A couple of housekeeping notes before we head to the meeting of titan minds that was Boris Johnson and Tony Abbott at the Canada Strong and Free Network. CSFN is a kind of Canadian PopCon, where the right wing go to cheer each other on as they curse the woke. Except, unlike so many alt-right talking shops, it’s got almost 20 years under its belt. There are probably people in it who remember a time before wokery, when political correctness had merely gone mad. We will hear a lot of words that sometimes seem to describe the throughline from early 00s conservatism to what we see before us today, but if you tried to actually draw that line, it would look like the cloud of hair and flies around Pig-Pen’s head.
The disgraced former UK prime minister no longer looks like a man whose Spads have ruffled his hair on purpose before he steps on to the stage, for “charm”. His dishevelment feels much more authentic and bedded in, like a man who’s already been kicked out but doesn’t know it yet because he hasn’t been home, and stands in contrast to the pin-neat Tony Abbott, who also has a neater, less contradictory mind.
Abbott brooks no contradiction because he allows in no information that he doesn’t like. If he were your dad, you would be insane, and if he were in charge of a nation in knife-edge times, you would be beside yourself with anxiety.
In Johnson’s ideal world, he’d turn up, say something cheeky and naughty about his own party (that it’s anti-smoking policies are bad), yaw on about Churchill (how can the party of Churchill think of banning cigars?), give off a behind-the-bikeshed atmosphere (smoking, yeah?), get a lot of lovely claps and hightail it off to a pretend appointment.
In the world we were in, he had to engage in a much lengthier discussion. One might go as far as to say he and Abbott were asked to lay down the intellectual foundations for the rightwingers of the Five Eyes (the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – certain people of yore used to call it the “white commonwealth”, but I’m sure nobody in this room). They were chaired by John O’Sullivan, who once advised Margaret Thatcher. He kept spooking himself out with random references to the “woke”, like a man shouting himself awake from a horrid dream. Sorry, how rude. I did not mean for one second to suggest he was awake. “Both our speakers tonight are transformational politicians,” he began. “Men who made the weather.” Ain’t that the truth, the UK drowning in sewage and Australia regularly on fire.
With all these white, right eyes upon them, they were forced to talk about actual issues, that were real, rather than Peppa Pig World or whatever. Johnson and Abbott discussed Ukraine, where they could agree with each other, but peeled emphatically away from other, much noisier rightwing elements (Donald Trump, for example). They talked about Israel, where they agreed both between themselves and with the rest of their tribe, but this came at a cost of describing black as white. And they talked about net zero, on which they couldn’t agree with each other.
We all know where Johnson stands on Ukraine, so there weren’t many surprises, although it was tickling to hear him describe Putin’s misconceptions about that invaded nation: “He believed his own Wikipedia-cum-Nostradamus nonsense, when he said that Ukraine wasn’t a proper nation.” You could hear the narcissistic projection in it. That’s exactly what Johnson would do, cobble together some wiki notion and invade a country on the basis of it, except could he, push come to shove, be arsed? We probably don’t express gratitude often enough for the sheer laziness of the man. Sure, there were bad times, but imagine if he’d had exactly his own self-interest and callousness, but Putin’s energy. Abbott agreed, both men making what I really hope is a blunder: that it is possible to build a “big tent conservatism” between those who think “Nato brings stability and peace” (Johnson) and those who think Nato nations have it coming, because they’re pussies (I’m paraphrasing Trump). They’re either engaged in wishful thinking, or they’re happy to drop stability and peace when the time comes.
On Gaza, meanwhile, Johnson made this truly remarkable argument: “Just bear in mind that if you protracted the numbers of Jewish people who had died on [7 October], and imagine that it had happened in the UK, it would have been thousands and thousands. Many more than 10,000 people.” This, apparently, is licence for infinite slaughter, infinite war: a hypothetical number of imaginary British people, to justify the documented deaths of three times that number of real Palestinians. That’s what it takes now to keep the right on the same page. An argument as unhinged as that.
Climate change is real, according to Boris Johnson, but still, capitalism first, folks; and not real, according to Tony Abbott, who got by far the bigger cheer. You could see Johnson processing the cold water of the less popular position, almost in real time. Will he ultimately switch sides, if the price is right? We couldn’t possibly say, but you wouldn’t want him in charge of the IPCC.
On the plus side, the assorted international new right is looking almost left wing in its dividedness. It’s just a bit troubling, what recent experience tells us: the way they come back together is always by getting worse.