Your wish is my command
A six-year cult has the Tories in its grip. Only defeat can free them
Irrational faith in the providence of Brexit has trapped adherents in cognitive dissonance and denial
Matthew Syed
Sunday October 16 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
In the autumn of 1954 a young and rather daring psychologist called Leon Festinger infiltrated a UFO cult in Minnesota. The cult insiders believed that they would be picked up in a spaceship at midnight on December 21 and transported to a new planetary utopia on the edge of the galaxy. They had sold their possessions and told the local newspaper what was about to unfold.
Festinger was not interested in the prophecy per se. Many such groups have risen up from time to time in different parts of America. Rather, he was fascinated in what would happen after the prophecy failed. Would the cult members admit their folly? Would they go back to their lives? Would they become reacquainted with reality?
In fact the 35-year-old Festinger, who had spent his career examining dogmatic thinking in all its forms, had a different expectation. He thought their convictions would become even more entrenched. It would be too psychologically threatening to admit they were wrong, too mortifying to confront the stares of those who had warned them. Sure enough, as the clock ticked past midnight, the cult members rapidly found an alternative explanation. The planetary timetable had shifted: the spaceship would now come two years later. Within a week they were back out on a recruitment drive.
I mention this research because it offers the only lens through which to make sense of what has unfolded over the past six years of British politics. Future historians will not be particularly surprised by the appointment of a fourth chancellor in less than a year, markets in meltdown and talk of a new leadership election weeks after the last one (with some bookmakers putting short odds on a Boris Johnson comeback). No, these will be seen as the logical consequence of what went before, a sequence of events stretching back to the defining prophecy of recent British political history.
For it is Brexit that sits behind all that has unfolded. It was the true believers who prophesied that the economy would grow ever faster when unshackled from the Teutonic chains of the EU; who divined that, reacquainted with the sovereignty looted by Brussels, we would be able to secure advantageous trade deals around the world; who foretold that we would be able to cut immigration to a fraction of its previous size while turbocharging productivity and growth.
Each of those predictions was flatly disputed by those who voted against this historic error, but we were told we simply didn’t believe fervently enough, or that we were talking Britain down. The language became ever more cultish as each prediction collided with reality and was found wanting. Backbenchers jeered in the Commons when reference was made to estimates that the economy had shrunk by 5.3 per cent; hooted when they saw that investment had plummeted by 13.7 per cent; howled with derision at damaging declines in exports. The more our economy suffered, the more our credibility was eroded, the more they cleaved to the cake-and-eat-it fantasies that got us here.
At times the confabulation has reached proportions that might have surprised even Festinger. Surveying the carnage on the gilt markets after the ill-conceived mini-budget, Daniel Hannan detected an all-pervading fear of a Keir Starmer government. The most ardent Brexiteer columnist for the Telegraph glimpsed a remainer cabal working to scupper a heroic Tory administration. In an interview with Mishal Husain on the Today programme Jacob Rees-Mogg felt moved to question the impartiality of the BBC. He regarded it as a betrayal that Husain had linked the rise in gilt yields to the mini-budget, even though one directly followed the other. Somewhere in that subtle but shallow mind an alternative reality was unfolding.
Historians will perhaps point out that we have seen mass sociogenic delusions in the past. Ancient Rome was so attached to the idea that it was protected by divine providence that, instead of dealing with the various crises of antiquity, it debased the currency: the denarius was adulterated from 98 per cent silver in AD63 to 0 per cent by AD270, leading to mass inflation. Similar patterns can be seen in the demise of the Mayans, Persians and Mamluks. Some might say that the vote for Brexit was a similar spasm of historical denial, a once great power struggling to deal with a more niche role in world affairs.
But that is why the idea that the Tories can ditch Truss now and restore confidence in time to win the next election stretches credibility. To remind ourselves, this is a government that ferociously criticises the last one, and if it moves on to its third prime minister this year, the new administration will surely turn just as savagely on the present incumbents. That, by the way, is another pattern Festinger found in cults: true believers have the tendency to fragment into competing subgroups as cognitive dissonance escalates.
In this context the People’s Front of Judaea is now represented by Rishi Sunak and the Judaean People’s Front by Penny Mordaunt — although who knows how many more splits will be in place by tomorrow. All the contenders now busying themselves for a run at the top job are true believers: people who defended breaches of the rule of law and other acts of Brexit-inspired vandalism. In many ways this reveals the truth that Brexit itself, however tarnished, is now the sacred shibboleth of the party — not economic competence, not Thatcherism, not even Burkean traditionalism. Everything is expendable in defence of the central dogma.
That is why we need not a change of leader but of government. This is not merely in the interests of the nation but of the Tory party itself. Festinger found the only reliable way for people to break free from the bonds of a cult was to take a break; preferably to go on a long holiday. Away from the echo chamber, freed from the exhausting demands of self-justifying confabulation, people are able to heal. A period in opposition would be a convalescence, an opportunity for the Tories not merely to change the leadership rules that grant so much power to members whose ranks have been swelled by entryism from Ukip, but to reset.
The backbencher Charles Walker gave a wonderful interview to Times Radio a couple of weeks ago. “We are a patriotic party,” he said. “Our first duty is not to get re-elected; our first duty is to the country.” I almost felt like hugging him as I heard those words, for it hinted at the Tory party that so many of us once admired. A party of pragmatism, of moderation, of realism. We need that party back for the health of our democracy. So, please, call an election, take a break and find yourselves again. Do so now, and you’ll be back. Cling on to the bitter end, changing leaders, jumping through hoops, gazing at navels, and you may never be forgiven.
@MatthewSyed