It’s been one of those weeks when politics in the United States and the United Kingdom dished up piping hot serves of bonkers.
Far-right forces in the Republican party blasted the speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, out of his chair, apparently because he attempted to avert a government shutdown. Dumping the speaker was a first in the country’s political history. But before anyone cries a river for McCarthy, remember he was one of more than 100 Republicans prepared to corrode faith in the country’s democratic processes institutions and institutions by voting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. I read one of the frontrunners for the speakership is the ultra-conservative Republican majority leader, Steve Scalise – once reported to have called himself “David Duke without the baggage”. What times.
Britain’s contribution wasn’t high octane. It was strange. The House of Commons leader, Penny Mordaunt, delivered a syntax-challenged speech to the Tory conference. The words were intended to be a rousing homage to Margaret Thatcher. Instead, the Mordaunt monologue achieved virality for being a curio, viewed and shared in ever expanding circles of incredulity.
Mordaunt urged her Tory colleagues to “stand up and fight”. This invocation was repeated not once, or twice, but 12 times. Standing up and fighting was a contagion. She said: “When you stand up and fight, the person beside you stands up and fights.” When the Tory party “stands up and fights then the nation stands up and fights”. When Britain “stands up and fights then other nations stand up and fight”.
This melee was so comprehensive – flashmobs of people abandoning tea and toast, jumping upright and punching on – the cause was almost obscured. For the record, the cause was freedom. Mordaunt was down with socialism, whether it be the wine bar variety, or the “iron” version, which was a bit confusing, given Thatcher was actually the Iron Lady. Comedic, yes, but also alarming, particularly when the final stand up and fight, Mordaunt’s closing call to action, was more a shout than a suggestion.
Our own Peter Dutton lives half a world away from Mordaunt, and an ocean stands between him and the barking, post-truth Trump complex.
But anger and aggression in rightwing politics is now a multinational enterprise. Australia’s Liberal leader took Mordaunt’s cue. Over the past few days, Dutton has swung with gusto in every direction, while serving up most of the buzz words in red hat bingo.
Boosh fans would say the Liberal leader went full Tony Harrison. During his regular Thursday morning outing on 2GB – conversations where Peter agrees with Ray (Hadley) and Ray agrees with Peter (Dutton) – Australia’s alternative prime minister characterised the non-partisan humanist values of inclusiveness and tolerance as “the woke agenda they” (they being Albanese and Labor) “are pushing out”.
During another heartwarming public outing, Dutton felt Albanese had been “captured by elites, by people particularly on the east coast”. (For clarity, Dutton was on the west coast when he shared this theory. For context, Dutton wants to win back seats in WA and push Labor into minority government or worse after the next election, so best quarantine west coast elites from any opportunistic sledging.)
Albanese (according to Dutton) was busy sucking up to CEOs and chairs of publicly listed companies “who crave popularity and who want to tell the public what they think they want to hear so that they can be popular on social media”. The prime minister was “hanging out with Alan Joyce, red carpet events and, you know, they’re besties having dinner together, all the rest of it”. The Liberal leader also harboured a more specific feeling that the prime minister had failed to amend the wording of a proposed amendment to the constitution to enshrine the voice to parliament “because Alan Joyce and others were telling him not to”.
I don’t know Alan Joyce, so I have no idea if the former Qantas chief wonders how he went to bed one night as a besieged Irish-Australian airline executive and woke up as George Soros in a graphic novel penned by Peter Dutton. I would if I were him. Given Joyce appeared to be fully extended trashing the Qantas brand, he might also be curious about how he managed to squeeze in supplying cheeky legal advice about the constitution while downing magnums of Dom Perignon and shovelling in canapes at secret soirees of the wokerati.
Mysteries really do abound. But here we all are, irked and mildly concussed on planet Big Angry Feelings.
In Trumpian tradition, Dutton also chose his own facts this week. He declared at one point Labor had let 105,000 asylum seekers into the country. Experts pointed out 94,260 of the 105,000 had turned up on the Coalition’s watch.
He also didn’t seem to mind contradicting himself in the space of a few minutes. Dutton thought Albanese was obsessed by the voice. He also thought the prime minister was obsessed with drumming up distractions to the voice.
Dutton felt Albanese had “long forgotten about the workers” – making the Liberal party “the party of the Australian worker today”. Odd, then, that the party of the workers is dead set against new legislation providing equal pay for labour hire workers and creating minimum conditions for gig economy workers. The self-declared worker’s champion rationalised this obvious inconsistency by observing these reforms (benefiting workers introduced, paradoxically, by a prime minister who had forgotten the workers) would be “another wet blanket over small business … at a time we can’t afford it”.
Dutton was like an exploding fire hydrant, theories and feelings pouring from him. Stand up and fight. Repeat 12 times.
I’ve said before Dutton evidently hopes he can make voters angry enough with Albanese to forget they really don’t like him. It’s a strategy we’ve seen Australia’s Trump prototype Tony Abbott deploy with success. But there’s not much evidence yet that Tony 2.0 is bearing fruit. The observations I’m about to share are a very long way from definitive, but I had a peek this week at take-outs from the focus group we run alongside the Guardian Essential poll. It was interesting.
One Coalition voter from New South Wales – a man under the age of 35 – described the opposition leader as a “thoroughly unlikeable individual”. Dutton’s model of leadership was “dull”, “reactionary” and “uninspiring”. An older Coalition voter from Queensland felt Dutton was lacking in charisma, and the Liberal party would be better placed with “a real leader like Jacinta Price”. A fellow traveller of the same age – an older woman from NSW – thought Dutton was “arrogant”, “outspoken” and “rude”.
This blue-bleeding trio of Dutton sceptics described Albanese as “stable” and “likable” in one case, “forgettable” and “average” in another. The woman who preferred Price wasn’t happy Albanese was “wasting taxpayer money on the voice” and “propping up Ukraine”. A younger man without a partisan leaning who intends to vote no against the voice approved of Albanese because he acted as a “more restrained Labor party”. This same voter felt Dutton was “too damaged from his past portfolios”. He found the Liberal leader “cold, serious and unlikeable”.
Dutton has used the polarisation he has fomented around the voice referendum as an accelerant, as fuel, to normalise and validate his natural political appetite for negativity. He will attempt to sustain that environment afterwards. Not everyone thinks that’s the right strategy.
It is worth listening to my podcast conversation with the Liberal MP Julian Leeser as you go about your business over the weekend. Leeser is far too measured and polite to give his leader a blood nose. But he’s very clear that importing red hat politics is a mistake for the Liberal party and terrible for the country.
Leeser says politics should be an honourable vocation, focused on the art of persuasion. He says the Liberal party must resist coddling its shrinking base and appeal to middle Australia, because becoming a party of the fringe is a recipe for one thing.
Electoral oblivion.
