Is the UK run by a Death Cult?

10 MINUTE READ

As the Party descends into failure, factionalism, and even outright felony, Henri Colens asks whether the Conservative Party is about to enter the final phase of its spiral into destructive cultism.

It started in 1995. The Conservatives were struggling - Labour holding a 22-point lead in the polls as May ticked over to June. Arsenal had just signed Dennis Bergkamp, when Prime Minister John Major, somewhere in a room in Westminster, threw his hands up in despair.

Enter Vulcan John Redwood, stage right. Reportedly bright, hard-working and an acolyte of Margaret Thatcher’s, Redwood heard Major’s muffled cry of “put up or shut up” and stooped to pick up the gauntlet. It was the beginning of a month-long contest for the leadership of the governing UK Conservative Party. In the end it would solve absolutely nothing (John Major would retain his position as Prime Minister) but these events echo all the way to the present day. Why? Well, because modern day Tories find themselves in a very similar predicament: riven, losing, ineffective and even hated.

1995 was the year in which the Tory right lost, but it was also the year in which it first truly believed it could one day win.

And it has been beavering away ever since to ensure that it would eventually win, culminating in the election to office of Liz Truss. Redwood’s platform, of minuscule government, full privatisation and low taxation was the inspiration for Liz Truss. In her campaign PR, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it PM may have cannily resurrected the ghost of Thatcher, but the air was thick with Redwood’s sandalwood musk. His backers, now secure within the architecture of Tufton Street, were hers. He lost, but he ensured that twenty years later she could win. And insodoing he rang the death knell of his beloved party: the death cult was born.

The idea that the Conservative Party should devote itself to bringing down the EU and then leaving it in tatters is positively Redwoodian. Remember Thatcher was far more pro-European than many Tory revisionists now claim. Rather than inspiring them, her oft-quoted 1988 “Bruges speech” riled up the Europhobes. The result was a small faction of Tories who began to preach a separation from the EU on economic grounds.

Not long after Thatcher made that intervention, a certain Alexander “Boris” de Pfeffel Johnson began to send fact-free diatribes from Brussels. Having landed in the capital of Europe in 1989, Johnson perfected British condescension in print-form, sending missives that turbocharged Eurosceptic reporting to new heights.  

The Telegraph seems to have played a leading role in not just publishing Tory populist thinking, but also launching its eventual leaders. Johnson emanated from a long line of cub-reporters-turned-Tory MPs - no wonder the paper is known as “The Torygraph”. Another influential columnist-turned-legislator is Daniel Hannan, who was elected to the European Parliament in 1999.

10 years on from the end of the Thatcher era, and the Conservatives are now languishing out of power in Westminster - Tony Blair rules Cool Britannia. Yet, egged on by Boris Johnson’s vitriol, Tories were soon tapping into a rich seam of Euroscepticism at the polls, becoming the largest UK delegation in the European Parliament. By 2006, they were wooing other parties across Europe in the hope of forming their own political group, heralding the infamous split from the EPP in 2009.

I was at the “launch” of the European Conservatives & Reformists (ECR) Group in Brussels at the old Arsenal buildings in 2006. An assortment of Conservative bigwigs was there to hobnob with their European counterparts: I distinctly remember being quizzed about the wisdom of leaving the EPP by William Hague. David Cameron, in his book For The Record writes:

I was convinced that it would be better for us all if we were outside the EPP, while cooperating with its members on shared endeavours. This indeed turned out to be the case - we established what rapidly became the third-largest group in the European Parliament after the socialists and the EPP.

However he tries to justify it, however he tries to dress it up (by the way, the ECR rapidly became the fourth-largest group - ALDE were third), this was a huge mistake. The first of many that Cameron made on European matters. Cameron’s early years might seem a million miles away from a cult. He was slick, looked relatively competent, and talked up his compassionate vision even as he ushered in austerity. Little did he realise that the pill he was making the general public swallow (austerity) would end up causing his downfall, and trigger the current death spiral of his beloved party. But Cameron wasn’t the cult leader. Even though he was PM and the head of the Party, the cult was not forming around him, but someone else…

It was during these years that Hannan and a close-knit group of well-funded anti-EU ideologues worked tirelessly to realise Redwood’s dream: Brexit. The movement’s destiny was set. This is the moment in the documentary when the cult members begin to develop ever more extreme convictions. This is the point when the Redwood devotees begin to elevate one leader above all others, pledging their fealty to him (it’s always a him, isn’t it?) Enter Nigel Farage.

Now, Nigel isn’t a Tory - nor will he ever be one. However, no other single person in the last 20 years has had more influence on the Conservative Party’s policies and fortunes. He may as well have been leader - in a sense he had a hand on the tiller. For several years Farage was the most famous politician in Europe. The media, even institutions like the BBC, fell over themselves to book him. Almost overnight he became the de facto opposition leader in UK politics. From Day One, David Cameron (who had become PM in 2010) could never get out from his shadow on EU matters. Farage’s mix of charming controversy, his haranguing of the EU’s bureaucrats, and his pub landlord nationalism appealed to many sections of British society, who had lapped up by now two decades of anti-European bile from The Sun, The Daily Mail and the aforementioned Telegraph.

But what people fail to realise is that Cameron took over a party machine which was stocked full of Redwoodian ideologues: such a long stretch out of power led to an intake of more radical young Tories who were prepared to wait patiently in the political darkness. These people lapped up Farage’s bile, and established figures in the Party, while they may have loathed him publicly, in private could only admire how easily he seemed to sense the pulse of Middle England. He quickly attracted devotees within the Tory ranks, who aligned UKIP on all things EU. The point is: even though Farage was outside the Conservative Party, there were enough cultists (in his book Cameron calls them “a coalition of disgruntled right-wingers and disaffected spads”) within the Party HQ doing his bidding.

Cameron’s strategy was to occasionally throw red meat to these Tory “Kippers”. He could never cast out the Europhobes, and later on he felt pressured to cave to their demands. He could see where the wind was blowing. Farage had opened up a gaping flank on the right, and his constant attacks were drawing blood. It must have been exhausting to fend off both Farage’s blows and the yapping and sniping from the burgeoning cult within his own party.

The biggest chunk of red meat was the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, or the EU Referendum as it came to be known. It was in fact an entire cow! It came after Cameron botched a renegotiation deal with the EU, itself a super-sized flank steak. Cameron lost the Referendum for a whole host of reasons, none of which I need elaborate on here. On 24 June 2016, the day of the announcement of the referendum result, Cameron resigned.

Cameron’s weakness finally gave the cultists the chance they were waiting for: the Redwoodians and the “Kippers” would come pouring in to fill the vacuum when Cameron left office. The host had now become a zombie: the Conservative Party was now a pale imitation of what it was before, and it was now hell-bent on the country’s (and its own) destruction.

As is often the case with long and winding political campaigns, once victory has been achieved chaos often engulfs the victors. The longer the gestation period of said victory, the worse the downfall seems to be. While Brexit had been easy to sell, the responsibility of implementation was way beyond the cultists. Many of them had made very decent careers from shouting from the sidelines and howling at the moon. It’s easy to pour poison into public life. Running a country on the other hand...

In 2019, the Conservative zombie stumbled triumphantly into 10 Downing Street. The cult, following many failed attempts, finally had their man in power, ready to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Trouble was, Johnson found the cult, now named the ERG, almost as impossible to deal with as his predecessors. But Johnson doesn’t have a conscience, so he didn’t mind lying to the public to get Brexit over the line. And this is when we began to see the first spasms of the Conservative Party out in the open. The rot was laid bare for all to see.

With Johnson’s chronic lying, his serialisation of scandal and his incompetence all laid bare, the Conservative Party was forced into another leadership race. Liz Truss’s election in 2022 finally proved that the cult was in control of the Conservative Party. The metamorphosis was now complete. But rather than the caterpillar majestically breaking free from its chrysalis in the form of a beautiful butterfly, the Conservative Party finally revealed itself in all its ugly, authoritarian, nationalist glory. The Party of Churchill and Thatcher, which (love them or loathe them) had presided over the great post-War reforms, the Party that had shunned Enoch Powell, the Party that came with sound economic competence as standard… Now a shell of its former self.

So let’s examine the evidence. A death cult, often referred to more prosaically as “destructive cultism”, is a kind of syndrome, whose acolytes withdraw themselves from society in order to submit themselves to an ideology, ever increasing levels of behavioural change and mental control, until they become slaves to the cause. The cult demands total loyalty and gradually detaches them from reality. The leaders are often charismatic sociopaths, driven by greed and ego. It sounds eerily similar to the Conservative party, doesn’t it? 

And now we have entered the endgame. What usually happens is reality becomes too hard to ignore, and the acolytes face a choice: go back to the real world or sacrifice themselves.

The economy is flatlining, and the social safety nets and institutions that support the needy and the vulnerable are straining badly. Truss squandered huge amounts of money in her attempt to “deliver” the last plank of Redwood’s vision: financial “reforms” (massive tax cuts). But these were fatally undermined by the market she professes to trust above all else. The ultimate irony is that one of the final nails in the Conservative Party coffin was driven home by the City, the one institution that never fails to stir cold Tory hearts.

The Conservative Party allowed itself to be undermined by a cult, whose ideology had no basis in reality. This cult used the legitimacy of the Tory Party, its connections with powerful print media and overseas funding, to insinuate itself and its ideas into public life. It captured the public by playing on their hopes and fears, selling an elixir that was in fact a poison.

But like all snake oil salesmen, it eventually ran out of gullible customers. And once the con is exposed the cult members are confronted with the lie they’ve been selling for 20 years. The public doesn’t forget. At the next election the Conservative Party will be destroyed. It will be rendered an ex-political party. No doubt a few MPs bearing blue rosettes will be returned, but the party as we knew it will be gone.