After Lee Anderson was suspended as a Tory MP for claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, the coverage that followed was full of questions. Had the party acted quickly enough? Would the apology he refused to give really have been adequate? Were Anderson’s comments Islamophobic? Would senior Conservatives unambiguously condemn them?
The answers were unsatisfying. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself thinking of Jodie Foster. When presented with an apparently uncrackable mystery in the latest season of True Detective, Foster, as detective Liz Danvers, scolds her colleagues for “not asking the right questions”. The mystery of Anderson’s baseless attack on Khan, made with no apparent sense of political jeopardy, will not be solved by asking other Tories whether they will now say that it was beyond the pale. The right question is: why on earth would Anderson have thought there was anything wrong with what he said?
Consider the ecosystem in which Anderson has flourished since his rise to prominence as an apparent sayer of the unsayable within the Conservative party. When he accuses food bank users of not being able to cook or budget properly, says asylum seekers who crossed the Channel should “fuck off back to France”, and calls some Travellers “thieves” who would steal your lawnmower, his colleagues smile benevolently, and describe his language as “salty” or call him a “fantastic asset”. He is treated as a folk hero in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph, all of which covered his comments rather more grudgingly than they did the Azhar Ali affair in Rochdale. And when he says any of these things on GB News, now the house broadcaster of the hard right, he doesn’t get in trouble: he gets his own show – and, for eight hours’ work a week, £100,000 a year.
The man giving Anderson that paycheck is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund founder who owns both GB News and the political commentary site UnHerd, and now hopes to buy the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. Last week, an investigation by Hope Not Hate and The News Agents podcast uncovered Marshall’s activity on X, formerly Twitter, since he recently took his account private and removed his name from it. Marshall has been liking and retweeting posts describing Muslim immigration as a stage of “Islamic conquest”, predicting civil war in Europe, and calling for the mass expulsion of migrants. (A representative for Marshall said the posts were a “small and unrepresentative sample of over 5,000 posts” and did not reflect his views.)
Another post that he liked appeared to suggest that Khan was working to create a “Muslim ghetto” and a “Muslim society”. That might help us understand why the presenter to whom Anderson made his comments about Khan, Martin Daubney, felt free to finish the segment not with a challenge, but with an exaltation: “You’ve had your Weetabix! Superb stuff!” On Friday, Daubney said that the UK has “fallen to Islamists within”.
Even inside the Conservative party, many of Anderson’s colleagues don’t just indulge him: they go much of the way with him. Suella Braverman wrote, in a column for the Daily Telegraph, that “the Islamists … are in charge now”. Robert Jenrick told parliament: “We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists.” In an interview to promote her new book with US far-right propagandist Steve Bannon, Liz Truss agreed that George Galloway is running in the Rochdale byelection on a “radical jihadist” ticket, a claim of militant intention that goes well beyond even Galloway’s grubby campaign. And an unnamed Tory source, who initially defended Anderson in news reports, said that his comments simply reflected the fact that Khan had “failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently”.
The supposed trigger for all this is the farce last week in the House of Commons, when parliamentary procedure around a vote on a Gaza ceasefire was changed because the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, said he feared for MPs’ safety. The intimidation some have faced is a grim and unjustifiable sign of the times, all the more alarming when set alongside vandalism at one MP’s office after she abstained on a ceasefire vote last year, the threats against a pro-Israel MP that have led him to stand down, and, in the not-so-distant past, the murders of David Amess and Jo Cox by extremists.
Are the threats referenced by Hoyle the real reason for this sharp rhetorical turn, and do they indicate that Islamists now rule the roost, whether by capturing the mayor of London or otherwise? In both cases, the answer is no. Braverman was calling those on the marches “Islamists” as long ago as November, echoed by Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, Douglas Murray in the Sun, Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, and plenty of others. The reality of the marches, according to anyone who reported on them in good faith, is that while there are certainly troubling incidents of antisemitism and disorder, the very significant majority of those attending go for the reason they say they do: to demand an end to Israel’s attack on Gaza and to argue for Palestinians’ right to self-determination and a democratic state of their own. If that’s enough to warrant the label of Islamist, someone had better keep an eye on Emmanuel Macron.
In fact, Islamism is an ideology that calls for governments to be organised according to Islamic law; Islamist militants are those who seek to achieve that outcome by violent ends. This truth is now barely relevant to the way the term is deployed in British politics, where it instead appears to have slipped into a hazy epithet for anyone advocating for the right of Muslim civilians not to be killed by bombs. On the front pages and in GB News chyrons, the term’s value is cruder still: it resonates because it has the word “Islam” in it.
This distorted meaning is bound to incorporate many British Muslims; the obvious next step is to conclude that Muslims are likely to be extremists – very like the way “Zionist” has become, in some hands, a racist code for “Jew”. Muslims, Islamists or otherwise, certainly aren’t secretly in charge now, and the suggestion that they are is as baldly offensive as the same would be about a Zionist conspiracy. If they really had so much power, you might think they could have persuaded Rishi Sunak to say, in his radio round on Monday morning, or the statement he issued over the weekend, that Anderson’s comments were not just “wrong” but Islamophobic.
Anderson, for his part, seems pretty relaxed about his suspension from the Conservative party; Braverman and Truss both appear to be having a much better time outside government than they ever did when they had to mind their language. The incentives operating on all three – presenting gig, leadership bid, pseudo-rehabilitation/book sales – are all more obviously appealing than a quiet life on the backbenches. Meanwhile, the Telegraph’s front page coverage of the story on Monday dwelled on a “red wall backlash”, and quoted a Tory MP as saying that Anderson “speaks for the silent majority in this country”. If such MPs really think so, the Conservative party’s Islamophobia problem is probably here to stay.
To understand why, we ought to consider the media ringmasters as well as the political clowns. When Marshall’s Twitter activity came to light, some asked whether it might render him an unsuitable owner for an even larger swath of the British media, and it would be nice to think so. But that’s the wrong question. The right one is whether his ownership would change anything at all.
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter and writes a monthly column on media, culture and technology
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