Oliver Dowden likes to portray himself as a moderate but is seen as much more hardline.
“I’ve always viewed myself as a one-nation liberal Conservative,” he told Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast. But others say this is just a mask and that underneath it the new deputy prime minister is a fervent culture warrior and enthusiastic Thatcherite. In his interview with Robinson, Dowden railed against “the unacceptable face of woke – that sort of really aggressive campaigning on issues and virtue signalling and cancel culture which I just think is kind of alien to this country”.
