And on the Third Day the National Conservatives did God...
And it was very bad
National Conservatism part one
Down among the dumpsters
Last Wednesday was the last day of the National Conservatism conference. The public benches were as full as they had been all week, but the press benches were almost empty. The big Tory beasts had done their turns leaving only Lord Frost to make his pitch, and in no known dimension was that likely to be interesting. So the hacks had gone and everyone else was freer to be themselves.
That included the sound team for the venue who demonstrated a keen sense of the inappropriate by playing us in with Louis Armstrong’s version of On The Sunny Side of the Street.
Grab your coat
Grab your hat, baby
Leave your worries on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
On the sunny side of the street
The first person to speak – a woman in her early 20s called Zewditu Gebroyohanes, chair of the session entitled History and Heritage – showed from her earliest words that she had ripped her coat, sat on her hat and directed her feet to an alley full of dumpsters. ‘We have seen”, she declared “a war on our heritage!” It was a war being fought by the National Trust and the Tate (but not the V&A, to which the government recently appointed her as a trustee), but “if we give up on our heritage, we give up on our nation!” With that happy thought she introduced her panel.
They were Dr David Starkey who requires less than no introduction, a slightly plaintive theologian turned historian called Nigel Biggar, Ofr Haivry an Israeli man associated with The Burke Foundation which organised the event, and a young woman called Emma Webb.
Starkey, as ever, played Starkey. Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory (both of which he seems to think are political parties) “want to destroy the entire Western tradition [applause]. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture!” Nigel Biggar more temperately took aim at the decolonising “epidemic” and compared the statue-removers of academe with the temple destroyers of Islamic State. Mr Haivry, was opposed to Tony Blair’s past and Keir Starmer’s proposed future reform of the Lords but never quite got round to explaining why on its foundation Israel had not itself opted for a hereditary second chamber. Or should that be Heroditary?