‘No Tories!’

In what follows, I intend to summarise, as briefly as possible, the argument of Peter Oborne’s new book, ‘The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism’.

The first thing to say is that Oborne is a well-established, conservative political journalist. Reading his book was interesting to me because, guilty as I am of choosing to read attacks on the establishment by writers outside the establishment, it was interesting to see a committed conservative, and proud Leave voter, coming out with such a blistering polemic against Our Great and Glorious Leader. My tribal intuitions tell me that this means anything Oborne has to say is even more credible than something coming from, say, Owen Jones: since he’s a member of the establishment, and hence has a vested interest in its effective continuation, challenges he poses to it are more readily interpretable as incitements toward genuine change.

Oborne’s argument itself is a decidedly journalistic one: his strategy is to draw together an impressive range of examples in support of his case, then to gesture at the theories supported by these examples, rather than to use his examples carefully to build and articulate a rigorous case. Instead, his actual thesis is left to the reader to draw out.

Boris Johnson, like Donald Trump (who is referenced in the book’s title more as a comparison-point than a subject), is a member of a new political class, operating on principles decidedly not consistent with those used by Brown, Cameron or May, but which, according to Oborne, existed in proto-form in Tony Blair. The defining characteristic of this new political class, argues Oborne, is that they have succeeded in privatising truth: because these politicians come from the world of media, they are able to manipulate the operations of that media, such that it ceases to operate as an impartial and critical ‘fourth estate’ holding ministers to account in the eyes of the public, and begins to function as an ideological, propaganda-producing mouthpiece for the state. Oborne traces this free-and-easy relationship to the truth back to its suspected origins in the left: his basic argument is that left-wing thinkers have always found it easier to be economical with the truth, appealing to facts about the goodness of human nature, for example, to encourage otherwise selfish people to act in more other-concerning ways. I am deeply suspicious of the idea that the left are responsible for truth manipulation, but we’ll need to do a deeper dive on this bit of the book to work that out.

Oborne dedicates a large portion of the book to this history of truth-relativism, citing the Profumo scandal as a paradigmatic display of the traditional relationship between political establishment and character. John Profumo was instrumental in ousting Chamberlain for Churchill in 1939 (and, to the extent that we hold Churchill to be the reason we won the war, instrumental in that victory as well) and enjoyed a high-profile political career until it came to light that he was having an affair with a woman who was also seeing a Soviet spy. Despite his very public fall from grace, he was later invited to a royal parliamentary dinner by Margaret Thatcher, at which he sat at the queen’s right hand. This digression, I believe, is supposed to capture Oborne’s almost jingoistic attitude to the ideal political character: so long as he can conduct himself with impeccable integrity in the public sphere, what he does privately is entirely up to him. Oborne also makes a great point of showing us that the ministerial code asks for the resignation of any ministers who knowingly mislead parliament. This allows Oborne to move to his truly conservative argument: the victorian political system set up by Trevelyan and Northcote was a beautiful and effective system which has become corrupted by exploiting individuals. The elegance of the victorian system, argues Oborne, is that it neatly divided public from private interests, ring fencing elements of industry and infrastructure in order to ensure that MPs would have no personal interests in the matters over which they presided. Hence, Oborne views the problem as the corruption of a system by exploiting individuals, rather than the degrading of a system’s fit-for-purpose over time.

This leads us to Oborne’s most philosophically interesting claim. He says that what is significant about the Johnson-Trump era, as a result of the political privatisation of truth committed at their hands (I personally wonder whether the claim of ‘privatisation of truth’ is overblown, but we’ll have to think about that another time as well), is that the British conservative party has ceased to function on conservative principles, for the precise reason that people like Johnson, Cummings, and the people they surround themselves with are actively trying to destroy the institutions currently comprising the UK establishment. Whilst the dismantling of the NHS might (?) make sense from a conservative viewpoint, the dismantling of the civil service, regulatory authorities and national infrastructure do not, simply because they violate the principle of conservatism: the ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’ mentality which sees us clinging to victorian moral codes, abrahamic books and babylonian gender concepts ‘just in case they get something right about how to live’. This may seem obvious to other people, but this realisation came as a bolt from the blue for me: the conservatives are not conservative. Part of the reason the ideological position of the left has fallen apart is because the ideological position of the right has also collapsed; individualism and identity politics seem to be replacing the old struggles, everyone wants change but different change, and the old group identities are disintegrating. So what do we do?

Obviously, I haven’t got a fucking clue. But Oborne uses a nice analogy to explain wagwan with the conservative party. The party used to have a lot more members - like A LOT more. In 1950, there were 28 conservative party members for every 1 in 2018. Not a big deal, right - one less tory? Wrong. Because with all those memberships went a whole load of money, and as we all know, without money, you can’t do shit. So what happened? Oborne says that the conservative party basically got reverse-takeovered. A reverse takeover in business happens when a national company (i.e. the railways) is transferred to public ownership. Having been a state company, this business bears the appearance of credibility and reliability. Hence, private investors buy up shares in the company, turning it into a literal shell: a business with the appearance of doing what it did before, but actually doing exactly what its new investors want. The reason investors do this is because it is much easier than going through the legal rigmarole of enfranchising a new company. And so, Oborne argues, that is exactly what has happened to our conservative party: gutted of its original membership, it has allowed that void to be filled by small men with big money, willing to turn up at a conservative dinner to lobby and bribe equally small MPs.

Oborne’s solution to the whole thing is to basically try and reintroduce accountability: every time a minister lies, write to your MP, and demand an apology; ask the Houses of Lords and Commons to exercise their authority more; and reawaken the ‘toothless’ regulator that is the Committee of Standards in Public Life.

I feel like none of these will do enough. But I do have two things to say. One is this: political disenfranchisement, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall, is creating a vacuum which allows the powerful to make a mockery of our democracy. This has literally been their stated goal since working men were enfranchised: the ruling powers tried to work out how to give us the vote without making us want to use it, and a couple of centuries later we have Russell Brand and the Murdoch Empire. I’m not saying go and vote, but I’m saying join your political party (as I will after writing this lol) or set one up if you don’t like it: if none of us are willing to put our money where our mouths are, to crowdfund an effective democracy, then we literally have no one to blame but ourselves when rich men with private interests decide to use our system for themselves.

The second thing I want to say is this: I have seen such an upsurge in ‘kill tories’ rhetoric on facebook and ‘no tories’ rhetoric on hinge. The fact that I feel compelled to point out that I am not a tory here may just speak to my own paranoia, but it may equally well speak to the polarised political world we inhabit. Polarisation, once again, is one of the tools used by the powerful to keep us apart: if I think a tory is a racist and a cunt, and if he thinks that I am a snowflake, then we’re never going to come together, realise our common interests, and end this blatant and corrupt economic subjugation. The points raised by Oborne demonstrate that it is not ordinary tories who are responsible for the corruption of their party; it is disenfranchised, powerless masses, on both sides of the fence, failing to take hold of their power because they are kept in a position of ignorance. So that’s all I want to say really: don’t hate tories, put your money where your mouth is, get involved. The current political climate creates a space for left-wing conservatism: for a movement which recognises the value of at least some of our institutions (looking at you NHS), and tries to figure out how to protect the rights that they confer from the (necessarily, naturally) exploitative desires of other individuals. Right and left, let us defend together.