Now the woke Blob is coming for Braverman
The Home Secretary dared to articulate Right-wing views – so she is going to be made an example of
One of the frustrations of being a columnist is that an event happens, a joke occurs, but by the time it’s your day to write, it’s already been told. Well, I’m sorry; this one’s too good to miss. Clears throat...
“I was distressed to hear that Harry and Meghan had been involved in a high-speed car chase with the paparazzi. The good news is that the paparazzi got away.” It’s a non-story but the silly season starts earlier every year – blame global warming – and so the PM, in Japan for the G7, was forced to discuss his Home Secretary’s speeding fine.
It seems that Suella Braverman broke the speed limit last summer when she was attorney general; she was given the option of a traffic course and, allegedly, asked civil servants if they could help her take it privately rather than as part of a group.
Labour is outraged that she involved the civil service. The civil service is probably outraged at having been asked to do anything at all.
Suella is the latest target of the blob, that cloud of resistance that descends mysteriously on Right-wing ministers and sensible ideas. She’s especially disliked for giving a speech to the National Conservatism Conference last week, a gathering so wildly misrepresented you’d think we’d met in Nuremberg. As one delegate said, this was “a seminar posing as a rally”, discussing the work of scholar Yoram Hazony and featuring academic debate about Thomist theology and the merits of the Corn Laws.
It was something of a rainbow coalition. Hazony is Jewish. Several speakers were gay. Miriam Cates, the MP who called for us to have more babies, earning comparisons with the patriarchy of Gilead, is a woman. No one called for the re-introduction of hanging or the empire, for not only has the centre-right moved on but, by standing up for free speech and women’s rights, one could argue its primary job is to rescue liberal ideas from wacky liberals – on an economic as well as cultural front.
Danny Kruger MP made headlines for referring to “normative” families (mum, dad, kids), but had the critics read his whole text, rather than just the interpretation on Twitter, they’d have discovered buried within it an interesting critique of the effects of the free market on “institutions and habits”. The real story of Natcon is that the next generation of Tebbits has shifted slightly towards state intervention, something I noticed in 2022 when Suella ran for the leadership and hinted that tax cuts aren’t sufficient to save civil society.
It’s not just the Left-wing attacks on the centre-right are predictable, they often miss the bigger picture. Look beyond Braverman telling the hall that being white isn’t a sin; like several speakers she is a person of colour, the child of immigrants who came here, she said, because they saw Britain as a nation state that is distinct and good. Isn’t that interesting? Couldn’t the BBC make a documentary about that? It’s strange that the Left, which puts such a premium on “representation”, rarely applauds the multiculturalism of the modern Conservative Party.
On the contrary, the blob has demonstrated equal opportunity in obstructing the careers of Tories of colour, hitting out at both Priti Patel and Braverman for their management of civil servants. These two ladies, incidentally, are far from allies. They are rivals for No10; Priti’s supporters believe she was doing a good job at the Home Office and that Suella, since taking over, has been all headlines and no delivery. But the threat they both pose to the blob is that they are instinctual conservatives, proudly British, the kind of John Bull who can’t be gently persuaded out of their beliefs by advisers, journalists or think tanks, nor intimidated out of them by Twitter.
The blob is not a conspiracy with a membership list; it is a consensus. It does not sabotage; it grinds you down. Mention it in polite company and you’ll be called a crank, but think of the number of policies the Tories had the seats to pass but never did. Where are the grammar schools or the British Bill of Rights? Why are taxes so high? Because many Tories are part of the blob too, as indicated by the scorn poured on Natcon by Conservative MPS desperate to let us know they are not one of those conservatives. Heavens to Betsy! You won’t catch us reducing immigration, cutting income tax or putting criminals in jail.
If Braverman is forced to show up to random conferences of the Women’s Institute or the Ricardians to warn that everything is going horribly wrong, this is why: she is outnumbered within her own government and can only force it to the Right via external pressure. That it hasn’t moved in that direction sooner attests to the power and reach of the blob. At a different meeting in Bournemouth, Andrea Jenkyns said that she looks at many of her colleagues and thinks, “you belong in the Lib Dems”. She’s wrong on one count: the Lib Dems win elections.
Braverman went down well at Natcon. She spoke off the back of two weeks of Coronation and Eurovision madness, and many in the audience were so tired they weren’t sure whether to clap, curtsy or award her douze points – but one detail leaves me doubtful of her judgment and I’m surprised her enemies aren’t making more of it.
Told she couldn’t do the traffic course privately, she took the points instead. Nobody ever takes the points. Either our Home Secretary is incredibly conscientious, or mad.