door of church. It was an act that would have profound historic consequences.
Luther’s powerful post was the catalyst for the Reformation, and it inspired the rejection of the authority of the then all-powerful Catholic church across Europe. Over the next century, borders would be redrawn, governing institutions would be torn down, and the hierarchy of power across the continent would be forever redefined.
In other words, it was essentially the Uxbridge by-election of its day in terms of its profound, epoch-defining importance.
But don’t worry, you don’t need to know all of the details. Here’s a rap made by some Christian students that explains the gist of the Reformation, in case you need a catch-up:
In any case, what’s important to know is that the Reformation isn’t just a political story. It’s a technological one too, as Luther and his fellow reformers were only able to spread their ideas and find an audience because of the invention of the printing press a few decades earlier.
It’s hard to overstate just how transformative this invention was. It exponentially accelerated the speed of knowledge distribution. Instead of monks having to laboriously copy out books for new readers, information was democratised, and could be read by many more people, at much greater speed4.
And given the obvious utility of the printing press it’s not surprising that it soon led to a dramatic intellectual revolution across Europe.
Anyway. this brings me back to the modern world and the big, honkingly obvious parallel I’m trying to draw.
We’re now thirty years out from the release of the first web browser, and just like medieval Europe, our information environment has been dramatically transformed compared to how the world used to work before.
In fact, comparing the internet to the printing press probably actually under-sells how dramatic the change we’re currently living through is: Even with a printing press, publishing books was still capital and labour intensive. And for centuries after, literacy was still mostly the preserve of the relatively rich and educated.
By contrast, in just a few short decades starting at the end of the 20th century, we’ve invented a technology capable of distributing and amplifying the thoughts and ideas of almost everyone on Earth, from the western ultra-rich to some of the poorest people in the developing world.
And given this, wouldn’t it be more surprising if the internet didn’t lead to similarly profound social and political upheaval as the Reformation? How could it not, when our technology has – for better or worse – dismantled the gatekeepers and put a direct connection to everyone else on earth in the hands of, well, almost everyone?
The Tory information environment
This brings us back to 2024. It may feel as though it has been around for a while, but on a historical timescale we’re still only in the very early days of the internet.
In fact, I’d argue that it’s only really since 2010 or so, with the saturation of smartphones and social media that we really reached the “internet” era in terms of our politics.
And in any case, compared to 2010, the digital content ecosystem today is almost impossibly more sophisticated and influential.
For example, today the gamut of “online sources of political information” no longer runs from the Mirror to the Daily Mail, with a handful of us weirdos reading political blogs.
Instead it runs all the way from Electronic Intifada to Novara to Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic, to Stormfront, via Joe Rogan, Twitch, Infowars, those private school kids who host an edgy lefty podcast, Hbomberguy, and all of those teenagers on TikTok whose political views just happen to align with those of the Chinese government. Oh, and some guy called James O’Malley.
And to be clear, the old world has not yet been completely replaced. Legacy newspapers can still set the news agenda and the person who writes the BBC News app’s push alerts is still the single most powerful political actor in Britain.
But in this sort of information environment, of course the spectrum of political opinions in the country is going to expand out more widely. The long tails on both left and right are inevitably going to be fatter, as people on the fringes can find each other and work together to promote their ideas – without traditional gatekeepers maintaining a ‘Chinese wall’ that separates out mainstream politics from the conspiracy theorists, cranks and racists.
So no wonder we see conspiracy theorists claim that Islamists are somehow controlling the Mayor of London, and the absolute worst people have a platform to argue that Tommy Robinson is a “hero”. And no wonder ‘mainstream’ figures are increasingly willing to pander to these views.
This is just an inevitable downstream consequence of a transformative distribution mechanism. And it represents a massive structural change in how politics works that we’re still watching play out.
Ultimately then, the Tories losing their minds is only a symptom of this broader, more important trend. We’re going to have to get used to the fact that we’re all extremely online now.
And just like the Catholic Church could not stop the distribution of Martin Luther’s ideas, this modern ‘Reformation’ is here to stay. There’s no going back to a world where weirdos and nutters can’t promote their bad ideas. Thanks to the internet, fringe opinions are never going to be quite so fringe again – and we’re going to need to accept that if we want to understand anything about how the future works.
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Presumably called The Rest Is (((Globalist)))) Conspiracy.
And this is even the case when we consider that the above examples mix and match a bunch of different election mechanisms (MPs deciding, members voting, mixtures of the two).
This also applies to activists. As surely it is only going to be the most fanatical supporters who remain highly engaged with the party after a bruising defeat. Anyone less hardcore is surely going to take the opportunity to take a break from politics.
I suspect persuading the monks to copy out writing about why the Catholic church was bad would have been a bit of an non-starter too, back in the day.