After Leon Trotsky’s assassin, Ramon Mercador, was sentenced to the maximum 20-year stretch for murder in 1940, his Mexican captors were intrigued by his tight-lipped response to their questions. Assuming that there must be some deeper motivations for Mercador’s tryst with destiny and an ice-pick, they sent in a psychiatrist to tease them out.
The psychiatrist’s final report was a disappointment to the Mexican government. There was a lot of juicy stuff about Ramon’s ambiguous feelings towards the rival father figures personified by Trotsky and Stalin, but it was his main conclusion that dismayed them the most, to the point where the report was left unpublished for many years. The psychiatrist said Mercador’s murderous political commitment pointed up the wider truth that all politicians were functionally mad; that compost of need, neurosis and the quest for powers to overcompensate for the awareness of impotence within themselves, marked down the whole lot as being barking.
That is a little extreme. Although a lot of politicians I know are slightly peculiar, many others are no weirder than the average, and on the surface are inspired and motivated by the worthiest ideals, whatever their political complexion. However, the unravelling of Liam Fox reminded me how at least one part of the political spectrum is very odd indeed. You may have noticed that there’s a strand of right-wing opinion, shared by Fox and his supporters, that is surprisingly dogmatic on a range of apparently unrelated topics. Take a peek at the musings of James Dellingpole, Melanie Phillips, or Guido Fawkes. True, there is a kind of blind tribalism you’ll find elsewhere, although their rancorousness is of a kind that died out on the left a long time ago (or at least that part of the left from whence some, but not all, of these new Illuminati originally came); and as often as not, that barking noise they make is a cry for attention.
But there remains a Canon of Principles held with more tenacity than the current Labour Party could dream of. Let’s list them, and try to see some connecting tissue between them all. To start with, Markets are Paramount. That’s because they create monopolies for a rich elite, and these right-wing ideologues are hierarchical lackeys to the core of their being, and go gooey at the thought of anyone richer and therefore more powerful than themselves. Markets also provide a way of ousting obsolete elites, so you don’t waste time on fawning to the no-longer-rich-and-therefore-powerful.
And you can see how this Fundamental Principle feeds into other Unvanquishable Truths: extremely harsh on Law and Order, backed up by Unforgiving Old Testament Morality (to keep the lower orders in their place, with the backing of God); zealous hatred of the BBC (stops the rich and powerful creating a monopoly with advert breaks); supports Aggressive Military Action everywhere (ooh, aren’t those boys so powerful); hates Muslims (we need an enemy for our boys to fight); hates the European Union (see BBC); denies Climate Change (see BBC); secretly hates NHS (see BBC); hates the Welfare State (see Law and Order and BBC); exults The Family (small enough unit to control: see Markets, Law and Order and God); hates Abortion (see Family and God); worships America (see all of the above); defends Israel under any circumstances. That last principle is where things start getting a bit strange, because this principle is, in context, a good thing. It means that the instinctive anti-Semitism which permanently stank up the wilder shores of British Conservatism has been more or less expunged (although in some cases merely transferred to Muslims, despite the harsher adherents to that faith being otherwise entirely sound on God, Family, Abortion and Aggressive Military Action).
The trouble is, this principle is now carved so deeply into the granite of Ineradicable Values that Israel, which is as prone as any other state to stupidity and excess, is now beyond any criticism. Which probably gets us back to God, and so we’re still more or less all of a piece.
But although I can just about square the paramountcy of Opposition to Human Rights with the Agenda (you can tick off hierarchies, prisons, Muslims, God and Law and Order here), where do Phonics fit in? Pardon? You heard. Phonics. It’s a way of teaching reading and writing. I won’t explain in detail, but it’s like catnip to many members of the Thatcherite Neo-Con Community. Just whisper “Phonics” and they’ll start yelping like macaques, dismissing every aspect of education over the past 50 years as a plot devised in the deepest pit of Hell by Stalin, Hitler and Beelzebub.
Which suggests that the detailed principles themselves don’t matter; the point is simply to have a principle to cling to for comfort, so you have the opportunity to be vile to everyone else while you moon over your masters counting their money. Which also suggests some clever entryist could infiltrate their online realm and establish some more, entirely random Indestructible Principles. Like the Restoration of the Anti-Macassar. Or wearing suede shoes to play golf. Or bringing back Slavery. Oh sorry, they’re probably already working on that one.
