The Tories Ride Out

...and the New Popular Front Rides in

Like many readers of a certain age, I used to read Dennis Wheatley novels and watch Hammer horror films in my youth, and there was a time when I was scared rigid by Terence Fisher’s 1968 film of The Devil Rides Out - well I was only thirteen. It’s the usual Wheatley schlock - good Christian aristocrats waging war against Satan and saving damsels in distress from the powers of darkness, but it was well done. The special effects were great for the time; Christopher Lee took time out from Dracula in a rare good guy role as the noble Duc du Richlieu, incanting occult mumbo jumbo with a conviction that few other actors could pull off; Richard Matheson wrote the script, and Charles Gray was a menacingly silky Mocata, the ‘devil’s chief disciple’ with the burning blue eyes and psychic powers.

In the culminating sequence, de Richlieu and his pals - including the late Paul Eddington from The Good Life of all people - have to spend the night inside a magic pentacle while Mocata hits them with the full Satan. Giant spiders, the Angel of Death on a horse - it’s a rough night for our heroes, but they hold the line. Mocata is sentenced to eternal damnation, and after the storm of cosmic battle, comes the misty dawn. Everyone is saved, and de Richlieu tells his pals that ‘Time itself has been reversed for us…all these things happened, but now, they have not happened. We are better. We are safe again. ‘

I wouldn’t want to establish an exact parallel between this hokum and the night of 4 July. For starters, it would be giving way too much credit to the Sunak government to suggest that it was driven by the powers of darkness. But elections can sometimes feel like a political exorcism, and for millions of people, this was the night we had all been hoping for for a long time, while never really believing that it would actually happen.

For 14 unutterably dismal years we have all been trapped in the haunted house of Tory, wandering down its gloomy corridors to the sound of clanking chains, banging doors and deranged laughter echoing down the hallway. But last week, like the dinner guests in The Exterminating Angel, we remembered that we could actually walk out of it, and we brought one of the most crazed, cruel, shameful and corrupt periods in British political history to an end.

No magic incantations were required. All we had to do was scratch our cross in enough ballot boxes and they were gone. And who, but the most jaded among us, could not take some satisfaction at seeing the departure of Ben Bradley, Gullis, Rees-Mogg, Truss, Brendan Clarke-Smith, Therese Coffey, Simon Clarke, and so many others cast into the void from which they should never have emerged in the first place?

Whatever reservations you may have about Labour - and I have more than a few - a 326 majority was only very recently the stuff of dreams. I was pleased to see the Greens gain 4 MPs - Carla Denyer is an extremely impressive successor to Caroline Lucas. The Liberal Democrats wrecked the Tories in their heartlands, and whatever they do in opposition, that is in itself a great service.

And yet, waking up in the early hours just in time to watch Truss lose felt strangely joyless. When Corbyn took Theresa May’s majority from her in 2017, I felt euphoric because it was so unexpected.

This time, everyone knew in advance what was supposed to happen, and the main emotion that I felt was relief that the nightmare we have all been living through was over, and that a kind of political justice had been meted out. But once the schadenfreude had worn off, the implosion of Toryism didn’t feel like the cathartic moment it should have been.

This was partly of what preceded it. Because unlike The Devil Rides Out, time has not been reversed. The last 14 years have happened, and it will take more than an election to wash their taste away or repair the damage they have caused. And then there was the Reform Public Limited Company. I know they only got five seats - less than the 13 predicted by the exit polls - but they did get a substantial vote share - 3.9 million votes in total - and had that not been the case, the Tories might have held onto close to 98 seats.

They still would have lost, of course, but the fact that they got this far - with assistance, not for the first time, from Russian bot factories - is worrying, and in the current international climate it would be very foolish to dismiss the dangers that this far-right bridgehead now represent.

A number of commentators, including Neil Mackay and Anne Applebaum, have hailed Labour’s victory as a defeat for populism. That interpretation feels far too premature to me, and not a little lazy, and not only because of its inane equivalence between Corbyn and Farage.

Firstly, it is by no means clear that rightwing national populism has been defeated in this country. The Conservative Party has been crushed, for sure, though to a large extent, this is due to its own stunning incompetence rather than its populist mimicry. And Farage and his gang - the genuine article - have actually done quite well out of the Tory collapse, and are poised to do even better. They won’t like the parliamentary straitjacket, and won’t achieve much within it, but Farage has already promised to build a ‘mass national movement’ that will enable them to fight the next election ‘properly.’

That is worrying, because Farage is an extremely effective, albeit malignant, campaigner, and he will have a lot of dark money to help him drag the Tory Party rightwards, and now he has the chance to take it over or form some kind of Reform/Tory pact.

And who would put any faith in the remaining ‘moderates’ to stop this and lead the party back to the path of virtue, such as it was?

On the positive side, the egoism, narcissism, factionalism, and general incompetence that has destroyed Johnson’s majority could mean that the Conservatives spend years ripping themselves to pieces, and for all Farage’s arrogance, Reform is riddled with despicable characters who may struggle to make headway beyond their racist/nationalist comfort zone.

Already their MPs and voters are complaining about the unfairness of FPTP, and how it doesn’t express the ‘will of the people’ - which of course, only ever expresses itself through them.

There would be no hope for the UK if a party like this ever came anywhere near power, so we should be grateful that the maths are what they are, but progressive governments shouldn’t be relying on mathematics. Unless the Democratic Party awakes from its complacent torpor, there is a very good chance that Trump will win a second term in November, and if that happens it will inspire and energise similar movements in countries across the world, including here.

Putin will do everything he can to facilitate that outcome. If Trump wins, then it is very likely that Ukraine will lose, and every national populist around the world will be celebrating. So as much as we all want to feel hopeful and optimistic after an election, we don’t have the right to ignore these possibilities simply because we want to feel better, because we are not out of this.

It is ludicrous, for the likes of Andrew Marr to say that we are now a ‘little oasis of peace and stability’ simply because of a change of government. There has been little or no reflection on how this country became the madhouse it became over the last 14 years, either amongst the politicians or the voters, because some traumas are too painful to acknowledge.

Yes, it is reassuring to know that there are now more than 500 MPs in parliament who, whatever their particular political orientation, will never be friends of the Tories or Farage. Starmer’s commitment to public service may lack the grand vision of a different society that many of us would like to see, but a starving patient needs thin gruel to be able to walk again.

It is a refreshing novelty after so many years, to see people entering government who do not resemble a pack of monkeys running a space station, who you feel are there on merit and not simply because of their deference to the leader. Already, the ludicrous and hateful Rwanda policy has gone.

But competence and service can only get you so far. These commitments haven’t worked for Biden, and they won’t necessarily work here, without significant and tangible improvements in peoples lives. Starmer has said that he wants politicians to tread more lightly on our lives, but this country needs more government, not less.

Last weekend, I spoke at a mosque in Harrow that provides meals to seventy families every weekend. On my way there, I passed three homeless men sleeping under blankets on a strip of waste ground while the rain poured down on them. These problems cannot be addressed simply by housebuilding programs and ‘creating wealth in every community’.

We have plenty of wealth, but most of it remains concentrated in the hands of very few people. It is not utopian to seek alternatives to this. Sooner or later, we need a debate about inequality and distribution.

Starmer’s achievement in reversing the calamity of 2019 in only five years cannot be dismissed, but had the last three Tory governments not been so staggeringly awful, there might have been a very different outcome. And the ruthless authoritarianism with which the Labour Party purged the left has driven out voices that could and should have been present in debates over the coming years, from Corbyn to Faiza Shaheen.

If Labour insist on marginalizing the left, and if they try to outflank the right, particularly regarding immigration, they will fuel and legitimize the real thing, just as Blair and Brown once did. And if that happens, then the shallowness of last week’s majority may well become apparent more quickly than we think.

Consider what has just happened in France, where a Green-left coalition formed only a few weeks ago has destroyed the National Rally’s chance of forming a government. That is an example of what the left can do, when it gets it act together. It’s clearly not the outcome Macron wanted when he made his gamble, but whether he likes it or not, the New Popular Front has done what the centre could not do - it has pulled off a stunning mobilisation that has stopped Le Pen in her tracks.

There are still huge difficulties, regarding the kind of government that comes out of this, but for the time being, c’est magnifique, and let’s not pretend that left and right in this context are simply expressions of populism.

For the time being, progressive politics has gained a foothold in France, and the same thing has happened in the UK, albeit in a very different context. Because unlike France, what has happened here is not a popular mobilisation. It is not even an endorsement of the Labour Party, as such, but the expression of an exhausted and disgusted electorate that could stand any more torment.

It remains to be seen whether we are able to use this opportunity to climb upwards, or whether it is simply another step in our collective descent. But there are possibilities here that were not present until last week. There are now constituencies that can make themselves heard, that had no influence whatsoever on any of the governments of the past 14 years.

We can’t say, like the Duc de Richlieu, that we safe again. But we are a little bit better than we were before, and now we can hear the strains of la Marseillaise drifting across the Channel, and we should take heart from the knowledge that the rise of ethnonationalism is not inevitable, that politics can still achieve great things.

It’s up to our new government to continue that trajectory, and it’s up to all of us to do everything we can to see that it does.