On A Cellular Level

The Conservative Party conference has given a rapturous reception to Jeremy Clarkson. He regards Brexit as one of the biggest mistakes of his lifetime, finds that it makes him want to sit in the gutter and weep, and cannot be friends with anyone who voted for it. Made rich and famous by the BBC, this friend and strong supporter of David Cameron used his newspaper columns to argue vociferously for Remain.

Clarkson is now prominent in a farmers’ campaign that has the Liberal Democrats speaking from its platforms while denying any official role to anyone from Reform UK. And along with both of their wives, Clarkson was spotted last February drinking in his pub with Ellen DeGeneres, who had moved to the Cotswolds as part of a trend of American liberal moneybags either fleeing to Britain or planning to do so. A special visa route for them has been proposed by the third largest party in the House of Commons, with which Clarkson has appeared on platforms from which Reform was explicitly barred. All in all, Clarkson is a perfect fit for the Conservative Party, as it clearly acknowledges.

Last year, that conference responded in the same way when Clarkson’s Sunday Times colleague, Matthew Syed, told it that he had become a Conservative specifically because that was the present vehicle for the New Labour of 2001, for which he told the adoring audience that he was “proud” to have been a parliamentary candidate, and from which all parties except the Conservatives had “moved wildly to the left”. The 2001 Labour manifesto, Syed asserted, “was miles to the right of almost anything you see in British politics today”, hence his pride. He called Nigel Farage “a Socialist, way to the left economically of the Corbyn-McDonnell manifesto of 2017”, and he stated that that was why he had joined the Conservative Party, which gave him a standing ovation.

And why not? The Conservatives know whom they have to beat, and it is almost never Reform, while they are in third place behind Labour at Great Yarmouth. It is in two of the five Green seats, half of one of them also in Norfolk, that they are the main challengers. In a pattern repeated across the Thatcherite, socially liberal, Rejoiner South, the seven MPs for Clarkson’s Oxfordshire are now five Lib Dems and two Labour, but with the Conservatives in second place in six cases, while Syed grew up in Berkshire, where only one of the nine MPs is a Conservative, where again they are no longer even in second place in one of them, and where a Lib Dem now sits for the Wokingham that Syed contested in 2001. Might he seek it as Conservative in 2029? If not, why not? And having been moved by boundary changes from Witney to Banbury, Clarkson now has not a Lib Dem MP, but a Labour one. Will he, too, be chancing his arm next time? If not, why not?