We’re spoiled. On Saturday we were gifted the Take Control conference of the Conservative Democratic Organisation. A collection of 200 or so weirdos, led by Nadine Dorries and Andrea Jenkyns, whose lives have been devastated by the absence of Boris Johnson. A keening for a flake of his life. A seance, even. Needless to say, Johnson himself couldn’t be bothered to attend in person. Instead sending down a few signed bottles – not ones he had bought, obviously – to be auctioned in his memory.
On Monday, for three days only, we are now being treated to the National Conservatism conference. The Nat Cons. A meeting of minds for those who think that Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni might have a point. A coming together of ideologies for the ideologically challenged. The sort of audience where Jordan Peterson would get a hero’s welcome. Not that he bothers with venues as small as the Emmanuel Centre in London these days.
So we had to make do with the Tory backbencher Miriam Cates instead as the warmup act. Her message to the faithful was that we needed more babies. Urgently. There were some obvious flaws with this. First, her audience was 75% male. Maybe the women had taken themselves off to side rooms to enthusiastically reproduce. Then there was the question of what kind of babies the UK needed. As Cates was quick to blame immigration for the low birthrate, it’s safe to assume she didn’t think that foreign babies were wanted onboard. Some babies were more equal than others.
Cates went on to moan about the current divorce rate. Married people weren’t taking their vows nearly as seriously enough. Far better for a woman to die of exhaustion having eight children she didn’t want than to make her own choices. It wasn’t clear exactly where the homes for all these large families were to be found. Everything was cultural Marxism. She might want to rethink that.
Perhaps they could all be put in the houses that the immigrants were now living in. And the immigrants could all go somewhere else. She was all heart. It went without saying she didn’t think the nanny state should be involved in helping women to raise this surfeit of babies. “Conservatism is always common sense,” concluded Cates. Having talked complete bollocks for 20 minutes.
More of the same was to follow with Yoram Hazony, a man who passes himself off as an intellectual of the right. He thought that with every passing month you couldn’t but help become more conservative, providing men had been made to do national service. To stop them becoming woke neo-Marxists, apparently. As for women, their greatest contribution to society was to have more babies.
Jacob Rees-Mogg at least was off the hook, having already had six children. Even if he has delegated their upbringing to a nanny. His version of conservatism was that he knew best. Then, he always does. Rees-Mogg has yet to discover an issue on which he is wrong. But his insight for the day was that Saint Thomas Aquinas had been a Brexiter at heart. Which might come as news to Tom.
We raced through a highly selective account of the last 1,000 years of English history, all of which had been a precursor to that glorious day in June 2016 when the UK voted to leave the EU. We weren’t like the French under Napoleon. We had never had any claims to expansionism. Er … the British empire? Moving on. The housing crisis was caused by planners working from home. Bonkers. Everyone seemed a bit lost and Rees-Mogg was upset there wasn’t more applause.
Then came his critique of the present. He didn’t want to criticise the prime minister because that would be disloyal and might lead to discontent in the Tory party. And hence to a Marxist government. Anything left of far-right is Marxist to Jakey. But he hated the government for raising taxes. He hated the retained EU law. He hated the broken promises. Apart from his own. He hated any immigration. He hated that the attempt to gerrymander the vote had failed. And he had been part of the government that had introduced voter ID. Shameless. He’s not even a tribute act any more. The Nat Cons are the only people dumb enough to give him an audience.
After a break for lunch, the conference resumed with a keynote speech from Suella Braverman. There were two brief interruptions for Extinction Rebellion protests, which Braverman declared to be auditions for the shadow cabinet. Never a truer word and all that. This wasn’t so much a speech as a leadership bid for a party in opposition. Braverman is the woman to take the Tories from 270 seats down to 160. But at least they will be the right sort of Conservatives.
Braverman began with the obligatory 10-minute backstory. Her parents had been hard-working immigrants. Exactly the sort of people she is now committed to keeping out of the country. They would have been astonished that their daughter had become attorney general and home secretary. Not nearly as astonished as the rest of us.
Then we came to her beliefs. Such as they were. Braverman is not known for her intellectual hinterland. Those who said Brexit would be an economic catastrophe had been proved wrong. Er … that must be why we have the worst performing economy in the G7. “We Conservatives must never say anything we know to be false,” she said, openly lying through her teeth. It was all just a weird combination of the mad and the bland. Does she really believe that only Conservatives love their country? If so, she’s dimmer than we thought.
She went on to criticise Sunak’s immigration plans. Immigration must be cut, whatever the economic costs. We could train up Brits to do the jobs they had shown no sign of wanting to do. Maybe she would like to take the lead. “It’s not racist to want to control borders,” she said. True. But that wasn’t going to stop some of the Nat Cons. And yes, she was happy to have banned any protests at the coronation.
“Conservatism is not an ideology,” she concluded. It was the universal disposition of humanity. That’s if you believe that humanity’s destiny is to get lost in conspiracy theories and Little England memes. “The facts of life are conservative.” What is it with these oddballs? Everything always seems to come back to sex.
