The revolution will be half-empty

“Great Britain — the country I once led,” Liz Truss declared to the Conservative Political Action Conference in London. And to give the attendees credit, no one laughed.

Truss was addressing a half-empty room in a hotel in Greenwich. The audience could have come to hear about time-shares, or how to get rich from crypto, or the secrets that doctors don’t want you to know, but as it turned out they had come to Save The West. The slogan was everywhere. Most of the speakers were slightly elliptical about who we were Saving the West from, although we could pretty much guess.

CPAC, as it’s always known, is a big deal in the US, where it fills a void that, improbably, turns out to exist if you don’t have annual party conferences. It’s far from clear whether there’s a market for it in the UK. What there definitely are is tickets. If you fancy hearing from Andrea Jenkyns or Nile Gardiner or a host of names that mean nothing to me at all, you can still get tickets for Friday and Saturday at £100 a pop. I promise you there’ll be a seat.

As well as somewhere to take the weight off your feet, you’ll get all the British people you absolutely expect saying all the things you like to hear. There were a lot of complaints about the blob, the Human Rights Act, and True Brexit Never Really Having Been Tried. “We are facing a communist government,” one speaker declared, revealing that he either had very unrealistic expectations of Andy Burnham or a very strange understanding of the word “communist”. And there were a lot of complaints about how you can get arrested just for sending a tweet, possibly because the speakers hadn’t realised that Reform is now in favour of people getting arrested for sending tweets, certainly if they’re about Nigel Farage.

On top of that, there was a roster of lost-looking Americans, who deserve credit for showing up, given that they’ve been told repeatedly that simply visiting London these days will see you fined for breaking Sharia law and then mugged for your watch.

The two sides turned out not to mix as well as might have been hoped

The two sides turned out not to mix as well as might have been hoped. To be an American Conservative these days, you have to be able to say with a straight face that Donald Trump is a Godly and tasteful man who won the 2020 election. That’s filtered out a lot of people with qualities like judgement and self-respect. It’s true that Britain’s Tories have had a few purges of intellectuals and dissenters, but not to anything like the same extent.

Indeed the British speakers, from Jacob Rees-Mogg to David Starkey, prided themselves on their intellectual brilliance. Perhaps none more so than Lord Young of Acton — Toby Young. In his capacity as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union.

For someone whose big thing is free speech, Young spent a very long time complaining about the things that other people say. As Voltaire put it: “I disagree with what you say, subscribe to my Substack to find out why.” Young’s particular complaint was that a journalist had suggested he didn’t believe in climate change. Nothing, it turned out, could be further from the truth. “Few people on my side of that debate deny that climate change is real,” he said. “We don’t even maintain that man-made carbon emissions aren’t a contributory factor.” It was the very spirit of open-minded engagement with the overwhelming scientific view. Although… “The rise of temperatures,” Young went on, “may have been exaggerated.” Oh, right.

The problem, Young explained, is that people who disagree with him “are deaf to argument”. It’s all a question of definitions. You are an intellectual isolationist, convinced of your moral superiority, while I am an insurgent who sticks to my guns. You are in a Metropolitan bubble, whereas I am addressing a half-empty room of Liz Truss fans in a London hotel.

But compared to some of the speakers who followed, Young was Plato rolled into Demosthenes. Representative of the American contingent was Jack Posobiec, who had come to tell us about the stories the media doesn’t tell us about. In his case, it turns out the media hasn’t told him anything about life or politics in the UK. Watching him deliver lines that clearly get big rounds of applause stateside to total silence in London was fascinating. “I believe God has a plan for Donald Trump!” he declared. “It is only by turning to God that we can save the West,” he said, looking baffled at the silence that greeted him.

That wasn’t a problem for Matt Goodwin. He was described as a “veteran” of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which is a funny way to spell “loser”. Goodwin’s theme was that the British political class hates the British people. This would explain why he was so keen to get into parliament, because few people seem to hate Britain more than Goodwin. His speech attacked our police, our foreign policy, our schools and universities, and quite a lot of our people.

Which people? Well, as he closed, he told us what he wanted to see: “a nation that looks and feels like something we know and something our ancestors built.” That might have been a complaint about modern architecture, but is it possible there’s some other thing about the way that the nation looks which Goodwin doesn’t like? It did feel like we were getting to the heart of who we’re Saving The West from.