By 
Political parties can survive all sorts of problems and still win elections. They can survive bad leaders. They can survive disastrous local election results. They can even survive economic crises. But, in Britain at least, what they cannot survive is becoming a clown show.
This is what happened to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn was a professional protester who had never held ministerial office before being elected party leader. He brought with him a menagerie of oddballs.
Seumas Milne, his chief political adviser, once appeared on official Russian television to claim that Western coverage of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea was “fundamentally misleading” because it framed Russia as “the aggressor in the conflict”.
Another adviser, Andrew Murray, was a former Communist Party activist who once wrote an article for the Morning Star expressing solidarity with “People’s Korea” (better known as North Korea). At Labour Party conferences, the far leftists who had previously protested outside the conference hall were now on the stage delivering speeches.
The same thing is now happening to the Conservative Party, which is sprouting right-wing pressure groups such as the New Conservatives (which supports levelling up) and the Conservative Democratic Organisation (which wants to bring back Boris Johnson).
It is also flirting with radical right-wing groups in continental Europe and America. Two cabinet ministers, Michael Gove and Suella Braverman, spoke at the National Conservative conference, organised by the Washington, DC-based Edmund Burke society and patronised by Donald Trump supporters, traditionalist Catholics and Viktor Orban sympathisers.
All this agitation is putting the spotlight on the party’s most polarising figures. Jacob Rees-Mogg played a leading role not only in the NatCon conference but in the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) conference that took place the previous weekend. He is a media fixture with his own show on right-wing media company GB News and a seemingly open invitation to comment on all things Tory on the BBC.
Andrea Jenkyns, a Brexit stalwart who has nicknamed her son “Brexit”, turned up at the CDO conference wearing a Union Jack fascinator and delighted Boris-worshipping attendees with her rendition of the national anthem.
And so the right is becoming associated with unpopular opinions. At the NatCon conference, Miriam Cates, an MP from the 2019 vintage, called for the British to have more children, blaming the low-birth rate on “cultural Marxism” and excessive education; JD Vance, US senator for Ohio and author of Hillbilly Elegy, earned prolonged applause when he mentioned that he attended a raffle in which the prize was an assault rifle.
In one of her regular TV appearances, Ann Widdecombe, a former Tory MP who jumped ship for Ukip, said that the poor should cut down on cheese sandwiches if they could no longer afford them. These policies (or bat signals) make Corbyn’s look popular by comparison.
The Tory party’s house newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, is fuelling angst on the right with a drumbeat of wacky headlines. “Eurovision proves it. We had to leave the EU,” says Tim Stanley. “Victory is within Remainers’ grasp. If they win, it will impoverish us all,” says Sherelle Jacobs, almost seven years after Britain decided to leave the EU. Allister Heath, who once called Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget “a moment in history that will radically transform Britain”, now says the country is being “impoverished by a Remainer establishment”.
Why is the British right going the way of Corbyn’s left? Frustration has lots to do with it. The Tories have been in power either on their own or as the dominant partner in a coalition since 2010. Yet public spending is 35% of GDP and taxation is at its highest point in post-war history.
Brexit was supposed to galvanise the economy and control immigration. Yet the evidence suggests that leaving the EU has hamstrung the economy and forthcoming figures on immigration are likely to show it now exceeds 700,000 a year. Only 9% of voters think that Brexit was “more of a success than a failure”, according to the latest YouGov poll.
This not only drives Conservatives pig-wrestling mad — hence all those hyperventilating headlines — but it has them reaching for the two most convenient explanations: the machinations of the elite and the enemy within. Tories work themselves into a fury about the “blob” — the name they like to give the civil service and the wider establishment — and its skill in frustrating reform.
They are more circumspect about blaming traitors within the party, at least in public. But there are others who will say it for them: Nigel Farage told Newsnight that Brexit failed because the Tory government had not maximised the potential benefits it offered. “What Brexit has proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were” — this though both Johnson and Rishi Sunak were committed Brexiteers.
The level of craziness is being turned up several notches by two groups of Tories: tomorrow’s would-be leaders and yesterday’s discards. Lots of Tory MPs have already concluded that the next election is already lost, and that the real question now is who will replace Sunak. The battle for the right-lane between Braverman, the fire-breathing home secretary, and Kemi Badenoch, the woke-baiting business secretary, is particularly vicious at the moment, with their respective supporters dripping poison to the press.
As for the discards, Liz Truss recently travelled to Taiwan to lecture the Chinese though her premiership was a farce, and Johnson is making millions while flirting with a comeback. Gone are the days when disgraced politicos such as John Profumo made amends by working in soup kitchens.
The most dangerous problem of all is arguably that the Conservative party is merging with the right-wing entertainment industry, just as it has done in the US. Some conservatives have taken to saying outrageous things, whether they believe them or not, to annoy their opponents (“own the libs” in US parlance).
NatCon gave a platform to the disgraced historian David Starkey, who told the conference that “white culture is under threat from Black Lives Matter and proponents of critical race theory”. Calvin Robinson, a presenter on GB News, called Sunak a “heathen” for giving a Bible reading during the coronation as a practising Hindu. This is all done with a view to making headlines and attracting clicks, just as professional clowns wear red noses and oversized shoes to lure people into the big top.
The obvious great exception to my “you can’t win an election by becoming a clown show” is Trump, who did exactly that in 2016. But Trump lost the popular vote by 2-million votes against a lacklustre Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, before going on to lose his re-election bid. He is now trailing Joe Biden by seven points in head to heads.
Moreover, Britain is not America. The next election will be won by persuading the centre rather than by supercharging activists. Middle Britain has a limited tolerance for grandstanding and gesture politics. Most people want the potholes fixed and the NHS waiting lists reduced.
Keir Starmer has done a remarkable job of restoring discipline to his party, dismantling the big top and hiding away the clowns. The eminently sensible Sunak needs to do the same if the Tories are to stand any chance in the next election.
Bloomberg. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
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