The first rule of politics is: define your enemies. This needs to be done with care. A sure sign of a party in trouble is that it starts to create sinister bogeymen. When leaders begin to talk darkly of shadowy coalitions of enemies — always poorly defined and out to get you — you know things aren’t going well.
Bogeymen haunted the last days of Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader — a Halloween coalition of the mainstream media, members of his own party, and various “traitors” of the Left. In the US, the bogeymen around Donald Trump — who helped propel him into the Oval Office — grew ever larger and more fantastical as he neared the end of his time in the White House, until they encompassed almost the entire political establishment.
