Tories

Who would be a Conservative MP right now? I mean, in government, but powerless against the antipathy of the establishment and generally reviled by the wider public. The most honest, faithful, dedicated, hard-working constituency MP is lumped into the same category as the most mendacious, mercenary, lazy accepter of back-handers and honours for favours. Damned whatever you do, what’s the point?

As a permanently suspended Twitter account I can still browse, but I only get whatever the almighty algorithms decide to serve up. Bereft of the guiding tastes of mutual followers, I can now only read tweets about kitties, puppers and how much people hate the Tories. Formerly my Twitter economy would regulate my environment with a healthy mix of sceptics, scoundrels and people on my wavelength, protecting me from the worst excesses of the liberal online world.

But now the filters are well and truly clogged and I just get an endless round of righteous lefty hatred. Not toward me – I’m a Twitter non-person, they don’t even know I’m there – but towards anything remotely to the right of Saint Jeremy of Corbyn and his Marxist comrades. The tee-shirts declaring “I’ve never fucked a Tory” were mildness incarnate in comparison.

In his song, Russians, Sting sang: “Mister Krushchev said, ‘We will bury you’ I don't subscribe to this point of view. It'd be such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too”. Quite. He went on to warble “There is no monopoly on common sense on either side of the political fence”. Astute. Yet here we are, with the side of truth and social justice, the ‘be kind’ set falling into the same trap the cold war sprang. Are the Tories really so very different from the Labours?

“We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.” And with that biology we share the same needs; shelter, warmth, food, safety, and all the trappings of civilisation. Nobody, whatever political gods they serve, wants to end their days as heads on pikes on the railings of Westminster as revenge for the bloody war they waged on their own people. Even Putin, no doubt, believes in his mission.

So, instead of wishing the new “Rashi Sanuk*” government well in its mission and looking to influence its choices the opposition in all its forms immediately goes on the attack. Mr Sunak is, of course, a coconut, say the brown racists of the left who genuinely believe they cannot be racists. And every member of his cabinet is a baby-eating, granny-starving tool of the evil global capitalist machine.

We never really got beyond this, did we?

It’s not so very long ago that the evil international machine was the communist one, so maybe globalism is just a convenient way to label whoever you consider the current ‘Russians’ to be. Well, according to everybody with a platform, the real global threat is climate change, so why does it seem like just another way for each side to beat each other up? Why can’t the eternally opposing ideologies of left and right put aside their differences and work for this common cause? I suspect the answer is that the ideology which engineers the divide is too strong. Maybe we just have to hope the Tories love their children too.

*Sleepy Joe Biden’s hilarious and total mispronunciation on hearing the news.