Tory MPs beware: if you whip up an angry mob, they may end up angry with you
Drawn increasingly into darkness and rage, the UK government functions as a promotional tie-in for the controversial Joker movie. Out next week, kids. Think of it as a Tory conference chaser. For now, it’s great to see everyone’s favourite political incel break cover, as Dominic Cummings makes a series of appearances among the chaos to announce: “We are enjoying this.” Such a self-styled antihero. He used to think what happened to his Brexit was a tragedy, but now he knows it’s a comedy.
The latest clip ends with Cummings blowing a kiss to the news cameras, a reminder that politics allows some people to play out a wishful version of themselves that would be laughed out of town anywhere normal. In any sane arena, Dominic is the answer to the inquiry: “What would happen if you shaved Quentin Tarantino’s head but kept everything else much the same?”
He is a political geek. As one of his friends told Tim Shipman for his book All Out War: “Dom watched [Bill Clinton campaign documentary] The War Room, I would guess, 40 to 50 times. He would sing the theme music. The missing Dom years were basically spent in a bunker under the Pennines watching The War Room on repeat.” Yet here he is blowing kisses, giving us his hot movie villain. You can stand down, Hollywood – the spad in the gilet’s got this covered.
It is thanks to Cummings that the Palace of Westminster this week resembled a sort of meth-addled Hogwarts, and yet Conservative MPs cling to him even though they know he hates them. More on these imbecile henchmen later. Only a political incel could rage in entitlement against “Project Fear”, yet orchestrate “senior allies of Boris Johnson” – including a cabinet minister – to inform Friday’s Times that there would be a “violent, popular uprising” if they don’t do what he wants. Thank you, Anonymous Secretary of State, for treating public life like an angry online forum. Save it for your 10-page manifesto you mail to the newsrooms.
Of course, the thing about incels (metaphorical and otherwise) is that while a huge part of their self-mythology is claiming they represent the unheard, the reality is that people really listen to their shit. Consider the case of the man accused of driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto last year, killing 10 people, who warned in a police video (released on Friday) that he’d start an incel uprising with it all. Nine days – nine days! – after that mass murder, I read an extremely serious column in the New York Times that used the event to discuss the “redistribution of sex”. As its author put it: “Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.”
Well, it was an admiring “wow” from me. Men’s rights is wild. These guys really get stuff done. Women have been fannying about for decades asking peacefully for their rights, and we still can’t be in charge of our own bodies. Ten people get killed, and before the fortnight’s out there’s a chinstroker in the world’s leading liberal newspaper wondering how we can address the needs and concerns of the suspect.
Like Cummings, the “big thinkers” who pander to these instincts are never going to be the ones getting hurt. Just as the guy who wrote that New York Times op-ed truly has my blessing to go and wank off whatever inadequates he likes as a public service to stop male terrorism or something, I suspect he thinks it’s a job for ladies. Not his problem. He’s thunked the thinkpiece, and it’s up to the patsies to enact it.
There is so much of this to Cummings’ “people vs parliament” brand of politics, but the patsies – the Tory MPs – are yet to catch on. While
most women could read that New York Times column and work out what it basically meant for them, a lot of Conservative MPs are dutifully spouting Cummings’ lines, but don’t yet seem to have worked out where they leave them.
But listen, Tory mooks – I’m here to help. While you’re getting a tiki torch and standing a post, let me tell you what a “people vs parliament” election ultimately means for you. First, if you whip up an angry mob, why do you assume they won’t end up angry with you? Do you think the mob is going to come upon an MP and go, “Wait, wait – this is so-and-so. He voted for Meaningful Votes 2 and 3, so we should, you know, definitely not put our pitchforks up his arse”? Eventually, you’re going to get a pitchfork up your arse either way.
To adapt that phrase of the altright to whom you tack closer every day: mobs don’t care about your feelings. If I had to come up with an adjective to help you understand mobs, it would probably be mob-like. Very mobby. Mobtastic. If you go to the country in a people v parliament election, you may indeed get elected and be part of a triumphant Tory majority. But when you have been elected, and when you’ve “got Brexit done” – which is to say, when you’ve either taken the UK off the no-deal cliff, or opened up the next however many painful years of trade negotiations fuckery-pokery, which is never going to solve the problems it is magically supposed to – you, then, are “parliament”.
The even angrier people are then versus YOU. That’s when they come for you, because you asked them to. You invited them in. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this line “the revolution devours its children”? That’s you, babe. Second, I know you’ve already only read about one war, but bad news: it’s the wrong war. You need the first world war, not the second. By way of a crash course of what Dom’s got planned for you, take the line in Blackadder, where the general brays to the guys he’s sending over the top: “We’ll be right behind you!” and Blackadder mutters: “About 35 miles behind you.” You’re the cannon fodder, you’re the Twenty Minuters. But, hey – enjoy it out there.
Third, as is blindingly obvious to everyone else, Cummings is one of those masterminds who hates his henchmen. He hates the Conservative party. He believes he’s surrounded by idiots. Again: that’s you, babe.
What’s amazing, given he’s written all of this stuff down, and at length, is the selective deafness of the Tories going along with it. They hear the stuff Dom is saying about things being swept away. But they don’t hear the bits that will eventually mean them.
Consider the irony of the European Research Group currently obeying a man who described them as a “narcissist-delusional subset”, adding: “You should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic.” It’s not a hugely opaque statement. More moderate Conservatives should realise where they’re travelling with this stuff. Some people just want to watch your bit of the world burn. You bow to them at your peril – and ours.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this line “the revolution devours its children”? That’s you, babe.