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.
As Boris Johnson’s government descended into the maelstrom of scandal that would eventually lead to his resignation, its war on the “woke elite” became ever more amorphous and unwieldy: a term so porous that — while punchy at first — eventually took in universities, schools, government bodies, corporations, social science faculties and the hard sciences, according to a speech former party chairman Oliver Dowden made in February.
Yesterday it was the turn of Liz Truss to describe her enemies, which turned out to be: Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the unions, “vested interests dressed up as think-tanks”, “talking heads”, Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion, Twitter users, podcasters, and those who have taken taxis “from north London townhouses to BBC studios”. In her so-called “anti growth coalition”, Truss created a monster too big to believe in. The symptoms are all there, I’m afraid, and the prognosis is bleak. What her government has bashed together is an enormous, unwieldy bogeyman.
Healthy parties, you see, do it differently. They talk of enemies too, but this talk tends to be based on reality. At Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Sir Keir Starmer defined his enemies rather obviously: the current policies of the Conservative Party and their effects. This is a party in good nick. It does not need to conjure up extra enemies to keep it going. But the last stage of the dying party is like the final quarter of a horror film: the enemy is in every shadow and every cupboard, and even among those you thought were your friends.
The decaying party creates the bogeyman because he has his uses. If you want to unite people you give them an enemy. It often works very well. “Woke” was an incredibly effective monster as it drew a link between large and sinister things such as threats to free speech to much more benign-seeming things like the Met Office asking people to drink water on the hottest day of the year. There was an ogre around every corner. It could also be used to scare any potential dissidents within into toeing the party line — it was woke, too, to deviate from a particular brand of social conservatism. Fear of being thought woke was good at stifling criticism both from within and outside the party. Once you were woke, you did not come back.
But in a crisis any enemy will do. When domestic politics get tough Johnson and Truss have taken care to emphasise, again and again, the ultimate threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. If things continue to worsen for Truss at home then expect the war in Ukraine to take on an increasingly large portion of her focus.
Other enemies will appear too. Chatter at this week’s Conservative Party conference in Birmingham was that some of the party’s membership base is hoping for a shadowy threat to drum up voters come the next election — that of small boats carrying migrants crossing the Channel. The key is that the Tories are prepared to go further on the issue, MPs say, than Labour would.
But bogeymen are liable to get out of control. Truss’s anti-growth coalition is so big that it has already started to absorb some of the Conservatives’ core voters. Her proposed planning reforms, for example, are of the kind most staunchly resisted by older voters and homeowners that can usually be relied upon to vote Tory. Plenty of Tory pundits, not to mention MPs, appear on the BBC and on podcasts. And use Twitter.
That is the problem, but behind it looms a bigger one. The risk for the Tory party is that their enemies will eventually grow more numerous than their friends. Truss would do well to listen to the strategists and choose her enemies wisely.
