The rampant populism of the Tory leadership contest shows how dangerous this moment is – iNews

This is Ian Dunts Week, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If youd like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week,you can sign up here.

Good afternoon and welcome to another week in which Tory leadership hopefuls compete in an arms race of idiocy. By the time this contest ends, theyll presumably have promised the end of the tax system altogether. Its an absolute bonanza of bullshit out there. Pack an umbrella.

This weeks column is below, along with some recommendations for what to do so that you stop watching the news. I take a step back to look at what the hell happened last week and what it might tell us about the future of populism. I wish I could say that the answers are reassuring, but of course theyre not.

We still havent processed what happened last week. Its all been too fast, too frenzied for us to catch our breath. No sooner had Boris Johnson resigned than the race to replace him kicked off a ferocious, non-stop whirlwind of news. Even as he sits in Downing Street, it becomes increasingly easy to forget that he ever even was Prime Minister.

But what happened last week was seismic, and not just in terms of who happens to lead Britain. It defined what populism is, the threat it poses, and the kinds of defences we have against it. We will be studying it for decades, even if we are ignoring it now.

Johnson, like Donald Trump in the US, finished his time as leader by engaging in the classic populist gambit: insisting that his personal mandate superseded the constitutional and political restraints against him. No matter that Trump had lost an election or that the public had turned against Johnson. Their supposed mandate overrode all other considerations.

Trump pursued the far more spectacular strategy of encouraging rioters to target the Capitol. Johnson did it in the rather more buttoned-up manner of threatening a snap election rather than accept the partys demands that he go. But constitutionally, it was the same principle.

Now, as the dust settles, Britain looks in a much better place than the US. Johnson was shuffled away. A leadership contest is taking place. Sometime after that maybe months, maybe years therell be a general election in which everyone is likely to accept the result. Things have gone back to normal. In the US, democracy feels fragile and tenuous, with a large part of the Republican party no longer recognising election outcomes.

Why? Whats the difference between them? Its natural to assume that the distinction might lie in the constitution. America has a single written constitution and numerous checks-and-balances. Britain has neither. Maybe, counter-intuitively, this more relaxed system holds up better than a formalised one.

But that is a blind alley. The key to what happened isnt about codified constitutions. Its about social norms. Did the political class act as if constitutional principles mattered? Did it behave as if these standards were true?

At the crucial moment, the Cabinet did precisely that. MPs said they had no confidence in him. Secretaries of state resigned. His ministerial ranks were left so depleted that government effectively ceased to function. And eventually, after some unseemly belligerence, he went.

But theres no room for complacency here. That is not the whole story. If you look at the last few years, rather than the last few weeks, a very different picture emerges.

From 2019 until earlier this summer, the party acted like Johnson was perfectly respectable. It did it through the unlawful prorogation of parliament, the purging of the parliamentary party, the attempt to dismantle the standards system, the dismissal of the ministerial code, the lies, the law breaking, the corruption. None of that made Tory MPs turn against him.

They never turned on the basis of morality or constitutional propriety. They turned on the basis of popularity. And that, ultimately, is the crucial distinction between the UK and US examples.

Johnson lost his popular support. Trump did not.

Even now, the former US president retains huge public backing. Fellow Republicans are too scared to come out against him. The same is not true in Britain. Johnson lost his support over Partygate and never got it back.

It was on that basis that Tory ministers and MPs finally moved to oppose him. If Johnson had still been cruising high in the opinion polls, those letters would never have gone in. He would still be in place now. Any talk of integrity or standards from those who served in his Cabinet is meaningless.

What if the public did not turn against him? What if Johnsons personal hold was stronger, or his political approach more effective, or his self-restraint more substantial? What if he had sufficient personal control not to attend parties in lockdown, as almost any other politician in the world does? Nothing in the British system would have stopped him from continuing on the path he had set: eroding standards, dismantling accountability, degrading truth.

But there is no recognition of this fact in the Conservative Party. There is no introspection. There is only the constant whirlwind of news. Onto the next thing.

On LBC last night, leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt was asked about her claim during the Brexit campaign that the UK would not be able to stop Turkey joining the EU. It was a false claim. The UK, like every other member state, had a veto. She could have now admitted it was false, apologised, and said she would try to do better. She could have taken this moment to reaffirm the value of truth in political discourse. Instead, she doubled down.

We need politicians who will uphold the norms of our culture regardless of whether they are popular or not. We need people who will stand up for what is right regardless of the opinion polls. That is what sustains our system.

At the moment it is clear that we do not have them. The Tory leadership hopefuls barely even mention Johnsons misbehaviour, let alone promise not to replicate it. They are now already starting to engage in it themselves.

Theres just silence, and distraction, and the constant whirlwind of news. No lessons are being learned. No principles are being affirmed. And that, more than anything, raises the danger of this happening again.

Next time, we might not be so lucky.

I stumbled across this 1970s debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault recently. Its a remarkable artifact. This is Chomsky before he became rather more eccentric. It is serious heavyweight stuff on the existence of universal human attributes. That all sounds abstract, but it reveals an intellectual crack, which would eventually lead to a fundamental split on the left between identity politics and socialism.

Afterwards, Chomsky would say: He struck me as completely amoral, Id never met anyone who was so totally amoral. I mean, I liked him personally, its just that I couldnt make sense of him. Its as if he was from a different species, or something.

I know, its two blokes half a century ago debating philosophy. Not the easiest sell. But it is genuinely gripping.

I first came across this Australian programme, which is packaged up into a podcast after broadcast, when I appeared on it years ago. I soon became a regular listener. It is perfect late night radio, Adams reassuring gravely tones providing serious intellectual heft to stories from across the world. From Hawaiis use of detention facilities to the European colonialist view of Australias mammals, it features items you just dont get to hear anywhere else. Patient, thorough and curious: an antidote to the usual tone of current affairs programmes.

You might know this from the Natalie Portman film on Netflix. That was great, but the book is better. Its the very best kind of sci-fi: mysterious, terrifying, operating somewhere beyond the range of human comprehension. It gives you that same feeling you get when looking at the recent extraordinary images from Nasa of being fundamentally incapable of understanding the scale and nature of the universe. Brilliant, beautiful stuff.

This is Ian Dunts Week, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If youd like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week,you can sign up here.

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The rampant populism of the Tory leadership contest shows how dangerous this moment is - iNews