Is the Lef t taking over the World?

Are conservatives on the way out? Not judging by recent political earthquakes – Brexit, Trump, Boris – if we agree these events were conservative in nature.

But Ed West, like many of the finest Rightwing thinkers, is what the Prime Minister would call a doomster and a gloomster. He thinks conservatism itself is quite possibly doomed, or will survive only in tiny pockets, and fears this era-defining change. No wonder he’s a glass-half-empty man.

‘To be conservative,’ he quotes the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, ‘is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried… present laughter to utopian bliss.’

Thankfully, there is a lot of laughter in this Eeyorish but highly entertaining book.

It is part memoir, as West charts the dawning realisation through his childhood and young adulthood that he is indeed a woefully uncool conservative. To begin with, he thought he had – in political terms – simply aged faster than his friends, as if ‘conservatism was like baldness or impotence’. But as he moves from being the only Right-wing journalist on a lads’ mag to a prospective Tory councillor, he realises that his peer group and neighbours aren’t heading the same way.

So alongside dips into his life story, and an enjoyable history of conservative thought, he issues a stark warning: the world is getting more Left-wing and there’s not really much to be done about it. That old rule about people getting more conservative as they grow older? It simply isn’t true any more.

According to research, the percentage of American millennials who see themselves as ‘liberal’ went from 41 per cent in 2004 to well over half in 2017. Just 15 per cent of them now identify as conservative.

It’s a similar story in Britain. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before so-called progressives hold the whip hand over the rest of us. These are the people who thought Jeremy Corbyn as PM was a good idea. And they have spent the past few years ‘no-platforming’ anyone who holds views that depart from politically correct orthodoxy.

They also think traditional values – things to do with faith, flag and family – should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Leftwingery is the new religion and most young people are genuinely committed believers.

There is a temporary antidote to all this, however, in one uplifting passage, when West escapes trendy North London for rural Herefordshire. A break from the ceaseless internet culture wars and the bubble of dinner parties does him the world of good.

He sees another Britain entirely and is reassured by it, even if it seems to be slowly disappearing. There’s a lesson here. When he’s next allowed, West should cheer himself up by following Dominic Cummings’s recent advice to a BBC journalist – get out of London and stop talking to rich Remainers!