Conservatism ain’t what it used to be

When rats begin to flee, it’s usually a good indication that the ship is sinking. This homespun wisdom is a useful introduction to the well-orchestrated resignation of five top aides to Boris Johnson.

One, Munira Mirza, No10’s head of policy, has been Johnson’s close lieutenant for 14 years, since his mayoral tenure in London. Her hubby-wubby, Dougie Smith, is also a key Downing Street aide, and has been under three consecutive PMs, so he is unlikely to stay for much longer either.

Miss Mirza’s flight is especially damaging. As one of her colleagues commented, “Munira isn’t so much a stab in the back as a big fucking beheading.” That may be, but Mr and Mrs Smith helpfully illustrate the title of this piece.

Dougie brought to Tory politics his invaluable experience in business. The business in which he garnered invaluable experience was called Fever Parties. Its line of work was organising orgies for London’s so-called ‘fast set’ in Mayfair townhouses, with over 50 couples as happy customers.

Dougie has reassured doubters that his business and political endeavours didn’t “overlap”. I’m not so sure about that – he may not be giving himself full credit. Of course, had he had a prior career as a male hooker, the overlap would be even more complete.

Far be it from me to throw the first stone at a man who tries to stay afloat in our dog-eat-dog world. I’m merely observing that, unless I’m very much mistaken, Messrs Macmillan, Douglas Home and Powell, to name just a few, got into Conservative politics by slightly different paths. Worth further study, that, along with Lady Thatcher’s young years.

Dougie’s wife Munira presents an even more interesting case. Her boss Boris once described her as “capable of being hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”, and he didn’t mean it pejoratively.

Now, all my good friends and most of my social acquaintances are lower-case conservatives who vote for the upper-case Conservative Party (the typographic detail points at a fundamental difference). Yet neither they nor I have ever described anyone in that fashion, not without adding expletives at any rate. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have we ourselves ever merited such modifiers.  

I’m not holding myself and this pre-selected group up as exemplars of conservative virtue. Nor am I casting aspersion on people who are “hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”. It’s just that those fine qualities aren’t readily associated with conservatism, however you spell it.

Neither is Munira’s CV, if I’m being totally honest. She started her political career as a communist, and I don’t mean this as a general term of abuse describing lefties. Munira was an active full-fledged member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In that capacity she regularly contributed to the party’s Living Marxism magazine. When the group dissolved, its core formed the Spiked website, where she too was a bright spark. She also studied for a PhD at Kent University under the professor who had co-founded the RCP.

Thence the mystery began. Munira, along with other RCP staffers, rank communist each, effortlessly floated into the Conservative Party, specifically its Eurosceptic wing. Just four years after that redemptive Damascene experience, Miss Mirza became Mr Johnson’s trusted aid, which trust she betrayed yesterday.

(I remember talking to Gerard Batten, when he was the leader of UKIP. The party should broaden its appeal, I suggested, positioning itself as a real conservative alternative. Gerard smiled ruefully. Far from all eurosceptics are conservatives, he explained. How right he was.)

Being by nature a forgiving sort, I’d have nothing against Conservatives extending a warm welcome to ex-communists. Except that I don’t believe any such thing exists.

When a fully sentient adult, which I assume a PhD candidate must be, remains a communist, that’s a point of no return. An educated woman being a communist activist (not just a passive fellow traveller) in her mid-twenties has to believe in the advisability of murdering millions and enslaving everyone else in pursuit of an evil ideology.

That belief can only spring from an evil emotional predisposition, not ratiocination with its careful weighing of intellectual pros and cons. And unlike ideas, one’s emotional make-up can’t be changed.

(I remember trying to explain this simple idea some 40 years ago to my son, who at that time worshipped Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Soviet spy who had seen the light. The little boy was appalled, a state in which he has remained ever since.)

Yet even if you reject such uncompromising bloody-mindedness, you’ll have to agree with the title above. Conservatism just ain’t what it used to be.

P.S. On a parallel subject, some of our conservative columnists refuse to fall out of love with Putin who, they insist, only murders people all over the world because we’ve treated him without sufficient respect. (I’m so vague on the identities because some readers take exception to my ad hominems against Peter Hitchens.) I wonder what they’ll make of this news.

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer has cited intelligence reports showing the Russians are setting up a mother of all false-flag ops. They are preparing a fabricated video of an explosion perpetrated on a Russian town by dastardly Ukrainians.

The video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they [Russia] would have created themselves… [and] deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed.”

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said disdainfully that similar allegations had been made before, and nothing like that had ever happened. I detect causality there. Can it be that such plans never came to fruition specifically because they had been exposed beforehand? Just asking.

I’m disappointed in my former countrymen though. Do they have to rip off the Nazis’ 1939 Gleiwitz op in every detail? Can’t they think of something new?