the times | Tuesday December 21 2021 31
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826The new purity cult of politics is WhatsApp
Who’d be a whip when control of the right social media group gives the power to turn on or off backbench rebellions?
Even on Zoom, it is perilously hard
to replicate techniques of body
language and pre-emptive throat-
clearing that remove the combative
spike from telling somebody you
reckon they’re flat-out wrong.
In text it is all but impossible, even
when you aren’t part of a caucus that
reckons it has moved beyond debate
anyway. Say what you like about the
ethics of wine and cheese in the
prime minister’s garden, but you can
bet that a lot more inconvenient and
unwelcome truths are spoken in
forums like that than in some
easy-to-screenshot purity cult on
your smartphone.
We should all know by now that
politics is fast becoming something
else. The old loyalties spread by
place, profession and class are being
usurped by new ones, spread by our
screens. It happens to all of us, to
greater or lesser degrees, and it’s
worth remembering that it happens
to MPs too.
Just as your troublesome uncle
might now hang out in online groups
where it is uncontested that Bill
Gates is a paedophile lizard, so your
MP might now spend their formative
hours in a virtual world where people
genuinely believe that what this
government really needs is the return
of Iain Duncan Smith. And yes, the
result may make you snort but that
doesn’t make it trivial. This is real
politics now. You couldn’t make it up.Party power now lies, and that it’s
certainly not with the cabinet.
With the average Tory MP today
probably doing their utmost to
ignore as many tedious and banal
WhatsApp groups as, well, you or
me, obviously not all of them are
going to be quite this powerful. What
they will share, though, are the
malignancies inherent in social
media more generally.
Or, to put that another way, you
might reasonably assume that thegreatest danger with all of this was
that it was covert, private and hidden
from public view. Whereas, actually,
almost the reverse is true. A
WhatsApp group is less, not more,
private than the whispered
conversation in a Commons bar or
the quiet meeting in a donor’s
Westminster townhouse that it has
replaced. What it is instead, though,
is demonstrative and insular, and
inherently hostile to nuance. And the
larger it gets, the more of all these
things it becomes.
Perhaps you too have noticed over
the past couple of years how much
harder it is to politely disagree with
people when meetings are online.miscounted and there were only 107.
Officials have them too. I once
wrote a Twitter thread comparing
Brexit to building a submarine out of
cheese (as in, it’s probably possible,
but still a terrible idea). Shortly
afterwards, to my delight, I learnt of
a top-secret “Cheese Submarine
Group” formed among despairing
wonks in No 10.
Among MPs, or at least among
Tory MPs, it’s a fundamental mistake
to assume that these groups are
always intended as forums of debate.
More often they’re about
orchestrated clout. It was Steve
Baker who pioneered the technique
back in 2016, herding the
headbanging Brexiteers of the
European Research Group in
opposition to Theresa May.
Effectively he created a sort of
electronic whipping, with which the
actual whips could not begin to
compete. Sometimes scores of
members would start abruptly saying
the same thing, forcing Downing
Street into crisis. Sometimes,
conversely, when a concession had
been wrangled out of the flailing
prime minister, they would all
mysteriously go quiet.
Control of the right group, even
today, gives the ability to turn on or
off backbench rebellions, as if flicking
a switch. In the Dorries/Baker spat,
silly as it is, you have a blunt
demonstration of where ConservativeT
he most gratifying, if
strangest, moments in the
life of a satirist are those
when reality subsequently
mirrors the thing you made
up for fun. Years ago, for example, I
wrote a joke in my Saturday fictional
My Week column about Steve
Hilton, once the barefoot guru of
David Cameron, inviting somebody
for a drink before making them pay
for it themselves because he refused
to carry money. “There are practical
issues,” I had him say, “but it’s all
about my personal freedom.”
Then, a year later when Decca
Aitkenhead interviewed him for real,
he enthused about having no
smartphone before inviting her to
join him in an Uber ... which he
made her order because he obviously
could not. Yes, I am psychic.
It was like that this weekend when
screenshots leaked out of the
Conservative “Clean Global Brexit”
WhatsApp group. For the past couple
of years I’ve often turned My Week
into a WhatsApp group because it’s a
fun way of depicting a political
bicker. And yet nothing I have ever
written has been even half as funny
as the sentence “Steve Baker
removed Nadine Dorries”, followed
by Baker saying “Enough is enough”,
before posting a thumbs-up emoji
of himself.
The thing is, beyond the joke, I see
now that all of my depictions have
been fundamentally wrong. In my
imaginings MPs grandstand and
compete and talk at cross-purposes.
They descend into self-contradiction
and lose focus. What I don’t write,
though, is environments where the
exact opposite happens; where views
harden and dissent dissolves away.
Ask any MP or political hack and
they will tell you that WhatsApp
groups are now where all the actionis, particularly among Conservatives.
There are scores of them and some
are beyond parody. Last year, during
some crisis or another, this paper
reported the creation of a new one
called “What The F*** Is Going
On?”. Another often mentioned is
the “109 Group”, so named after
Boris Johnson welcomed 109 new
Conservative MPs in 2019 and never
renamed after they realised he’dThese groups are more
about orchestrated
clout than about debate
Old loyalties spread by
place, profession and
class are being usurped
Hugo
Rifkind@hugorifkind