Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2025

The strange rebirth of English patriotism

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Niall McCrae discusses what he calls “a new crusade” as the downtrodden English rediscover — or in many cases, discover for the first time — patriotic feelings for their nation, and earn the scorn and contempt of the ruling class and their media fart-catchers:

“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A wave of patriotism swept across England last summer. Flags were tied to lampposts up and down the country, but while these displays had wide public support, the intelligentsia were troubled, particularly as the colours were often flown in areas of cultural diversity or on roads passing hotels accommodating illegal immigrants. This suggested provocation, rather than the use of national flags to celebrate sporting success.

Politicians and Guardian commentators were careful not to appear too negative, but they emphasised unity and inclusion over nationalistic fervour. The Union Jack was preferable to the St George’s Cross, because they associated the latter more with the far right (this is not accurate, as groups such as the National Front and BNP rallied under the Union Jack).

The Union Jack (properly termed “flag” as a jack is hoisted at sea), comprises the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. It is perhaps the most impressive flag in the world, a classic design of great cultural impact. How globalists, the EU and Islamists would like to banish it!

The “Unite the Kingdom” march led by Tommy Robinson in September, which brought a million people to the streets of London, was a marvellous spectacle of patriotism. For the counter-Jihad movement, conflict in the Middle East is regarded as an existential struggle against militant Islam. Israeli flags are often waved towards pro-Palestine marchers, and the London rally gave several Zionists a platform at Whitehall. However, the vast majority of marchers were there for one country only – their own. This was truly a British event, with a roughly equal mix of Union and St George flags, alongside some Welsh dragons and Scottish saltires, and Irish tricolours too.

Significantly, there was another symbol prominently at the London march: the Christian cross. A poignant moment was at the ramparts of Westminster Bridge, where a fearless young man mounted the head of the stone lion and from that precarious pedestal raised in one hand the flag of St George, and in the other a wooden cross. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOpagGvkQk9/)

I first observed the resurgence of Christian faith at the huge protests against the Covid-19 regime. Several marchers bore crosses, or placards asserting the power of God over earthly evil. The Book of Revelation was quoted, and when the “vaccine” was launched it was cast as the “Mark of the Beast”.

Socially unacceptable they may have been, but now St George and Christian crosses are regularly appearing together in gatherings for patriotic or traditional causes. In his book Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags (2017), Tim Marshall observed that “with the rise of Islam in Europe, these symbols are likely to be increasingly used by the far right to try to define the continent as what they think it is, and in opposition to what they think it is not”. You can’t get a book released by a mainstream publisher without expressing such approved outlook, but Marshall is making the mistake of blaming patriots for the devaluing of their national flag; it is surely the subversive ideology of the progressive left that has taught generations that national pride is regressive and bigoted. Meanwhile “woke” warriors are not shy of waving the Pride rainbow, transgender stripes and the flag of Palestine. And the likes of Hope Not Hate had no complaint about huge fascist-style marches awash in the blue and yellow stars of the EU.

November 23, 2025

Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:

eLbOwS uP!

The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.

The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.

But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.

Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.

Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.

The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.

The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.

Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.

November 20, 2025

“Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley profiles my local MP, Jamil Jivani:

A screengrab from MP Jamil Jivani’s video that is critical of the Liberals’ national school-lunches program. Photo by Jamil Jivani/X

A few eyebrows raised earlier this year when Toronto-area MP Jamil Jivani, long heralded as an essential younger voice in the Canadian conservative movement, wasn’t offered a critic role by party leader Pierre Poilievre. There are 74 official Opposition critics, which is more than half the Conservative caucus. And if Poilievre and Jivani don’t see eye to eye, one might still have thought Jivani’s relationship with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance would be a useful resource.

There’s also the fact that Jivani is rather good at defending conservative policy, especially on the social side — better, one might argue, than Poilievre. On Monday, Jivani posted a video of himself arguing that Canadian children should go hungry at school. Or at least, that’s how certain hysterics chose to interpret his opposition to the Liberals’ national school-lunches program.

“It should frighten us that there are parents who can’t buy their own kids lunch,” he tells a constituent in the video. “(But) the government shouldn’t be your daddy; the government shouldn’t be your mother. We have families, and families should be strong enough to provide for their children, and when they’re not that should break our hearts. … It should not be used as a justification for the government to have even more influence, even more input, even more control over our lives.”

The program is already underway, with $1 billion in funding over five years committed as transfers to the provinces in 2024 — three years after the Liberals first promised it. And the Liberals recently announced plans for more. “Permanent” funding of more than $200 million is set to kick in in 2029.

The response anywhere to Jivani’s intervention, anywhere to his left, in a nutshell: “Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”. Even among some conservatives we hear the traditional timid refrain: Is this a “winning issue”? Or is the party just making itself look callous? What will the media think? Jivani, unlike many more seasoned Conservatives, seems not to care so much about the potential blowback.

Lunches served at school — paid or subsidized — are hardly a brand-new statist invention. They’ve been around forever, although they’re more common in certain kinds of schools than others. A 2013 Queen’s University study looked at 436 Canadian schools and found only 53 per cent had a cafeteria. (When I was a kid, many of my friends walked home for lunch and back afterwards.) And Jivani concedes in the video that many Canadians will like the sound of a national school-lunch program. Who would argue against it? It’s obviously far more important that kids eat breakfast and lunch (and dinner) than it is who provides it.

But that assumes a national school-lunch program, or even a provincial or local school-lunch program, is the quickest and easiest way to make sure kids are fed. It obviously isn’t, but trust in government, somehow, is a tough nut to crack in this country. Mass pandemic-era supports like CERB weren’t unalloyed successes, but they proved governments at least know how to shovel money out the door when they feel it absolutely necessary.

Especially since so many Canadian schools don’t have cafeterias — 53 per cent of elementary schools in the Queen’s study, and 82 per cent of combined elementary-secondary schools — it would make much more sense just to mail every parent who needs one a subsidy and let them pack the lunch, or the lunch money, that their kids need.

I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not a Conservative, but I don’t mind Mr. Jivani as my Member of Parliament because he doesn’t seem to me to be a typical Canadian Conservative (I thought it was significant that the PPC chose not to run against him once he became the Conservative candidate). In my YouTube recommendations, this video appeared with some sensible views from the Deputy Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Melissa Lantsman:

The trouble, as always with parties in opposition, is that they can sound like they’ve got great ideas and will energetically address the problems they identify while not in government … but once they go into office, sound remarkably like the government they just defeated and little or nothing actually changes.

November 18, 2025

Canada’s divide isn’t left versus right, it’s old versus young

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Older Canadians seem to be taking joy in sticking up their elbows and robbing younger Canadians of opportunities, jobs, and hope. It’s quite literally un-Canadian, but the Boomers have always been a generation apart and this is merely the latest manifestation of their self-centred worldview. Alexander Brown wonders if this divide can be fixed before the country itself is ruined:

“eLbOwS uP!”

“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.

The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.

The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the “safe” choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.

If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.

    The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!

    At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian …

    We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.

On and on. Yada and yada.

Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.

Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.

Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction“, or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.

Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism”. But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.

Of course, the Liberals survived Monday’s budget vote … for now:

When I saw Elizabeth May stand up and ask Mark Carney what looks like a completely planted question, I assumed the budget would pass and I was correct. Planted questions normally come from government MPs and are a soft way for the government to push their agenda.

This time, it wasn’t a Liberal MP, well at least not a Liberal MP in name and fact. Instead it was Green leader, or deputy leader, or let’s be honest the lonely lady in the corner who is the only Green MP asking the question.

That statement put the Liberals one vote closer to passing their budget and of course May later confirmed ahead of the vote that she would back the budget. This was after saying couldn’t back the budget, might back the budget, would probably back the budget, definitely wouldn’t back the budget and finally would back the budget.

How anyone can take Elizabeth May seriously is beyond me.

How the other votes went…

Ahead of the vote there were lots of questions about how things would go. Would all MPs show up or be able to vote online? Would people abstain? Would MPs vote for the budget without crossing the floor?

In the end, the budget passed 170 to 168 with two NDPers abstaining. That leaves five votes not accounted for and we will figure out.

Here is how the vote went.

Now, some members who were not in their seats did vote electronically. I didn’t see Matt Jeneroux vote electronically and I’m told that he is in British Columbia with is family. Also not voting, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.

Conservatives Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid both voted no but only in the time that is allowed for MPs voted electronically to claim tech problems. They were both in the House, so why were didn’t they vote in person?

Regardless, the NDP rushed out to say they voted against the budget but also made sure that it passed with their two abstensions.

As for all this talk of a Christmas election, had the government lost this vote and the PM gone to see the Governor General tomorrow, the earliest election date would have been December 25.

A Christmas election.

November 12, 2025

The legacy media are still fanatically pushing the “Tories in disarray” line

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s good to see that sometimes you get good value for your money. In this case, it’s the massive financial subsidies the federal government pay out to most of the Canadian legacy media outlets, so that the media ignores stories that the Liberals look bad but push the living bejesus out of anything that makes the Conservatives look bad … even if they have to distort the story almost out of recognition. Brian Lilley has the details:

I told you this would happen, the legacy media is trying to make this whole floor crossing thing into a PC versus Reform Party thing. As I broke down all of the background information that I could muster and tried to present it in a straightforward way, I said this would be a narrative of the MSM.

The reality is, the frustrations exist for a number of reasons but Pierre being too conservative is not the main issue here, it’s that they didn’t win in April. It all goes back to that and how different people interpret that loss and the leader’s response to the loss.

If you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth your time just to understand some of the nuance that you won’t find from other media.

There is no party divide …

The idea that there is still a schism on the modern Conservative Party between old PC voters or members and those that came from the Canadian Alliance or Reform side is not only false, those pushing it are showing their ignorance. The parties merged more than 20 years ago, they governed as the Conservatives for 10 years, anyone that left over this supposed divide left years ago, but the media can’t give this up and so they play into it with Chris d’Entremont on the weekend.

That was followed by Adam Chambers, the Conservative MP for Simcoe North in Ontario who pushed back against the idea that middle of the road Conservatives like him aren’t welcome in Pierre Poilievre’s party.

A hat tip to CBC Watcher on X who grabs so many of these clips and posts them.

Well done by Adam, not that it will help. This is a narrative some in the media are deciding to run with.

They will ignore that d’Entremont first ran under Andrew Scheer, hardly a Red Tory and in fact a so-con and d’Entremont was comfortable with that. Maybe because as a local French CBC outfit pointed out, d’Entremont is also on the pro-life side, the one the Liberals normally hate.

Oh … and another point on CBC’s reporting here. Remember the claim that a staffer was shoved out of the way … this is at the bottom of the CBC article that made the claim.

The Toronto Star will not be outdone …

This is a headline that I can’t believe the Toronto Star actually ran.

I’m pretty sure that columnist Althia Raj is old enough to remember all the way back to the morning of December 16, 2024. I know that was a REALLLLLLY long time ago, like, literally decades (please read that with a Valley girl upspeak).

If you don’t know that date, you will know what happened, because that is the day that Chrystia Freeland stabbed Justin Trudeau in the front, not the back. On the day that she was supposed to deliver the federal government’s fall economic statement, she issued a scathing resignation letter instead.

This of course also came after months of Liberal MPs pushing Trudeau to resign. A letter had even circulated among caucus members demanding he stepped down.

Liberal MPs couldn’t make Trudeau leave, Freeland’s resignation couldn’t make Trudeau leave, the 20 point lead the Conservatives then enjoyed couldn’t make Trudeau leave – it was Trump that did it.

All of that was wilder, had more drama than last week, but sure, tell people we haven’t seen this in decades. The column penned by Raj doesn’t mention Trudeau, it doesn’t mention Freeland, but it does want you to believe we haven’t seen this in like, FOREVER!

November 7, 2025

Crossing the floor in Parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s not an everyday thing, but I saw someone mention on social media that there had been over 300 floor-crossings since Confederation. The latest Member of Parliament to switch parties … to literally walk across the floor in Parliament to join Carney’s Liberal party is Nova Scotia’s Chris d’Entremont:

The speculation in Ottawa about floor crossers is getting silly, some of the names being pushed don’t make any sense. Which makes me think that this is really an attempt by the Liberals to try and destabilize the Conservatives.

Sorry, that would be “destablise” in Mark Carney’s new English but more on that shortly.

We have seen Liberals push name after name including Chris d’Entremont who did cross, but others who have said they have no interest in crossing. That was the case for Dominique Vien the Conservative MP from Quebec’s south shore who had to post a video after jerks like me published her name following weeks of speculation.

If you don’t speak French, let me summarize, or sumarise in Carney English. She says that she’s heard the rumours that she would be leaving the Conservative caucus to sit as a Liberal or an independent, but that’s not true. She states clearly that she is and will remain a Conservative and that she doesn’t like Mark Carney’s budget.

Meanwhile, Joël Godin, the MP for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier a riding northwest of Quebec City, who has been named as a possible floor crosser declined to answer questions entering caucus on Wednesday. Does that mean he’s ready to cross or not just putting up with the BS?

Conservative insiders tell me that he won’t be changing teams anytime soon.

The rumour mill is insane, with Liberals pushing the idea that all kinds of Conservatives are looking to jump ship. I’ve had several Liberals tell me that Michael Chong has been looking to cross the floor, an idea that is so ridiculous that I didn’t even call Chong to ask him because anyone floating that doesn’t know the man or conservative politics.

After I mentioned that on 580 CFRA in Ottawa, Chong called me to assure me that he wasn’t crossing to the Liberals. Michael, I never doubted you.

It’s doubtful that other names Liberals are pushing will come to fruition.

What is clear is that Carney and the Liberals are reaching out to Conservative MPs and making them offers to switch parties. Are they making illegal offers? I’d really like to know what has been put forward.

Is a “comfy landing” being offered for those that will cross? It wouldn’t be the first time that kind of thing has been offered.

As to the particular motivations for d’Entremont decamping to the Liberal benches, discussions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter indicate that he just barely got elected this time around, that he’d been fired by Pierre Poilievre as Deputy Speaker, and he decided he had a better chance of getting back into Parliament as a Liberal in the next election. Quinn Patrick reports that the Liberals had been trying to get d’Entremont to join them for quite some time:

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the Liberals had been courting former Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont behind the scenes for five years before he ultimately crossed the aisle.

“We’ve been trying to recruit him for a long time,” Joly told reporters in French on Parliament Hill on Wednesday. “Finally, he saw the light.”

D’Entremont had served as a Conservative MP for six years, after first being elected in the 2019 election.

As several people pointed out, that conveniently meant he’s qualified for the platinum-plated MP pension plan … but I’m sure that’s not why he switched parties.

Liberal MP Kody Blois, who also represents a riding in Nova Scotia, confirmed that he and d’Entremont had been speaking “for a long time about the ways in which we can collaborate.”

“It’s great to see Mr. d’Entremont join. If there’s other members of Parliament feeling the same way, again, I think we’re always welcome to those conversations,” said Blois.

While Blois didn’t explicitly say he had been attempting to enlist d’Entremont, he said the Liberals are a big-tent party with room to accept more “moderate” conservatives.

When asked if the Carney government was actively trying to recruit more MPs, Blois said that “wouldn’t be a conversation I’m going to have right here in front of the media.”

The former Conservative MP met with Prime Minister Mark Carney at a post-budget media conference on Wednesday, saying he didn’t believe his values as a “red Tory” were being “represented.”

“I didn’t find I was represented there … my ideals of an easterner, of a red Tory and quite honestly of trying to find ways to find solutions and help the community rather than trying to oppose everything that’s happening,” said d’Entremont.

He also alluded to the possibility of other Conservative MPs “in the same boat” but stopped short of naming anyone specific, saying he would let them share their stories “if the time comes.”

However, he has been the only one to cross the aisle thus far.

Conservatives and their supporters have accused d’Entremont of betraying his constituents and his values in pursuit of his own ambitions.

November 1, 2025

MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.

Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.

Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.

In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.

Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.

[…]

You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.

The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.

Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)

For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.

And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.

October 27, 2025

“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Daniel Jupp considers the recent schism in the Church of England, which has left the original church shorn of the vast majority of Anglican worshippers across the globe:

“Canterbury Cathedral aerial image” by John D Fielding is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Today, though, the English Church is broken. The Anglican Communion, which encompassed all the places across the world touched by English exploration, discovery, trade and power, where English Christian missionaries often led the way, has witnessed a devastating schism. At the start of this month Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. As is tradition, the appointment was approved by the Prime Minister and the King, but the nomination came from the Church.

Whether Anglican Christians worldwide approved doesn’t seem to have been considered. Based on multiple past fissures between the part of the Church active in the United Kingdom and the (much larger) Anglican communities globally which had each time been papered over, it may be that the hierarchy in England assumed that the same would happen again.

If so, they were wrong.

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (also known as Gafcon) represent the Anglican faith in Africa. Their response was to declare publicly that they would no longer send delegates to Church meetings in the United Kingdom, no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals or a seat of authority to which they deferred, and no longer consider themselves in the same communion as the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England within England. Perhaps even more tellingly, they asserted that they were the true Anglican communion, more loyal to the instructions of the Bible and Anglican interpretation of those than priests in England. There’s a subtle but powerful distinction there – they were saying not that they had broken away from an Anglican vision of Biblical instruction and Christian identity but that the Church in England had done so.

African Anglicans now assert that they are the true Anglicans, and that the organisation within the UK is not. And in terms of the number of people who follow their message, they are right to assert this.

In losing the African churches and the global, more conservative branch of Anglicanism, the Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet.

Imagine a company that lost 80 per cent of its customers. Or a political party that lost 80 per cent of its voters. Or a nation state that lost 80 per cent of its territory. These would in each case be recognised as unmitigated disasters.

Now imagine this following a previous disaster, which was the end of Justin Welby’s period as Archbishop over a scandal based on not being firm enough and honest enough about paedophile cases in the clergy. One would think the Church might be looking for a non-controversial appointment intended to restore moral trust immediately and defuse criticism.

They did not do this. Knowing the much more conservative and traditionalist stance held by the majority of Anglicans, they chose not to listen to those people, and did something it knew to be passionately opposed by them.

There is an intense irony here that gets to the heart of the self-inflicted problems of the Church of England today. Sarah Mullally has been very clear on the kind of Church she believes in – she’s a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and activism, she has strongly backed asylum and migration, she is a self-declared feminist, and she is both politically and it seems religiously progressive. As Bishop of London, she boasted about representing a diverse and multicultural city, and put her experience in handling diversity as one of the key qualifications and evidence of positive experience she could bring to being the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This was an intensely reality-averse selling-point. London’s slightly lower trend on the relentless decline of Christian faith and attendance compared with the UK as a whole is based not on Mullally’s competence and persuasion. It is based on traditionalist, conservative-minded members of the African Anglican communion in London being more likely to go into a church.

And these people hate woke attitudes and politics.

Update, 28 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 26, 2025

QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift of American Jews towards conservatism is going to gut the Left, which has historically relied on secularized Jews to supply a much larger share of its leadership and backing donations than their single-digit-percentage representation in the general population would suggest.

I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.

(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)

All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …

That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.

Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.

October 24, 2025

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s Thatcher?

Filed under: Japan, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Christopher Harding profiles the new Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, the first female PM who was elected to office on the 21st:

Sanae Takaichi, new Prime Minister of Japan, 21 October, 2025
Photo by the Cabinet Public Affairs Office via Wikimedia Commons.

As a teenager, Sanae Takaichi no doubt riled her parents now and again with her love of motorbikes and heavy metal. Today, poised to become Japan’s first female prime minister at the age of 64, she is polarising a nation. Some credit “Japan’s Iron Lady” with the steely resolve required to tackle the country’s domestic problems and stand up to China. Others lament the apparent fact that to succeed as a woman in Japanese politics you have to adopt the worst instincts of the men, from policies that prop up the patriarchy — men only on the imperial throne, compulsory shared surnames for married couples — to a nativist ultranationalism.

While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.

First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.

One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.

Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.

Update, 26 October:

October 23, 2025

Alberta considers rule changes to get rid of the “Longest Ballot” pranksters

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The last couple of elections Pierre Poilievre has fought attracted the attention of a group of activists who claim their shenanigans are directed at effecting changes in our electoral system, by flooding the field with frivolous candidates to somehow change how we elect our members of parliament. It’s odd that these serial efforts were directed at the leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, who has no power to change the electoral system rather than, say, the Prime Minister or his cabinet ministers who, theoretically, do:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the last general election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

On Monday, Alberta Conservative House Leader Joseph Schow mentioned to reporters that the province’s government has legislation in the works to protect the Alberta electoral system from the shenanigans of the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). That’s the protest group that has been flooding some federal election ballots with spurious candidates — most recently in the federal riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, where Elections Canada had to desperately improvise an all-new write-in system after the LBC persuaded more than 200 people to contest an August by-election.

Kieran Szuchewycz, one of the whimsical conspirators behind the committee, was the person who successfully (and without hired legal counsel) persuaded an Alberta Queen’s Bench judge in 2017 to eliminate statutory election-deposit requirements as unconstitutional. Justice Avril Inglis accepted that the purpose of deposits — which had already been made unconditionally refundable — was to deter frivolous candidates, and that this was desirable and rational.

But she concluded that “it makes little sense to suggest that the deposit requirement achieves any filter other than for those that cannot part with $1,000 for the duration of the election.” Deposits, which had been part of Canadian elections since before Confederation, had suddenly failed the Oakes test. Inglis’s ruling immediately led to an intentional explosion in openly frivolous federal candidacies, engineered by the very same gifted amateur who had talked her into it.

With deposits proclaimed unconstitutional, the only remaining defences against the Longest Ballot Committee’s DDoS attacks on democracy were the requirements for candidates to gather a hundred signatures of constituency residents on their nomination forms and to hire an official agent. The LBC skates around those by recruiting nominators who are willing to endorse anybody, using the same hundred signatures for many candidates, and by providing the same official agent, often somebody named Szuchewycz, to multiple candidates.

These days Mr. Szuchewycz’s brother Tomas is the public face of the LBC: earlier this month he appeared before the House of Commons procedure committee, which has dedicated a few meetings to the subject of LBC tomfoolery. (Kieran, the original smooth talker who got rid of election deposits, is currently listed as “on leave” from the board of electoral-reform group Fair Vote Canada.) There was a heated but unenlightening contretemps between Szuchewycz and Conservative MP Michael Cooper over whether the LBC had used unlawful techniques in their signature-harvesting efforts.

Szuchewycz explained the goals of the LBC ballot-fouling. The group’s supporters and leaders are obviously garden-variety election-reform nerds, but they now focus on the need for taking election design away from the House of Commons and delegating it to an “independent, non-partisan” body. Election reformers have an absolutely terrible track record of advancing their ideas when they’re put to direct referendum tests, and they were hilariously betrayed by Justin Trudeau in the Commons itself, so it is natural that they would seek a side door to the reforms they want. Even if that side door itself has an anti-democratic rule-by-expert character, which it absolutely does.

Update: Added missing URL to the main story.

The Liberal-funded legacy media all chorus that the Conservatives are collapsing

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Brian Lilley contrasts what the legacy media are all pushing with the actual conversation among Conservatives:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre Poilievre stood before his caucus Wednesday morning and was contrite. The Conservative leader has caused himself and his party headaches since his comments about Justin Trudeau and the RCMP on the Northern Perspective podcast last week.

Will it be enough?

Time will tell but his Conservative MPs who are upset will have forgiven him long before the media will. The stories about Conservative MPs or supporters being upset have not abated and hours before Poilievre did his mea culpa, Radio-Canada, the French wing of CBC had a story with MPs sniping at Poilievre.

Of course, none of them were on the record.

Later in the day, the rumour mill started that at least one Conservative MP, most likely a Quebec MP, would cross the floor by the end of the day. I’ll tell you from experience that when rumours start on Parliament Hill, they can take on a life of their own.

Will someone cross the floor?

Perhaps, and I’ve been given names of the potential floor crossers by Liberals, but none of them have done it so far.

We wait.

It’s all part of crafting a larger narrative…

If you only consumed legacy media, you might think the Conservative Party was falling apart, that the Conservatives were falling in the polls and that fundraising had dried up. None of that is true no matter how often they tell you it is while the facts tell a different story.

Were Poilievre’s comments helpful with swing voters? Absolutely not, and while he’s not focussed on them yet, he will need to be one day so he needs to be more careful.

As I’ve stated though, Poilievre was right on the RCMP dropping the ball on SNC-Lavalin and someone should have been charged with obstruction of justice in that case.

But none of this means the Conservatives are falling apart at the seams.

Will you get people grumbling, absolutely. Will some of them turn to the media as anonymous sources, considering many turned to me months ago, sure, it’s going to happen.

I also have my own anonymous sources telling me there is no one in caucus organizing against Poilievre. Speaking to veterans of the Scheer and O’Toole palace coups, they say this is a very different feel.

People are tired, they are tired of losing, but they aren’t looking to replace Poilievre. That’s not just because there is no one waiting in the wings, they genuinely want to give him a second chance.

Given the latest Abacus poll, I’d say he’s doing okay. That poll would show a minority government if an election were held today, one that could go Liberal or Conservative.

October 22, 2025

The Anti-Coynist Manifesto

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In a guest post at Without Diminishment, Michael Bonner takes a blowtorch to the boomer hippies and particularly to Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. But first, the obnoxious boomers:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.

In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of “finding oneself”, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.

They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.

At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.

And on to Mr. Coyne himself (full disclosure: I’ve met Mr. Coyne a few times at early Toronto blogger gatherings and he seemed quite a sensible chap 20 years ago):

Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.

Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.

That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a “bullying, sneering culture” of “the low brow and the lower brow”. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that “learning and science are to be valued, not derided”, apparently. In contrast, “a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed” was “the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau”.

Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a “piece of shit“. Not the man who, at a “ladies’ night” campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s “basic dictatorship“. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to “pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things“. Not the man who mused about such subjects as “making Quebec a country” if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda” — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the “Banana Boat” song.

Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.

October 21, 2025

Everyone benefits from Germany’s political “firewall” except the people that created it

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Checking in with eugyppius on the situation in Germany, where the centre-right parties apparently feel they have no enemies to the left, as they maintain the “firewall” against the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and the beneficiaries are … the left and the AfD:

The brings me to the crazy and ridiculous firewall against the AfD – the unending Antifa-enforced political tabu upon achieving anything with AfD votes at the state or federal level. AfD support is held to be contaminating, regardless of whatever it is the AfD happen to be supporting. It can turn even the most ordinary routine legislation into dark evil malicious fascism.

The firewall against the AfD splits the right and so it is a great gift to the left. For example, it’s the only reason the SPD has a say in the federal government after their disastrous showing in the traffic light coalition. It’s the only reason the left is still a force in East Germany outside Brandenburg at all. Should we get new elections, the firewall will probably bring the Greens into government too. If it didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it, that is how well the firewall is working out for them.

The AfD also benefits enormously from the firewall, even though it’s not of their making. The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD‘s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.

The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD are evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified [become an end in itself].

In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leadership had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD are stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems and just govern pragmatically with whatever majorities are at hand.

Let us survey the damage: The firewall has helped the AfD supplant the CDU as the standard right-of-centre party across the entire East. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt, the Evil Hitler Fascists are within striking distance of outright majorities. Ballooning AfD popularity is fuelled by the failures of Merz’s federal government, where the firewall has locked the Union into a doomed coalition with the radicalised and hostile Social Democrats. The SPD have so far obstructed all major federal initiatives, probably for the purpose of hurting the CDU still further and driving them into the arms of the AfD. It is a strategy the left first tried during the federal election campaign, and one they have so far refused to abandon.

Various preeminent Union personalities, eager to stop the destruction of their party, have demanded a change in course. These firewall-rethinkers include former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber – the very man who played a leading role in devising the firewall strategy in the first place. Shortly after Stern published Tauber’s mild and very careful dissent, a series of CDU politicians from East Germany lined up to say that they, too, would desperately like to see a new approach to the AfD. As I type this, CDU leadership have withdrawn for a highly secret meeting to discuss this dilemma and how they will deal with the AfD in the future.

Alas, endification is a powerful force. You can’t just turn it off. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose political instincts rival those of most earthworms, has used the days and hours ahead of this meeting to sing the praises of the firewall. In response to a journalist’s question last Tuesday, Merz intoned absurdly and for no reason at all that “We are the firewall!” And yesterday, at some political event in Sauerland, he ruled out cooperation with the AfD in any form – “at least not under me as party leader of the CDU“. Merz further claimed that “there is no common ground between the CDU and the AfD” and complained that AfD opposition to the European Union, NATO and the European Monetary Union means that the party “is against everything that has made the Federal Republic of Germany great and strong over the past eight decades”.

At this stage, I suspect a lot of German voters would like to respond to Merz’s “not under me as party leader of the CDU” by doing the meme:

October 14, 2025

The Thatcher Centennial

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Monday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada, Columbus Day in the United States and — at least for some — the Margaret Thatcher Centennial in Britain:

Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983. She was in office from May 1979 to November 1990.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

One hundred years ago – October 13th 1925 – Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, an English market town in the East Midlands. She was raised in the flat above her father’s grocery shop. That’s to say, she came from the same class as the ladies out on the streets of Epping and elsewhere protesting the rape of their children and their demographic dispossession in one of the oldest nation-states on earth, and despised by Starmer et al for not getting with the death-by-diversity programme.

Young Margaret grew up to become a research chemist, a barrister, and finally a politician called Mrs Thatcher — always “Mrs Thatcher”: I cannot claim to have given her any other specific advice but I did suggest she should not accept her alleged upgrade to “Baroness Thatcher”, as if one of the rare consequential members of the political class was of no greater rank than such wretched figures as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. The only guy who got any mileage out of it was CNN’s Larry King, who took to introducing her as “Margaret The Lady Thatcher”, like Sammy The Bull Gravano. She achieved greatness as a missus, and should have remained so, like Mr Gladstone rather than Mr Gravano.

Mrs Thatcher shaped events as opposed just to stringing along behind them. There have been nine prime ministers since, but, like a guest on my Saturday music show, I can’t name them, can you? Trimmers and opportunists, charlatans and at least one traitor (Johnson). Her present successor has momentarily thrilled the pseudo-Tory press by being marginally less disastrous in her conference speech than she was expected to be, so weird kinky mummy fetishists like the Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley are now drooling excitedly if dementedly that “Mummy is back“. The Conservative Woman is rightly contemptuous. Mrs Badenoch seems a pleasant enough lady after a fashion, but a third-of-a-century ago, when I last lived in London, certain types of women would put their business cards in red telephone boxes offering, ah, specialised services to middle-aged men whereby one could be fitted with an oversized nappy and put in a giant pram to throw your toys out of, after which Nanny would have to discipline you. It does not seem to me a useful political framing.

It does, however, testify to the long shadow of Mrs Thatcher. At the Tory conference, she was much invoked — for the same reason pre-Trump Republicans used to cite Reagan: he was the last good time before Bush/Dole/more Bush/McCain/Romney … So it goes with Maggie, the last good time before Wossname/Whoozis/Whatever/the “Heir to Blair”/Fat Blair/the Hindu Hedge-Funder … It is forty-six years since Mrs T arrived in Downing Street. She quite liked “Winston”, as she was wont to refer to him (although whether to his face remains unclear), but she would have found it odd had the 1986 Conservative conference banged on about him incessantly. That is not an encouraging sign, either for the party or for the country.

Mrs Thatcher’s success bred a lot of resentment, not least among the resentful twerps of her own party, who eventually rose up and toppled her — over her attitude to Europe, of course. Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, the “radical” “poet” Seething Wells, decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for “in the absence of her loco parent”. After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher’s various crimes, he leaned into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: “Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes”.

Carol was a jolly good sport about it, as always, and bought him a pint. And it has to be said that this terrible indictment loses a lot of its force when you replace the word Thatcher — or “Vatcha!”, as the tribunes of the masses liked to snarl it, with much saliva being projected down the length of the bar — with the rather less snarl-worthy formulation “your mum”.

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