Carrie

The saddest part of the Carrie Symonds coup over #OurCummings is that it couldn’t have been more predictable. Well, maybe Johnson’s malleability was disappointing, though he’s hardly an ideologue or a based single-minded demagogue in any case.

No, the saddest is that there are thousands and thousands of Carries. They are literally everywhere and their grip over various nominally right-wing institutions is remarkable. Even if this one goes, another will replace her. And not just at the arm of Johnson, but at Conservative Central Headquarters and so many other places in London.

Carries trumpet their own insignificant pet causes, but it’s more than that. Carries make issues out of things that are only issues if you make them issues. Carries demand ‘signs that we are taking action’ on sentimental nothingburgers like badger culls and to accordingly avoid anything remotely ‘toxic’ (i.e. the things that BBC producers say they don’t like over a negroni at a minor branch of Soho House).

Carries insist that their colleagues make apologies for lewd comments made years ago in an attempt to ‘show that we’ve left that behind’. Apologies make you weak. Nine times out of ten, you should never apologise. Carries don’t understand this basic fact, because their self-justificatory function is often to just keep offering rubbish advice that gets media attention, but attention on someone apologising is never good.

There is a kind of wing of the Tory party that is defined not so much by ideology but as a venue for socialisation by socialites. There is a lot of money sloshing around here. But these people have no deep political understanding and take all their cues from what is dominant in the left-wing culture industry. Socialite types (led by the whims of women) are therefore an important release-valve of pozz into official political ideology. There is a discussion to be had about the role of gays in this mix as well – they’re normally a bit more actually ideological than the Carries, but not in a good way.

In the long-term, Carries obviously need to be on board with the #based agenda of the radical right, or at the very least a good fraction of them need to be. But in the short-to-medium term they must be sidelined and ignored while a parallel social value system is built by a band of men (i.e. we show that we are winners and that the establishment are losers). Women in general have temperaments that are too cautious, swayable or anxious for serious political insurgency. They only embrace ‘activism’ that has its security guaranteed by the state and all standard moral arbiters.

Dom Cummings was someone who cared about things, not people. He was a man. He was also very good at prodding public opinion, understanding where it really lay, and exploiting it. These are the types of minds which get new things done and push things forward. It’s also what Carries despise as it cuts through the bullshit, and I think this episode has underlined just how captured the Conservative Party is by these kinds of interests. The swamp is deep.