The Right-Wing is Eating Itself - and I’ve Brought Snacks

A week on the British right featuring Channel theatrics, arguments over Englishness and an increasingly crowded political firing squad.

Good afternoon, all.

I suppose I should start this off with an apology for the late publishing. Usually on a Sunday I do try to get it out for you in the morning. However, having done a rather longish walk for charity yesterday, I decided that I was going to sleep a little bit today, and even the fur daemon let me do so, for which I’m incredibly grateful.

Miracles do happen, and apparently they happen on Sundays.

For those of you who do not know, I am in a semi-abusive relationship with my fur daemon, who loves to wake me anywhere from 4 o’clock to 4.30 in the morning by variously shoving her nose in my ear and blowing, slamming the cupboard doors right next to me, and occasionally giving me a good hard slap.

I don’t know whether she actually did any of her usual repertoire this morning, but I was so unconscious that I was just unresponsive. Maybe we’ll never know.

Needless to say, it was a much later start to the day than is my usual thing. So for this week’s post, we are just going to have a bit of a look at what has been happening on the right wing of the United Kingdom.

Pack snacks. It’s a long and deeply silly safari.

The most recent controversy I’d like to pick up is around Andy Burnham. And it’s not that he is the Starmer of the North or anything like that (I haven’t quite made my mind up about the man yet), but rather to do with his wife.

So there were a couple of headlines that came out yesterday, the first of which I believe was LBC, who said that “Andy Burnham’s wife leaves marketing job to take on ‘first lady’ style role”. Eish. Now, that is quite the unfortunate headline, because this is not actually what’s happening.

What Marie-France van Heel has done is, in fact, resign from her position with an electric vehicle charging company called Be.EV, and she has done so to support her husband. Which I think is perfectly fair enough.

A woman supporting her spouse. Scandalous, I know. Clutch your pearls.

The umbrage that’s been taken, though, is at the use of the words “first lady”, seeing as we do not have that, with some of the other responses being, “What would Queen Camilla say?” It’s all pretty hilarious. Nothing says “I love my country” quite like going apoplectic over a job title that nobody actually gave anyone. But what is very interesting is that most of the partners of Prime Ministers have filled supporter roles, everyone from Philip May to Samantha Cameron to Cherie Blair to Dennis Thatcher.

There have been multiple partners who have given support to their partners while working as Prime Minister. But this particular fannywobble comes down to the fact that it was called “first lady”.

And just to clarify something here, Andy Burnham did not get up at the podium at Downing Street and announce, “Meet my wife, Marie-France van Heel. She is now your first lady. Bow down to her!”

No, no, it was all down to the framing. Which, for certain corners of the press, is more or less the entire business model. Now, the other concern around this is apparently the taxpayer cost. Because nothing gets the pitchforks out quite like a woman on a plane - all of which would largely have been covered anyway.

The fact is that Marie-France van Heel was going to travel with Andy Burnham quite a lot of the time, as she did this week to the UN General Assembly, where she met Olena Zelenska, Melania Trump, and a bunch of the other partners of world leaders. But this has become a frothing issue because people on the right, and especially on social media, basically just need something to get angry about. Give them a headline and a free afternoon and they’ll build you an outrage the size of Table Mountain.

Now, speaking of things to get angry about, you will all have seen that Danny Tommo, leader of the now infamous Patriot Platform, or, as I like to call them, the Black Shorts, has been arrested.

Shame. Truly, my heart bleeds.

He got arrested because he livestreamed himself this week stabbing a dinghy in the middle of the Channel with a rescue worker still on board. Inevitably, there was a lot of consternation (and very sudden fundraising) on the right, and there were a lot of the usual “two-tier policing, two-tier justice” proclamations.

Speaking frankly now I have to add that if I find that I ever felt like committing a crime like public property destruction or endangering rescue worker’s lives, I’m probably not going to do so while livestreaming it online.

Call me old-fashioned, but even the dimmest among us must know that this is not the most clever thing in the world to do - especially when you already have a prison stay behind my name for an attempted kidnapping, but that might just be me.

The hilarity of Tommo being arrested and grown men crying about it set aside, this whole Patriot Platform thing is becoming more and more dangerous.

Within hours of his arrest this week, we saw, again, a very rapid mass mobilisation of a bunch of right-wing thugs (and yes, they are thugs as there is no better way to describe them), in balaclavas, who went to go and stage a protest outside Basingstoke where Danny Tommo was being held ahead of his hearing.

Nothing screams “proud patriot” quite like hiding your face from the country you claim to love. Danny Tommo has now been charged with criminal damage, and we will probably be seeing next week if he gets bail.

However, I can’t help but feel that this story keeps gathering momentum, and I do also feel that the government at this stage isn’t doing enough to address the real concerns about a bunch of balaclava-clad, black-clad men walking around coastal towns across the country, intimidating all and sundry.

If a group of masked men even the slightest shade above pale were marching through Margate chanting in any other language, COBRA would have been convened before the kettle boiled.

Now, the other bit of news that really did catch my attention was Jacob Rees-Mogg. And for once, and I hate saying this, the haunted coat stand actually said something sensible. I know. I had to have a lie down too. Take a moment.

There was a big furore, again, over the past two weeks or so about English ethnicity again. Because of course there was. It had been at least a fortnight.

And controversially, I would say that English ethnicity can sort of kind of be a thing:

If you say, “Oh, my ancestry is Huguenot, Norman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking”, I suppose you could say that is an English ethnicity¹. Mind you, by that measure, half of Kent is technically French.

But that aside, there were, again, attacks on Rishi Sunak, also someone who I do not like but will defend to the hilt on this, about whether he can actually be English. Now, this subject does need a fair bit of exploration, but what it basically boils down to is that Rishi Sunak is English.

Sorry, lads.

Yes, he might not have 17 centuries of Anglo-Saxon Viking blood running through his veins. However, culturally, linguistically, historically, he is an Englishman. He is certainly awkward enough to be one. Where it went weird was when Jacob Rees-Mogg himself came to the fore to defend Rishi Sunak.

In his words, “we are a mongrel people” - and that does remain true, but it was just very interesting to see that the right is now being further split between those that believe in blood being the only measure of Englishness, and those actually being a bit fucking pragmatic about it and going,

“Oh, you know what? This brown person is English, regardless of who they pray to, because they were born here, raised here, educated here, and became our fucking Prime Minister.”

Lekker, Jacob. Well done. Don’t get used to the compliment.

What the is-he-or-is-he-not English conversation showed though is that the right of politics is definitely splitting far more than I would have expected. The very hard right, the likes of Restore, are truly leaning into horrific concepts like blood purity, and looking at who deserves what. It’s all very 1930s, just with worse haircuts and more Facebook groups.

But that, in our electoral system, is going to be disastrous for the likes of, specifically, Reform, and it will ultimately also help the Tories, because what is going to happen is that you are going to get three camps.

You are going to get the hard right, made up of Restore on the far right and, sort of more to the centre right than them, Reform. Think of it as a circular firing squad in matching gilets.

And they can be bickering among each other, meaning that the seats in right-leaning constituencies will very likely go to the Tories again. Will they go to an extent that they can become a large opposition? Possibly. Will it go to the extent where the Tories become the largest party? Very unlikely. Will it mean that the Tories will win the next election? Almost definitely not. That would require the electorate to develop collective amnesia, and we’re not quite that far gone.

Yet.

While Kemi Badenoch has, according to polls, been doing a slight bit better, she still has not really addressed so many of the things that made the 14 years of Tory leadership of the country so utterly, utterly disastrous. Being marginally less awful than your predecessors is not, strictly speaking, a plan.

Now, I would also say that this does not mean that Labour is gonna come in with a stonking majority at the next general election, which, from the looks of things, will be in 2029, according to Andy Burnham.

But it does mean that the right side of the vote is going to split, and I think it is going to split more and more, and it is going to get a lot worse as Reform tries to grab from both the Tory and Restore sides, and they are going to compromise everything and achieve nothing, while at the same time becoming more far right and pretending they are more centre right. Trying to be all things to all bigots is, it turns out, not quite the winning strategy.

So it’s a very interesting thing to see on that side. Labour has had the Burnham bounce, but at the same time, they are still holding onto things that are utterly stupid, just utterly idiotic, like the fact that we are still banging down on immigrants, and very specifically on care workers.

It does boggle my mind that Shabana Mahmood, who really is a piss-poor Home Secretary and who has been tacking very right wing with her policies, is still in place. At this point, I’m not entirely sure whether she’s sitting in a Labour cabinet or auditioning for Reform. And I suppose that’s one of the things that is still gonna probably preclude me from voting Labour at the next general election, and have me looking at alternative votes, if I can afford to do so.

The long and short of this particular ramble is that the political picture is shifting, and we can definitely see that, especially in a very recent poll across all the constituencies in the country, which showed that Reform is really taking a knock. Last year it was significantly higher, but this year Reform is back in third place behind the Conservatives. So things are looking better. Relatively speaking. It’s a low bar, but I’ll take it.

The caveat of course remains that there’s still one in five people voting for Reform, which is really troubling. One in five. Eish. But at the same time, we seem to be slowly moving in the right direction.

There are a couple of things that need to change to speed things up, most importantly probably Burnham needing to sort out his Home Office. They need to immediately stop the anti-migrant messaging that Labour has been dabbling in, which hasn’t worked in any way, shape or form. All it’s done is alienate left-wing voters without winning over right-wing voters in any meaningful way.

You can’t out-bigot the bigots, chaps. They’ve had far more practice.

So there is a lot to happen, but for the first time in ages, I do feel that despite the negativity, despite the overt racism that’s still being shown, there are a couple of green shoots, and my hope is that by the time we hit 2029, Labour will have found its feet and become Labour for the people again, and not just for issues like migration and keeping businesses happy.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m not going to make any predictions at this stage. I’ve watched far too many pundits confidently call an election and then eat their hat on live telly.

Now, on that note, I am going to very tenderly rest my very tired calves and thighs from yesterday. My legs are currently about as stable as a Reform policy platform. Hoping everyone has a fantastic Sunday, and I’ll chat to you guys during the week.

1. The major caveat here is, of course, call yourself ethnically English - but the moment you tell someone else who isn’t ethnically English that they are in any way or form not entitled to the same protections and rights as you have, you have crossed the line into outright racism and can fuck straight off.