A visit to Conservative party conference is like being transported to the recent past of another country. When the US Republicans were routed in 2008, the seeds of what they would become – a party defined by conspiratorial far-right populism – were being planted. The newly elected Barack Obama intended to establish a communist dictatorship with a Gestapo-like security force, claimed one Republican congressman. Fox News became a key engine of a new conspiracism, not least the notorious “birther” lie, falsely alleging the president was not a native-born American. The Republican establishment leaned into this fanaticism: take the salutary example of Liz Cheney, daughter of George W Bush’s vice-president, who defended the birther lie at the time. She helped feed a conspiratorial far right that found itself a demagogic figurehead in Donald Trump, whom she would later go on to denounce.
There was no shortage of Tory Liz Cheneys at conference. Take the transport secretary, Mark Harper, who took to the stage to endorse a conspiracy theory that, until now, has been the preserve of far-right internet trolls. The idea behind 15-minute cities could hardly be more innocuous: we should all be a 15-minute walk or bike ride away from everyday services we depend on, like GP surgeries, shops and banks. But Harper told the assembled faithful that local councils will dictate “how often you go to the shops”, “ration who uses the roads”, and then enforce it with CCTV surveillance. This is a lie, and Harper knows it. When his ministerial colleague, Andrew Bowie, subsequently defended this conspiratorial nonsense, arguing that voters were concerned that their “liberties were going to be infringed”, he must have known it was a hoax too.
