Conservatives would usually be the first to complain when police officers are diverted from their duties tackling crime and maintaining order to participate in a publicity stunt. Yet it was Rishi Sunak who last week summoned police chiefs to Downing Street for no better reason than to provide him with an audience of blue uniforms to hear his unevidenced claim that there is a “growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule” in Britain. A consensus among whom? The hosts of GB News? The most rabidly rightwing tabloid ranters? The leadership of the Reform party?
The police chiefs themselves have been strikingly reluctant to endorse Mr Sunak’s contention that Britain is descending into “mob rule”. This sounds like the kind of thing a rent-a-gob reactionary backbencher might spit out in the hope of being quoted by the Daily Mail. You don’t expect to hear that kind of nonsense coming out of the mouth of the prime minister. Not least because it wouldn’t normally be considered either clever or responsible politics for the leader of the country to suggest that it was plunging into violent anarchy on his watch. Unless, that is, the leader was aiming to do a Donald Trump by seeking to gain advantage through fomenting fear, increasing division and toxifying the atmosphere to justify trampling on democratic norms.
This is not to deny that there are genuine issues about the behaviour of some protesters on some marches. There are also legitimate concerns about the extent to which demonstrators should disrupt the lives of other citizens and about the locations chosen. Targeting the homes of MPs and their families is harassment and intimidation. There’s a need for a reasoned debate about the conduct and management of demonstrations. But that was not what the Tory leader was seeking to stimulate with those headline-hunting remarks. He was conflating democratic protest with “mob rule” in a way that disdained and undermined Britain’s proud traditions of free assembly and free expression. This wild outburst did him no credit.
Number 10 itself seems to have come to the same conclusion after a couple of days to reflect on it. So Mr Sunak had another go at the subject 48 hours later. When the prime ministerial lectern was wheeled out on to Downing Street for a rare Friday evening statement, the phrase “mob rule” had been expunged from his vocabulary. At his second attempt, he was more serious and more befitting of the office he holds. He issued even-handed denunciations of both “Islamist extremists” and “the far right”, and correctly argued that they “feed off and embolden each other”. He was not wrong to suggest that there are malign forces seeking to take advantage of the intense feelings aroused by the Israel-Hamas war. He acknowledged and condemned the escalation of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred. He was obviously right to say that no one should have to live under threats of violence.
I thought it a mistake to give a shout out to George Galloway. That grisly old demagogue will be flattered to hear the prime minister call his victory in the Rochdale byelection “beyond alarming”. Mr Sunak hit a more uplifting note, and one that had nothing Trumpian about it, when he celebrated Britain as “the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy”.
This was one of his better crafted speeches, even if the cynic in me wondered whether a deeply unpopular prime minister was trying to gain public favour by presentinging himself as the steady leader of the nation manning the thin line between stability and chaos. There is also a big underlying issue: the jarring discordance between Mr Sunak’s advocations of unity and mutual respect with the conduct of elements of his own party. Let’s give him enough credit to believe that he wants to lower the temperature and bring people together. There are very clearly Tories striving to do the opposite.
The enemies of our multi-ethnic, multi-faith society are not only those seeking to stir up conflict on the streets. They are also to be found sowing division in TV studios and spewing poison in newspaper articles.
Exhibit one: Suella Braverman, the former home secretary with naked ambitions to become the Tory party’s next leader. She plumbed a despicable new low when she wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now. They have bullied the Labour party, they have bullied our institutions, and now they have bullied our country into submission.” This vile tripe cannot be simply shrugged aside as routine political exaggeration for effect. It needs saying often and firmly that she is peddling utter fabrications. Labour didn’t have a candidate in Rochdale for a seat it previously held because he was sacked for retailing ghastly conspiracy theories incompatible with the Labour leader’s zero-tolerance position on antisemitism. So much for “Islamists” being “in charge now”. Ms Braverman either knows what she wrote is a falsehood or she really believes in the hate-inciting tropes that she is so dangerously eager to propagate.
Exhibit two: Liz Truss travelled to the United States recently to pay homage to Trumpism at a conference of Maga-fans in Maryland. She blamed her downfall on the machinations of “the deep state” and urged Nigel Farage to join the Conservative party. Less hilariously, she sat silently beside Steve Bannon as Trump’s former henchman lavished the label “hero” on Tommy Robinson, the founder of the far-right English Defence League. You may say that no one should pay heed to the antics of the ridiculous Ms Truss, a woman whose shelf-life at Downing Street was beaten by a supermarket lettuce. Yet she was elected as their leader by the Conservative party and she was prime minister of this country not all that long ago. What she says and whose company she seeks shouldn’t be entirely dismissed. It sends signals about the state of the Tory party and the behaviours that it is prepared to indulge.
Exhibit three: the reliably repugnant Lee Anderson’s latest outrage when he made the grotesque claim that “Islamists” have “got control of London” and its mayor. “He’s given our capital city away to his mates.” Sadiq Khan rightly responded by saying that this was “pouring fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred”. After some havering by Downing Street, Mr Anderson has been suspended from the Tory parliamentary party. While semi-condemning him as “wrong”, the prime minister and other members of the cabinet have been resistant to saying why he is wrong because they are pitifully reluctant to agree that he is Islamophobic for fright of reaction within their party. The MP for Ashfield has received vocal backing from some Conservative MPs and activists, a development that warns us that his malignant views have a currency in the Tory party that goes well beyond himself.
Exhibit four: Paul Scully, a former minister for London, who asserted that parts of the capital and of Birmingham with large Muslim populations are “no-go areas”. Keeping the flag flying for civilised Conservatism, Andy Street, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, slapped down this “nonsense” and Mr Scully then tried to walk back some of what he had said. He had been regarded as a Tory moderate. That makes his outburst a disturbing sign of how far some toxins are spreading through the Conservative body politic.
The prime minister and his friends will protest that none of the above speak for him or reflect his own views. They don’t. What is a fair charge against the Tory leader is that he has been flabby about policing extremism within his own ranks and this feebleness is sourced in a fear that they represent constituencies within his party that could make trouble for him. The Tory party’s hard right is the mob he feels most menaced by. He has not repudiated Ms Truss’s love-ins with the Trumpites. He sacked Ms Braverman as home secretary for an incendiary provocation about “hate marches” last November, but she was only in that profile-enhancing post in the first place because Mr Sunak struck a Faustian bargain with her when he thought he needed hard-right support to secure the premiership. He handed a louder mic to Lee Anderson by promoting him to deputy chair of the Tory party, a role he exploited to platform his noxious prejudices, until he quit over Rwanda.
Only extremists will disagree with the prime minister when he says we should not allow them to hijack our politics. More’s the pity that he has too often behaved like a hostage of the hate-mongers within his own party.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
