Farage’s Conservatism and Dahl’s anti-Semitism

It may be true that the English, by nature, are conservative. It’s utterly true that the Conservative Party led by Kemi Badenoch is not the natural home for the English anymore. How has this political atrophy, after a decade-and-a-half in power before Labour came in from the cold, hap­pened? How could the House that Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher and Johnson built, and the intellectual ballast coming from the likes of Burke, Oakeshott and Scruton, descend into grassroots irrelevance? It could be said that power corroded the Conserva­tive soul, and somewhere along the way, the party abandoned the core values captured in those three f-words: flag, faith and family, despite the Brexit in­surrection. Longevity didn’t expand the Conservative ter­ritory; rather, the party, while in power, validated the cliché that you contest from the right and rule from the centre. David Cameron, the prime minister who kept his word on Brexit, normalised the Conservatives’ social compassion, being more Blair than Thatcher in fixing broken Britain or dealing with immi­gration. Johnson, unarguably the most popular Conservative after Thatcher, could have saved the day, but he fell to a palace coup preceded by a silly moral campaign against the shambolic Downing Street resident over a garden party. Today, in the polls, the Conserva­tives are hopelessly trailing at the fourth position, behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. A perfect lesson in how to lose an election and unite to kill the party.

As the sun sets on the party that was the original apostle of English understatement, the new insurrection­ist pledges to retrieve the lost soul of Conservatism. Nigel Farage is a cultural usurper and a political debunker, and his Reform UK is Conservatism drunk on lager. If polls are to be believed, his party is set to win the next General Elec­tion. Farage, who holds no university degree, is a different kind of pol in the Conservative space, for so long domi­nated by the so-called Oxbridge toffs. He has brought Conservatism down to earth. Immigration and Europe, the topics that make or unmake political careers in Britain today, have given Farage the aura of the intimate native. He is the closest to what David Goodhart calls Somewhere people in his The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics can get as a redeemer. Somewhere people, as against the Anywhere lot, don’t belong to rootless cosmopolitanism or the nation-diluting globalism. They prefer to live in a famil­iar place surrounded by familiar people and feel more at home when they hear a familiar language in the neighbour­hood. Farage is too familiar to be missed by them. He is ad­dressing their fears and anxi­eties as a native, a term the elite, from both sides of the ideological divide, hates to accept. In payback times, those who evaded the biggest question in Europe—unchecked im­migration—are forced to step aside and watch the insurgents race to power. Farage, a one-man conservative army prone to changing the nomenclature (he hasn’t come a long way from Referendum to Reform), is rac­ing past, despite his beer-soaked bravado, the worn-out Labour and Conservatives without conviction.

Like any other politician in his autumnal isolation, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is desperately stealing ideas from the right to postpone redun­dancy. By going tough on immigration, he may look very contemporary in realising the existential crisis staring at many mainstream parties across Europe. You just can’t sing the glory of multiculturalism at a time when more than half of your population is agitated over the strangers at the gate. The Starmer double act is a piece of amazing political flexibility. On Europe, he is a globalist, partially dismantling the Brexit isolationism. On immigra­tion, he is daring to break free from his party’s foreigner-friendly tradition. And whenever he gets a chance to highlight Zelensky’s plight or Israel’s continuing pounding of Gaza, he plays the compas­sionate internationalist to perfection. Still, charmless Starmer remains elusive as he takes turns and U-turns on the path to perdition. Looks like the British have given up the hope of keeping pace with the shapeshifter, further reinforc­ing the truism that, increasingly, politi­cians without convictions won’t win the popular trust.

I could have gone to Trafalgar Square and watched speakers (among them some I admire) bare their con­science in the cause of Gaza. Instead, encouraged by good reviews (except for the dissenting Spectator) I went to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End to see John Lithgow play the anti-Semitic Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s debut work Giant. It was old-fashioned theatre with bare props and brainy dialogues—and a denouement reached through the volatility of ideas and the power of prejudice. On the eve of the publication of The Witches in America, Dahl is in trouble, at least from the perspective of his publisher, for the stink of anti-Semitism in a review he has written for an English journal. In Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 1982, the ageing, petulant, condescending Dahl sees the strains of Hitlerism in Jews. Israel’s mili­tary action is an occasion for the British writer to denounce the entire Jewish race. A sales executive from his Ameri­can publisher and his English editor, joined by his live-in partner, ask him to withdraw the rant and apologise lest the forthcoming book be affected. Israel is a contention and Palestine is a cause here, and Dahl is too entrenched in his rage against Israel to be generous in accept­ing a different view that dilutes his idea of historical injustice. He talks himself to a dead-end from where he won’t dare to retreat. Caught in that twilight zone between pathological rejection of a state and what he believes to be the moral obligation of someone who is so certain of what is right, Dahl can’t allow anyone else in the room to save him. In the end, I couldn’t help wondering: What does he hate most, the other view or the demon state born in his imagination? In the time of Gaza, a Dahl fretting and fuming in a moral cauldron on the stage doesn’t help us choose our side. More than four decades after Lebanon, Giant makes us aware of the cruelty of choices.

GiantJohn LithgowMark RosenblattNigel FarageRoald DahlSir Keir Starmer