Boris will never recover from partygate

When a political party is hit by a crisis, the tendency these days is for both the politicians and their supporters to pretend that there isn’t a crisis at all, hunker down inside a comfortable state of denial and blame it all on a hostile media. To a degree, this has always happened — but social media has unquestionably exacerbated the process, to the extent that at any one moment a vast number of people are living under a bizarre delusion from which only much later do they emerge blinking into the sunlight. The polarising effect of social media and its echo–chamber properties have led to it becoming little more than a vast conduit for confirmation bias, and this informs the way in which politicians react to crises. This is certainly one reason why Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, resisted the charge of anti-Semitism for so long (another is that quite a few of its members were, er, anti-Semites, of course). The whole thing was a plot against the leadership orchestrated by Corbyn’s internal opponents and a gleeful media: it was, in fact, no story at all. On Twitter and on Facebook this was the line taken by the Corbynites, and they were not lying or dissembling, they actually believed it. Everybody whom they knew on social media sites told them, you see. Hell, there were even a few Labour Jews who would say the same thing. It was all a vicious confection with no basis in reality and the voters didn’t care about it one bit.

Conservatives — or at least a large number of them — seem to be gripped by a similar delusion right now. The right-wingers I know on Facebook all parrot the same tune — that partygate is entirely a media concoction and that we should all shut up about it because the public doesn’t care.