Transitions.
The grim irony of a trans minority facing the fury of a nation caught mid transition.
I’m not sure if I’m melting from one state of being to another, but whatever liquid thing I am becoming I’m still far too hot to have anything useful to say about the competition to become Prime Minister through the accident of being leader of the Conservative Party. It’s been a sticky stultifying affair. Previous editions of in-office but out-of-their-minds blue-on-blue murderball have been unedifying spectacles of power-hungry cynicism. This time though we’ve been denied even that joy.
The big five who made it to the pair of pointlessly televised debates all lack any desire to do anything except be leader. Two of the five couldn’t even seriously aspire to that. Tugendhat presumably was in the race only to add names to his private kill list of everyone who has slighted him. Never be fooled - reasonable conservatives are the worst. “I’ll say it again slowly, your hedge is encroaching on my property”. The calm yet nervy voice of a man one breathing exercise away from a screaming fit in Waitrose because he’s being asked to pay the correct price for a mislabelled jar of olives. Similarly, Badenoch isn’t mad enough to have imagined victory and clearly made no plans for that outcome. Instead she was here to air her brand, seemingly “that friend who isn’t your friend but you somehow have to invite to things, even though they relentlessly use every opportunity to tell you that you’re an ugly failure because they know you value honesty”. Resentful, envious, attention seeking and bitter, it’s no surprise that her campaign was masterminded by Michael Gove.
Yes, we are long past ideology. Johnson famously wanted to be PM as fulfilment of a childhood ambition to be World King. The disaster of his premiership speaks to his central psychic wound, his lonely and miserable time in boarding school. Brexit was just a way of him winning the ultimate popularity contest. However he remains politically vacuous but narratively compelling. Mourdant by comparison seems to want the job merely because she thinks she’ll look good pulling serious faces. An instragram PM, too busy being to leave any trace.
Truss, who doesn’t look good pulling serious faces, or any faces, and might not even appear in photographs or mirrors, seems too sad. The weight of her terrible choices bending her shoulders, she already looks as beaten as Theresa May did when hounded from office. That said, Truss’ desire for the job is rooted in her need to prove her parents wrong, so that might yet get her over the line.
Finally there’s Sunak, the Batman of British politics, if, rather than using his insane wealth to dress up in sex gear and have fights, he’d just kept all the money and teamed up with the Joker. Sunak’s case to lead seems nothing but a knowing glance at the others and a plaintive whine that it’s his go.
With no real plan to achieve anything, the distinctions between them have been a row over whether to bribe the electorate now or later and whether to blow the anti-trans dogwhistle or instead use the anti-trans fog horn and fireworks display. Watching the candidates queue up to literally boast about their genitals has been even more depressing than I’d have imagined. Mourdant’s odd avowal that she would still be a woman after a mastectomy was unnecessary proof of her belief that the Tory faithful will only vote for a total cunt.
Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also quietly took last weekend to side with her political opponents on the dicks and fannys issue. It appears whoever wins the next election, it is the transgender community who will lose. Whichever side of this culture war you find yourself on, it should give you pause that this issue is playing so loudly. There is enough recent history to teach us that a society that unites only to attack its minorities is deeply unwell.
Usually the argument is that we demonise difference, the majority turning against those that are unlike and other. But you cannot hate something without it defining you.
I wrote last time about the concept of post-truth, trying to see contradiction as something more than a Johnsonian con trick. The Tory leadership debates involved a lot of fat air about the future dynamism of our nation, but this energy could only come from the tension between our contradictions. Difference is strength, we should not all be the same. Even internally, within ourselves, we should delight in our multitudes, our fluidity.
The transition of Brexit gave us Johnson. Bound by no law, no promise, no truth, he is a soup of atoms free to form and reform into any necessary shape. A walking contradiction he refuses to resolve himself and that ability to be all things and no things is his true legacy. In this Truss should be his rightful heir. Remain voting, ex-Lib Dem, child of CND marches, daughter of socialists, Truss too is as fluid as the nation she hopes one day to tearfully be rejected by. Except Truss hates this part of herself. Truss hates her contradictions. Hates that they stain her still. In that she is perfectly placed to replace Johnson as the ghastly portrait in our national attic.
This podcast is detailed and insightful on the same topic and if you’re sick of right wing politics then I offer you this fascinating piece about the complexity of Michael Winner’s Death Wish.
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