Nigel Farage has an echo. A rather tinny one, admittedly, but it’s uncanny all the same. Whatever he says, somewhere from the cavernous depths of Robert Jenrick’s ambition those words come floating back.
Farage spends his summer campaigning for Donald Trump to be president? Back in August, Jenrick said he too would vote for the man whose own former chief of staff calls him a fascist. Farage endlessly portrays migrants as violent and dangerous, threatening to leave the ECHR because apparently Britain is being “walked all over by foreign criminals”? Jenrick too complains to the Daily Telegraph of what he calls “an institutional cover-up about the costs of mass migration” (by which he means ministers won’t keep a public record of crimes committed and benefits claimed specifically by migrants) while saying that leaving the ECHR would help “remove dangerous foreign criminals like rapists, murderers and paedophiles”.
And when Farage suggested darkly that the truth was being kept from the public over the Southport attacks, after the charging of the defendant with a terrorism offence, you’ll never guess which Tory leadership contender felt there were “serious questions” to be asked of the prime minister. Actually, trick question: that was Jenrick’s rival for the job, Kemi Badenoch, leaping briefly on the Reform party’s bandwagon. But characteristically, Jenrick went much further than she did in implying some kind of deep-state skulduggery, adding piously that he feared any suggestion of a cover-up would damage public trust while evidently not fearing it quite enough to actually stop himself. The state, he told Good Morning Britain viewers over their breakfast, should not be lying to its citizens.
We’ve become so used lately to such casual feeding of the crocodiles that to be shocked by it seems positively old-fashioned. What did you expect from the Tory party of the last few years?
Yet it is and should be jolting to see a former Home Office minister and trained lawyer apparently wilfully misunderstanding how police investigations work or why there are strict legal constraints on what can be said about live cases for fear of prejudicing a jury. A perfect example of how easily the once unthinkable becomes mainstream, just as it started to do more than a decade ago across the Atlantic; how quickly the floor disappears from under your feet until full-fat conspiracism with your cereal barely seems worth complaining about.
Until very recently, they didn’t come much more mainstream than Jenrick. A remain-voting Cameron stalwart in the days when that was fashionable, he morphed seamlessly into a Boris Johnson supporter when required and subsequently into what Suella Braverman scornfully calls a “centrist Rishi supporter”, before regenerating as a Farage tribute act just in time to seek election by the most rightwing Tory membership in living memory.
The moderate argument still made in some quarters for choosing Jenrick over the more obviously rightwing Badenoch is that he doesn’t mean all that stuff really, and would tone it down if he got the job. (You may remember hearing something similar about Boris Johnson’s inner liberal supposedly bursting out, back in the days before the Rwanda plan.) But in real life it doesn’t work like that, when what’s left of the grassroots party remains obsessed with winning back the votes it lost to Reform UK. The choice currently facing Tory members this weekend is therefore a brisk smack in the teeth from Badenoch, or Faragism but without the charisma under Jenrick. No wonder turnout in this election is rumoured, as Badenoch let slip this week, to have been on the low side.
It’s tempting to think that it doesn’t really matter who gets the thankless job of leading a shrunken and largely irrelevant opposition, given that neither candidate yet has an accurate explanation of why they lost nor a compelling argument for what they’d have done instead of this week’s budget. British political junkies are still far too consumed by the epic battle between Harris and Trump to care about this comparatively piddling local contest, while for Labour the prospect of an opposition going full Farage sounds in some ways quite appealing: better the Tories exhaust themselves on the fringes of politics than fight them for the more electorally valuable centre ground.
But it would be a mistake to think that this contest in which the vast majority of us don’t get a vote doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, in what the small print of the budget makes clear will be a tough and unforgiving slog of a parliament, this government will stumble enough for an opposition to get a hearing. And as this summer’s violence showed, tinpot Trumps amplified by the seething hot mess that social media has become don’t have to win elections in order to make everyday life frightening for the marginalised groups they target.
Poison has seeped into the bloodstream of politics across the US and Europe over the last decade wherever it could find a way. In some electoral systems, that’s via small populist parties that can become kingmakers – but in countries like Britain and the US, its only real option is to become a squawking cuckoo in some reassuringly mainstream party nest. Though Britain is still thankfully a million miles from the kind of existential crisis now gripping the US, this otherwise wholly forgettable contest has nonetheless been a small reminder of how social norms wear away in a democracy: first very gradually, in ways that barely seem worth being shocked about, and then suddenly so fast it takes your breath away.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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