Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew.
Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’.
What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell? Either answer – they were not in control, or they were not interested – is damning
It has taken the Conservative government 13 years and 95 days to stagger breathlessly to this point. Thirteen years in which almost every public and private institution in the country has capitulated, to a lesser but usually greater extent, to the imported American ideology of intersectional progressivism. Everything – from the BBC to the National Trust to every library, gallery and museum in the land – is stuffed to the gills with this guff. The Tories outsourced sex education in schools and didn’t bother to check who was hired. They stood back and shuffled, tongue-tied, as progressivism gobbled up all before it.
It’s hard to do justice to the enormity of their failure on this front. Their recent noticing of this is a bit like the fall of Troy, but with King Priam holding up a finger and saying, ‘hang on a second, I think there might be something a bit fishy about that wooden horse’ as his wife is carted off over the shoulder of Agamemnon and chunks of toppled masonry smash into the strewn bodies of his slaughtered children.
What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell? Either answer – they were not in control, or they were not interested – is damning. Wilful blindness is not something one looks for in a politician. For Barclay to wake up now, to shake his head, suck air through his teeth and say ‘You’ve had some cowboys in here’ is unacceptable. You were one of the cowboys, Steve.
Kemi Badenoch, by contrast, is more clued up. It sometimes feels like she is, in fact, the only shield protecting the public from what she calls ‘destructive things’. Although she has many remarkable qualities, this feels somewhat precarious. It’s like sheltering in a downpour at night in a shop doorway – you may be just about dry, but it would be better to be inside.
The Tories’ long string of excuses for their culture failures – ‘well, it was the Lib Dems, you see, our hands were tied’, and then ‘well, Brexit took up all our time’, ‘and then there was Covid, oh and Ukraine’ – ring increasingly hollow. I suspect the real reason was the well-brought-up reluctance to avoid hyperbole, to swerve anything resembling a ‘scene’. They are embarrassed to be conservatives, ashamed to do things that might upset ‘nice’ people, which crippled them from the very beginning. They shied away from any confrontation – it took over a decade for them to address the blatant intimidation in academia, to notice that students were no longer the amiable geeks waving little gonks on Blockbusters.
Lest we forget, this nervous twitch was an impulse strong enough to make Boris Johnson shuffle in conciliatory embarrassment. The Tories didn’t want to notice what was clearly going on and – incredibly – are still shocked by it. They are ‘appalled’ that despite producing ‘guidance’, the antagonistic institutions take absolutely no notice of them. They are so complacent and disinterested that it’s left to the press to check up.
The hilarious irony is that the Conservative party is often accused by its enemies of populism. Luminaries such as Angela Eagle and Chris Bryant have accused them of ‘stoking a culture war’, which is so far from the truth it’s like pointing the finger of blame for world war two at Switzerland.
In fact, the Tories have invented a whole new philosophy – unpopulism. This is going full pelt at things that their voters hate; Net Zero, tax hikes, continuing mass immigration, turning a blind eye to the wreckers trashing the cultural inheritance of the nation and fomenting racial division.
There is much commissioning of reports and assessments, much issuing of guidance, much piddling about with details. Occasionally one of them goes over the top – Suella with her silly ‘tofu-eating wokerati’ speech – but almost nothing is ever actually done. If you didn’t know, you would assume the current Home Secretary was Harriet Harman. It might as well be.
There has also been the total failure to notice or to defuse the Blair-Brown era landmines of the Equality Act, in-work benefits, recording ‘non-crimes’, etc. They let themselves be played.
It’s far too late for the Tories to get over their fear of being seen as oafish, or to realise that nothing could be less important than how embarrassed they feel.
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