Closet Conservatives
Hugo Rifkin wrote a topical piece for The Times the other day in which he explored the concept of 'closet Conservatives' who so spectacularly rode to David Cameron's rescue in the Westminster general election.
Now even the Tories share of the popular vote was a miserly 37%, but as Ed Miliband was willing to try and form a government on only 33% or so the Labour Party can hardly complain now.
How all these smarty pants Labour figures must wish their party had made a principled stand long ago on the subject of fairer votes, proportional representation and getting rid of the discredited 'winner takes all' First Past The Post voting system.
Just how shy can a closet true blue get?
How all these smarty pants Labour figures must wish their party had made a principled stand long ago on the subject of fairer votes, proportional representation and getting rid of the discredited 'winner takes all' First Past The Post voting system.
Just how shy can a closet true blue get?
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
When people will confess to anything online, it’s amazing that Toryism remains the love that dare not speak its name
I saw a survey recently in which 61 per cent of men had confessed to using their smartphones to send intimate photographs. Sixty-one per cent. How do you conduct a survey like that? Get them to send you one? There’s a job.
These days, people will share anything. Pictures of their lunch, pictures of their kids. Anecdotes of the sort that would once have ruined reputations and livelihoods for ever, such as the one about the way they inexplicably woke up in Barnstaple this morning, wearing a sombrero and a perfect stranger’s shoe.
Elsewhere, you’ll find whole websites devoted to, for example, selfies taken at funerals, with some teenage girl — it’s usually a teenage girl — doing one of those cat’s bum pouts people do these days, with her grandmother in an actual varnished box in the background.
Even on television, in this post-Jerry Springer age, no midweek morning is complete without a man and a woman sitting on a stage, separated by bouncers, as he explains to her and ten million viewers that he’s running away with her gay uncle. People, like I said, will confess anything. Anything. Anything. Except, it seems, that they’re going to vote Tory.
Which is odd. Isn’t it odd? Especially as you can always tell a Tory, anyway. They have backcombing and blazers, don’t they? Sometimes both at once. They’re middle-aged, or look it. They do that little vomit in the back of their throat whenever they have to speak to ethnic minorities, even if they are from an ethnic minority. They live in suburban houses with pretentious rustic stylings, where they make aspiring wizard schoolchildren sleep in cupboards under the stairs. Everybody knows this. Suddenly it seems that there are well over 11 million of these highly distinctive people in Britain. Where were they all hiding?
I doubt you’ve ever been to a Conservative party conference. I have. They’re quite unlike anybody else’s. At Labour ones they all talk policy. Even when they’re drunk. Even when they’re flirting. Probably even when they’re sending each other intimate photographs. Get a load of my strong economic foundation, baby; come over here and let me raise your living standards, etc.
At Lib Dem conferences nobody speaks to each other; they all just sit there weaving. The Tories, though, rejoice in each other’s company. The pocket handkerchiefs bloom, the hair gets even bigger. They wear more and larger pussy-bow blouses than you would frankly believe. They exude a palpable relief to be among their own, and not out there in a world full of people who keep saying how much they hate them. Which is the exact same world that keeps sending them to Downing Street.
It’s not just pollsters to whom Tories lie about being Tories. It’s also themselves. For some people, Toryism and their own self-image simply isn’t compatible.
“Do you think you could be friends with a Tory?” I’ve heard people ask each other, all my life. “Actually friends, though? Would you kiss one? Euuugh! I mean, you certainly couldn’t introduce one to your mates. Have you seen Maria lately? No, nor me. She’s still dating that Tory. I don’t know how she can. I’d bite through my own tongue.”
Then they’ll go out on polling day, these very same people, and what will they do? That’s right. They’ll vote Tory. Just like they’ll send their kids to the private schools whose alumni they claim to despise, and pay to avoid the NHS they claim to cherish. And they won’t even feel, quite, that they are being hypocrites. “It’s not what I am,” they’ll say to themselves. “It’s just what, right now, I have to do.”
I have never been a secret Tory. At many points in my life, I’ve been a secret non-Tory. These days, I feel I’m quite open about not being a Tory, only nobody ever seems to notice. “I can’t believe that even Tories are admitting this!” they’ll say in disbelief when I write something they agree with, again.
It’s slightly exhausting. While part of the annoyance comes from the sinking realisation that I can write thousands upon thousands of words and some people will never get past the second half of the byline, I can’t pretend that’s all of it. It’s tarnishing to be considered a Tory. People don’t trust a Tory. Even when they secretly are a Tory.
I know people who have spent the past month disparaging Conservatives on social media — posting Labour links ad nauseam, and imploring people to vote Weird Ed — and have then wobbled, hard, on the way to the polling station. I know journalists, even, who would never dream of admitting in print that they voted Tory, and might even have begged their readers not to, but then did, and would again. My hunch would be that they wouldn’t even regard this as hypocrisy, but rather as two completely different things. With the idea being, I suppose, that the one cancels out the other. That public behaviour and private behaviour are different beasts, with different rules.
We’ll beat up the pollsters for the failures of the past month. We’ll mistrust them for the next decade, at least, and roll our eyes at their predictions like we now do with economists, or soothsayers, or people who read the stars. Only, it’s not really their fault, is it? All they have done, essentially, is fail to properly anticipate the extent of our weaselling bloody lies. It’s like pretending you own a car, and then being angry with the guy in the garage for letting you drive off in it.
All of our sharing, I think, is actually something else. We are getting less open, not more. It’s a pose. We confuse honesty with noise. In fact, we are learning to perform. Perhaps we are indeed more brazen than ever before, be it on social media, or to aghast strangers with smartphones, or reality television, or to a pollster, or to anybody, really, but that doesn’t mean we’re also honest. Instead, we create façades and hide behind them, pretending to fit in with the herd even when we don’t, even though they’re pretending to fit in with us.
Even today, half those shy Tories will be properly furious, genuinely convinced that their own shy Toryism was somehow different from everybody else’s. “Bloody hell,” they’ll be saying. “Those shy Tories, eh? Shame on them!” And meaning it, too. And that 61 per cent up top? Don’t trust them, either. I bet they all used zoom.
When people will confess to anything online, it’s amazing that Toryism remains the love that dare not speak its name
I saw a survey recently in which 61 per cent of men had confessed to using their smartphones to send intimate photographs. Sixty-one per cent. How do you conduct a survey like that? Get them to send you one? There’s a job.
These days, people will share anything. Pictures of their lunch, pictures of their kids. Anecdotes of the sort that would once have ruined reputations and livelihoods for ever, such as the one about the way they inexplicably woke up in Barnstaple this morning, wearing a sombrero and a perfect stranger’s shoe.
Elsewhere, you’ll find whole websites devoted to, for example, selfies taken at funerals, with some teenage girl — it’s usually a teenage girl — doing one of those cat’s bum pouts people do these days, with her grandmother in an actual varnished box in the background.
Even on television, in this post-Jerry Springer age, no midweek morning is complete without a man and a woman sitting on a stage, separated by bouncers, as he explains to her and ten million viewers that he’s running away with her gay uncle. People, like I said, will confess anything. Anything. Anything. Except, it seems, that they’re going to vote Tory.
Which is odd. Isn’t it odd? Especially as you can always tell a Tory, anyway. They have backcombing and blazers, don’t they? Sometimes both at once. They’re middle-aged, or look it. They do that little vomit in the back of their throat whenever they have to speak to ethnic minorities, even if they are from an ethnic minority. They live in suburban houses with pretentious rustic stylings, where they make aspiring wizard schoolchildren sleep in cupboards under the stairs. Everybody knows this. Suddenly it seems that there are well over 11 million of these highly distinctive people in Britain. Where were they all hiding?
I doubt you’ve ever been to a Conservative party conference. I have. They’re quite unlike anybody else’s. At Labour ones they all talk policy. Even when they’re drunk. Even when they’re flirting. Probably even when they’re sending each other intimate photographs. Get a load of my strong economic foundation, baby; come over here and let me raise your living standards, etc.
At Lib Dem conferences nobody speaks to each other; they all just sit there weaving. The Tories, though, rejoice in each other’s company. The pocket handkerchiefs bloom, the hair gets even bigger. They wear more and larger pussy-bow blouses than you would frankly believe. They exude a palpable relief to be among their own, and not out there in a world full of people who keep saying how much they hate them. Which is the exact same world that keeps sending them to Downing Street.
It’s not just pollsters to whom Tories lie about being Tories. It’s also themselves. For some people, Toryism and their own self-image simply isn’t compatible.
“Do you think you could be friends with a Tory?” I’ve heard people ask each other, all my life. “Actually friends, though? Would you kiss one? Euuugh! I mean, you certainly couldn’t introduce one to your mates. Have you seen Maria lately? No, nor me. She’s still dating that Tory. I don’t know how she can. I’d bite through my own tongue.”
Then they’ll go out on polling day, these very same people, and what will they do? That’s right. They’ll vote Tory. Just like they’ll send their kids to the private schools whose alumni they claim to despise, and pay to avoid the NHS they claim to cherish. And they won’t even feel, quite, that they are being hypocrites. “It’s not what I am,” they’ll say to themselves. “It’s just what, right now, I have to do.”
I have never been a secret Tory. At many points in my life, I’ve been a secret non-Tory. These days, I feel I’m quite open about not being a Tory, only nobody ever seems to notice. “I can’t believe that even Tories are admitting this!” they’ll say in disbelief when I write something they agree with, again.
It’s slightly exhausting. While part of the annoyance comes from the sinking realisation that I can write thousands upon thousands of words and some people will never get past the second half of the byline, I can’t pretend that’s all of it. It’s tarnishing to be considered a Tory. People don’t trust a Tory. Even when they secretly are a Tory.
I know people who have spent the past month disparaging Conservatives on social media — posting Labour links ad nauseam, and imploring people to vote Weird Ed — and have then wobbled, hard, on the way to the polling station. I know journalists, even, who would never dream of admitting in print that they voted Tory, and might even have begged their readers not to, but then did, and would again. My hunch would be that they wouldn’t even regard this as hypocrisy, but rather as two completely different things. With the idea being, I suppose, that the one cancels out the other. That public behaviour and private behaviour are different beasts, with different rules.
We’ll beat up the pollsters for the failures of the past month. We’ll mistrust them for the next decade, at least, and roll our eyes at their predictions like we now do with economists, or soothsayers, or people who read the stars. Only, it’s not really their fault, is it? All they have done, essentially, is fail to properly anticipate the extent of our weaselling bloody lies. It’s like pretending you own a car, and then being angry with the guy in the garage for letting you drive off in it.
All of our sharing, I think, is actually something else. We are getting less open, not more. It’s a pose. We confuse honesty with noise. In fact, we are learning to perform. Perhaps we are indeed more brazen than ever before, be it on social media, or to aghast strangers with smartphones, or reality television, or to a pollster, or to anybody, really, but that doesn’t mean we’re also honest. Instead, we create façades and hide behind them, pretending to fit in with the herd even when we don’t, even though they’re pretending to fit in with us.
Even today, half those shy Tories will be properly furious, genuinely convinced that their own shy Toryism was somehow different from everybody else’s. “Bloody hell,” they’ll be saying. “Those shy Tories, eh? Shame on them!” And meaning it, too. And that 61 per cent up top? Don’t trust them, either. I bet they all used zoom.
