Why I haven't written about politics for a while

If there is such thing as a seasoned reader to my blog, they will have noticed that I haven’t written about politics for a long time.
Where was my early thought on Boris Johnson’s premiership? Where has been the commentary on the current Labour leadership race? Where is the fire and passion that I showed in what I published at some length in the 2015 contest that saw Jeremy Corbyn elected?

What’s with all this sentimental poetry and frightfully polite, terribly safe, vanilla HR content on LinkedIn? Is that the tone of things to come? Has the loony left managed to force or exhaust me into political silence?

Just to be clear, I love the whole process of writing. I’m hugely invested in everything I write – I can’t do it any other way. But I have not been silenced.

When ancient Greek civilisations went to war with each other, the victor wouldn’t kill those on the losing side. They would turn their wrath instead on those who hadn’t taken a side in the first place. What smart people they were!

Politics, for me, has always meant taking a side. The political theorist Carl Schmitt argued that politics is precisely the distinction between friend and enemy. For me, politics has never just been about the opinions I’ve held, but it’s always been attached to a tribe.

That tribe, for me, was the Conservative party. I didn’t always like the party, don’t get me wrong. It was always a coalition of sometimes uneasy bedfellows: One Nation types (like me), Thatcherite neoliberals and social conservatives.

But it wasn’t Labour. It wasn’t the left. IT wasn’t them. I believed in equality of opportunity; they believed in equality of outcome. I believed people should have a fair chance to do their best; they believed we should get closer to a point where we all have the same. I believed in freedom of speech; they believed in the victim and professional grievance culture of identity politics.

Brexit changed everything for me. It wasn’t immediate. I hoped that the Tory party could still somehow be my tribe when it was all done and dusted, forever thankful to the brave remainers that took all the abuse and flack to stand up for what they believed in within the ranks of the party.

But resentment gnawed corrosively at my soul. Anger and unforgiveness is hard. I didn’t want to talk about politics anymore. I wanted to write about anything else.

I didn’t want to have debates. People would ask me what I thought of the latest developments and, I had to admit, I had hardly looked up to read the headlines – my newspaper subscriptions have been a dreadful waste of money over the last couple of years. I tried a few times, but I didn’t even know if I believed what I was writing or if I would have changed my mind a month down the line.

The Tory party would always have to make a choice. The whole country had to eventually – either we gave someone a mandate to take us out of the EU or we offered a second, decisive referendum. In electing Boris Johnson, the Tory party members – people like me, made the choice, and I believe the choice will be utterly ruinous.

A pathological liar, his bullying and vindictive aid and a sycophantic cabinet of absolute nobodies predominate in government now, all thoroughly committed to an act of national suicide so calamitous that the best they could say about it at the election was that they’d get it done.

Don’t believe me? One chancellor has already been seen off. The people I admired – the Ken Clarks and Dominic Grieves, were actually thrown out of the party (or had the whip withdrawn as it is politely called). How could I stay or justify parting with my hard-earned money when my political heroes were on their way out?

Leaving the Tory party is spectacularly undramatic. You don’t write a letter, appear before a committee or even get yourself thrown out with a tweet supporting a 100% income tax or proclaiming your love for the miners. You simply ignore the email and then the letters that remind you to renew and pay up.

By the time my date of expiration had arrived, I’d already told anyone who was interested in my inconsequential beliefs, and voted Lib Dem in the December election – this despite regarding the national Liberal Democrat party as appallingly lacking in credible leadership and knowing that I live in an area where it was essentially a wasted vote.

That no longer being a Tory felt so unimportant, so insignificant and so irrelevant to my life made me realise just how dead my old political sense of identity has become. That my long-cherished ambition to become an MP is probably for the birds now, no longer matters. I don’t care. I have my integrity, my values, and my beliefs about what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, and that’s my comfort.

I haven’t written about politics because, whilst I can encounter perspectives sympathetic and hostile to mine as ever before, I can’t reflect that in the really important moments of political participation – I have no say in the leadership of any political party anymore, and I can’t vote for a party that I honestly believe deserves it.

Some will have only known this discombobulated, homeless, ever-searching kind of politics and wonder what I’m making a fuss about. It’s a fair challenge. I am, quite simply, sharing my truth. I don’t get angry about stuff, write blogs about it and occasionally get into epic Twitter squabbles because I want to make a name for myself or see these things as worthwhile ends in themselves. I do it to develop, inform and crystallise my political conscience in an ever-changing world. I hope to take people in some way on the journeys I make when I decide what I think and where I stand.

I read the Telegraph and Spectator for perspectives that I enjoy hearing, because usually they are very aligned with mine and presented with whit and sparkle. I read the Guardian just to reassure myself that it still makes me angry, and the Times to marvel at columnists who, unlike me, are maddeningly clever people and supremely good at what they do.

Now these things will have to become ends in themselves. I have no tribe. I have no sense of security, knowing in advance what box I’ll place a cross in at some point 5 or so years from now. I don’t know which set of statistics I’ll try to find the supporting evidence for when I watch Prime Minister’s Questions.

Carl Schmitt believed that the friend/enemy distinction is the very essence of the political. HE’s right. In a political wilderness, I feel somewhat alone. I am sometimes gripped by the fear of writing about a subject because maybe I don’t know enough about it. I’m reluctant about throwing my time and energy behind causes in case I change my mind. I’m mindful that, since I no longer vote with my heart or pay another organisation to do its bit for the things I believe in, all I have to offer is the contributions I can make in word and deed to the things I believe in.

I don’t have an easy way to make it matter now, and that’s both scary and wonderfully exciting. All I can say is that, I’m still in the early stages of my political rebirth. I don’t say that to sound important or grandiose, just honest about how I feel and what I’m thinking.

All this is why I haven’t written about politics for a while. I feel like what I say matters more than it ever has before. But I assure you that I will again when, to borrow a phrase from a book I’ve recently read, I find my reason big enough.