Numb at the Spectator summer party 2: After the orgy
Conversations with Geoff Dyer, Jordan Peterson, Liz Truss, and Nigel Farage
The following essay was originally scheduled for the 14th of July, but put on hold due to Donald Trump’s head nearly exploding in a shower of crimson goo. In the time since then, the weather in London has improved.
It hasn’t stopped raining since Keir Starmer became our Prime Minister. Big sweaty clouds pile overhead, churning their charcoal-coloured rolls. Fat splats against my window. When I go outside they ping against my bald spot like a hammer on a bell, and every passing car sends out a great scythe of grimy gutterwater to soak my shoes. It’s July and the whole of Britain looks trenchfooted, mouldbearing. What does God mean by this? What is he trying to tell us?
I thought I’d feel something. On the big night itself I invited some friends over to watch the Tories lose. I made red and blue cocktails. We put on D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better mostly ironically and one person danced. I’d spent virtually my entire adult life living under some variety of Conservative government: this party that’s spent the last fourteen years plaguing the country like a rat infestation, chewing through wires, gnawing at the skirting board, clattering around under the floors at night, spreading disease. Every morning I’d wake up to find that His Majesty’s Government had bitten a ragged hole through a nearby hospital and left dozens of small dense turds under my kitchen sink. Eventually I stopped caring that there wasn’t anything better on offer. Keir Starmer: fine. Let him nestle the nation under his gormless double chin. I just wanted this plague of Tories out of my home. Now they really were gone, and I thought I’d feel something, and all I got was rain.
My one consoling thought was that I had once again been invited to the Spectator’s annual summer party. The Spectator summer party is, of course, the biggest social event in the right-wing media calendar, where some of the country’s most prominent politicians mingle with the journalists who supposedly hold them to account, to plot and scheme over free-flowing champagne. When I went last year, I managed to squeeze some fun caricatures out of it. This year’s felt more serious. (This is why I’ve decided not to be coy with satirical characters this time round; everything I describe here is what actually happened.) Originally, the date had been set for the 3rd of July, but then Rishi Sunak decided to call an epoch-ending general election for the very next day. God knows why. I assume he got his invite. Maybe he just wanted to fuck with everyone’s social plans on the way out. Anyway, the Spectator decided to postpone the event to the 9th, which at first I thought was an act of abject cowardice. What a party that would have been! The last night of Tory Britain! In the morning, plodding Keir and dowdy Angela and all their focus-grouped cronies will raise the red flag over Westminster—but tonight, evil still reigns. Mad bacchanals, orgies, Sadean depravity, maybe human sacrifice. Let’s ritually disembowel Nadine Dorries on a stone altar. She might even be up for it, if we can get BoJo involved. Let’s sexually torture some spads. Andrew Neil, wild-eyed, snorting like a bull, a piece of some lobby hack’s ear between his teeth, dripping blood. Maybe those that don’t fancy seeing the dawn can gulp down a cyanide pill with their Pol Roger. We can burn the bodies as the sun comes up. For a while, I felt robbed. But in the long rainy days after the election, I started to appreciate the new date. Maybe Starmergeddon wasn’t doing anything for me now, but surely I would feel something at the Spectator summer party. Surely it would gladden my twisted little heart to see the ashen faces and the forced smiles of my political enemies. To see them in the desert again, hopeless and defeated, just like me.
On the evening of the party it rained. I trudged along Whitehall, pelted throughout by raindrops the size of wads of chewing gum. Did the obligatory quick peer through the security gates down Downing Street. Keir’s gaff. He might be in there now, unpacking his mugs, putting up his Stormzy poster. I arrived at the party wet and lightly steaming. It’s fine, I thought, everyone here will still be more miserable than me. But they weren’t. Here they were in their floral-print sundresses, sucking down their naughty little fizzy flutes of champagne, greeting each other oh-darling-mwah on the cheeks as the heavens poured down ashen-grey judgement against this island and all its inhabitants. Outside there was a marquee, sheltering the Spectator’s little gravel garden from the downpour. I elbowed my way through the crowd basically at random but couldn’t find anyone I knew. It’s weird to be at a party where there are plenty of faces you recognise, but none that can rescue you. Oh look, you think, there’s Amol Rajan, I’ll go and say hello. But the horrible truth is that even if he did say that funny line about jungle on the telly, Amol Rajan is not actually your friend.
I ended up being recognised by an Evening Standard hack. We talked about how weirdly cheerful all the Tories seemed. He said he’d seen a senior Tory, recently sacked, sitting alone in the pub up the road, staring morosely into his pint. But then the same senior Tory suddenly appeared nearby, chatting merrily away. The Standard hack seemed weirdly cheerful himself, given the situation. Once, the London Evening Standard was a proper full daily newspaper, with enough money on hand to pay its columnists to write the most pointless anodyne drivel in the entire industry. Every time you opened the Standard you’d see the face of some blinking gimp called Jorles Hutching-Jones, proffering something like ‘Isn’t There Loads of Bloody Great Telly On These Days?’ or ‘Three Cheers For Cress.’ But now the Standard is just three sheets of flimsy paper stapled together, and very soon it’ll stop printing its daily edition altogether and go online-only. This is what the media is like now. It’s all over: journalism, the cult and calling to which so many young hacks have offered up their livers. But the collapse is slow, it’ll be decades before it’s done, and until then you can still build a career, constantly hopping from one piece of falling wreckage to the next. The trick is to publish one good story at every outlet before it folds. The Spectator will meet the same fate too, sooner or later; it’ll be replaced by a WhatsApp group called DEPORT THE NONCES. Its political impact will basically remain the same, but it’s hard to imagine there’ll be any parties.
Eventually, I ran into some more familiar faces. My editor introduced me to the writer Geoff Dyer. I told him I’d read and enjoyed half of one of his books, and he seemed to like that. We talked about the election over in America. I said I was enjoying the fact that all three of its major figures—Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump—had an utterly deranged but really unique mode of speech. Yes, said Geoff Dyer, I agree, but I don’t like when people use intensifiers with the word unique.
More drinks. I ended up in conversation with a nice middle-aged woman who’d been drummed out of public life a few years ago for, well, the thing that gets nice middle-aged women drummed out of public life. Now she was heading up an anti-cancel-culture campaign group. She was cycling through all the bigwigs at the party, the people who had been Cabinet ministers less than a week ago, and who were now just ordinary members of the public, trying to get them to sign on to her initiative. Too late! I felt bad for her. Cancellation had swallowed her life. Now she was introducing herself at parties as the person who’d been made to suffer, just for saying that girls don’t have penises.
To be honest, this is the thing I find most unattractive about the contemporary right, maybe even more than its actual politics. I can make my peace with conservatism; everyone’s a conservative relative to the things they like. But I’m grossed out by the delight in loserdom, in victimhood, in being silenced, being the underdog, being crushed under the boot of the all-powerful woke mob. All the narcissistic compensations that come with being oppressed. It’s not great when the left does this either, but at least we’re supposed to be the downtrodden, at least it gels with our general vibe. And at least the left still has the idea that your personal feelings of victimhood ought to be fodder for something else: a common solidarity, the redemption of the world. We might not always live up to that ideal, but we are capable of upholding some notional value beyond our own self-pity. The right doesn’t even have that, which might be why the whole ideology now seems to be made of nothing but the secret pleasures of resentment. I don’t even mean that these people aren’t being silenced or victimised; they plainly are—but if you’re on the right you should be forbidden from ever whining about it. What’s the point of having reactionaries if they’re all trying to be the underdog? If I wanted that stuff I could get it at home.
Anyway, it just so happened that the living incarnation of this whole tendency was also present at the party: the undefeated champion in the All-Canadian Crying Competition, Dr Jordan B Peterson himself. His jacket was panelled with icons of Catholic saints, and immediately on arriving at the party he was surrounded by a beaming gaggle of the Spectator’s IT department, who all insisted on posing for individual selfies with the man. When I met him he was being questioned by my friend the Evening Standard hack. What do you think of Keir Starmer? Well, said Jordan Peterson, he’s going to be like Kerensky. Any left-wing government is a terrible thing. The far-left maniacs inside that party are going to drag him into their insanity, just like Joe Biden and the Democrats in the United States. At that point I felt compelled to break cover. Wait, I said, what are you talking about? There is no far left in this country. It’s totally defeated. Keir Starmer purged them all. I’m the only far left that’s left, and look at me, I’m here. Jordan Peterson tilted his head back and stared into the middle distance with his mouth hanging open. This lasted for a few seconds. It was extremely disconcerting. Eventually he spoke. What about the damn transgender movement, he said, you don’t think that’s far left? I pointed out that a few of the people who had put gender self-identification before Parliament were actually at this very party. Were they far-left? There was an unpleasant silence, in which Peterson once again stared at nothing with his mouth wide open. He looked pink and raw, like a baby bird waiting to be fed. He didn’t say anything. The Standard asked him what he thought of Nigel Farage. I think he’s a decent man, he said.
I probably should have left it at that, but I possess a certain cruelty. I’ve got a question, I said. Are dreams real? Again Jordan Peterson showed me the inside of his mouth. What do you mean by real? he said. Fair question. I mean, I said, are dreams just a muddled or distorted version of waking life? Or do they constitute, in some sense, a separate world, proceeding according to their own internal logic? Dreams are definitely real, said Jordan Peterson, but they’re at the edges of reality. This seemed promising. There’s a philosopher called Antti Revonsuo, I said, who argues that dreams are a kind of virtual reality, that they’re actually much less amorphous and incoherent than people think, they’re basically just a sandbox where you can play through simulations of various potentially difficult social situations, to help you make better decisions in waking life. What do you think about that? Yes, said Jordan Peterson, I definitely agree. That’s very disappointing, I said. It was. I might not have thought much of Jordan Peterson’s politics, I might have known him for a lightweight, imbecile and uninformed, but I’d expected more from the chaos-dragon guy than this limp utilitarianism. I think I walked away in disgust.
There was a moment, more than half a decade ago now, when Jordan Peterson was a significant figure. My comrades on the left couldn’t stop freaking out about him. Back then it was impossible to imagine anything more reactionary than a permanently weeping man who told you to clean your room. I don’t really blame Peterson for what happened next; everyone I know who became even slightly famous online has ended up fucking themselves up in exactly the same way. It’s always xans. When you get too famous you need to go numb, dead to the world, or else you’re pulled apart into splinters by all the tiny versions of yourself that live inside so many heads. The Greeks might have praised kleos as the worthiest ambition, but immortal fame is the immortality of the dead. ‘Then will one say hereafter as he sails his ship over the sea: This is the monument of one who died long since a champion who was slain by mighty Hector.’ But Jordan Peterson couldn’t die gloriously in single combat with mighty Hector, so he reached for the benzos instead. What’s amazing, though, is that he still keeps up his guru routine, dispensing advice from on high, even though his life has plainly fallen apart. He wears the world’s ugliest suits and posts genuinely psychotic nonsense on Twitter. He came to the UK to interview Tommy Robinson. He’s trying to catch up to his right-wing audience, but a good chunk of them have moved on to the harder stuff now. Race realism; naming the Jew. It’s over. He’s cooked. He blames it all on the woke authoritarians. In the end, there’s only one lesson Jordan Peterson really taught anyone, and it should be engraved in stern letters above the gate of his house, and possibly tattooed on his forehead too: EVERY STOIC IS A SECRET HYSTERIC. When the time comes, and it might not be long, we can write it on his grave.
I did feel bad about essentially commandeering and then derailing the Evening Standard’s interview with the once-famous Jordan Peterson. But when I read the writeup the next day, his line about the bloody transgender movement was in there. I guess in some small way I’d helped.
There was one loser I really did want to talk to. At the party last year, I’d witnessed Liz Truss having what looked like the most awkward evening of anyone’s life. The shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history had wandered dejectedly around the small gravel square, systematically being frozen out of every conversation she tried to join. After a brief period of this she went home, possibly in tears. This time round she was still the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, and she’d also lost her seat in Parliament to boot. Support for the Tories had cratered during her premiership and never recovered: the electoral disaster these people had just gone through was all, fundamentally, her fault. But she was glowing. Every time I spied Liz Truss she had a sparkle in her eye and a grin on her lips, and she was flitting about like a drunken bumblebee, chattering happily away. I decided I had to talk to her. I wanted to know what it was like to have been so badly undone by the only thing you ever wanted. What it felt like for the grand forces of history to deposit you in the highest office in the land—only to then suddenly go whoops, sorry, that was all a mistake, you don’t belong here at all, and snatch you away again into the murk.
But how would I ask her? I’m not usually a nervous person, but I’d never just introduced myself to a former Prime Minister before. Somehow, that wasn’t an issue. Just as I was discussing the problem with a few other people, Liz Truss suddenly wedged herself into the conversation right next to me. Hi! she said. What a lot of new people! She stuck her hand out at me. I’m Liz! she said. Sam, I said, shaking it. Sam’s a writer, someone said, and Liz Truss gave a polite ooh. Speaking of writers, she said, did you see Jordan Peterson over there? I wouldn’t mind getting a selfie with him! But he must get asked for one all the time! She laughed, even though she hadn’t actually said anything funny. I said I’d had a brief chat with Jordan Peterson, but I’d been very disappointed by what he’d said about dreams. And that’s how it went: we shared a few minutes of very boring chitchat. Weird to consider that this cackling woman next to me, who ought to have been knocking back the chardonnay at an All Bar One, had written the Letters of Last Resort, the secret instructions given to British nuclear submarines, only to be opened if the government is destroyed in a nuclear attack. Writing those letters is the first duty of every new Prime Minister once in office. For a few weeks, the life of every human being on the planet had been in this woman’s hands. But when there was a brief lull in the conversation, I had to fight the instinct to turn to her and say so, Liz, what do you do? I never did ask Liz Truss what it was like to have been handed the world and thrown it away. But I later learned that she’d recently published a book called Ten Years to Save The West, in which she blamed her political failure on the unions, the think tanks, the Bank of England, the civil service, the Treasury, the IMF, the administrative state, and the woke left. If I had asked, I’m not sure she would have known.
I did learn something from our meeting, though. She really wasn’t putting a brave face on things. Her glow was real. Five days after being booted out of her seat in Parliament for some bloke in his thirties called Terry, Liz Truss was in a genuinely good mood. She didn’t mind losing. She was immensely comfortable in defeat.
The left lose all the time, but somehow we still haven’t got used to it. Before the last election in 2019, I spent every spare moment I had trudging around the swing seats of outer London, knocking on doors, talking to strangers, with all the witless evangelical fervour of a freshly hatched Jehovah’s Witness. Sometimes I’d end up talking to an impoverished old person practically walled into her mildew-speckled flat. She’d say she wanted to vote, but she didn’t know how she could possibly make it to the polling station, and when I got to tell her that her local Labour Party would send a car, it felt like liquid pride seeping into my lungs. Aren’t we good? Aren’t we kind? Isn’t it ennobling, to believe that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all? We believe in democracy. We want everyone to make their voice heard, so long as they’re voting for us. And then we lost. I had spent years piling all my hopes into the Corbyn project, and the British public rejected it in the most devastating defeat for Labour since the beginning of the current two-party system. They hated it, they hated us, and in the end I had to accept that their hatred was justified. I even wrote a big mopey blog post about it. I said that if dumb earnest hope had brought us here, maybe it was time to abandon hope. Maybe try a politics of despair instead. I assumed this political depression would last a month or two, but it never quite faded. My actual beliefs haven’t changed much, but these days my instinct is to assume that every political conflict is actually a grand conspiracy to conceal the fact that there’s nothing in particular at stake. These days, I’m usually right.
But the Tories revel in losing. Who needs political power when you’ve already got all the money? Power is nice, winning is entertaining for a while, but sometimes a nice spell in opposition is just what the doctor ordered. Besides, this country is clapped out, on its last legs, and now that’s all someone else’s problem. Let Keir worry about it. Let Keir take the blame. Your only job now is to enjoy the immense pleasures of being the loser, being the underdog, of being aggrieved and put-upon and victimised and upset. That’s what this party was: a huge gathering of losers, all celebrating their loserdom. All except one man, the man who’s done more to shape this country’s destiny than anyone else alive. Somewhere, Nigel Farage was here.
I think I know why I’ve felt so numb ever since this month’s election. Labour won a landslide, 412 seats, but when you look at the actual votes everything falls apart. Some 9.7 million people voted for their Labour candidate; in 2019, when we suffered the worst defeat in living memory, it was 10.3 million. Keir Starmer did manage to secure a higher vote share this time round, but only barely: Labour won 60% of the seats with 33.7% of the vote, up only 1.6% on the disastrous end of the Corbyn era. It’s still substantially lower than the 40% Corbyn managed when he lost in 2017. In fact, it’s the smallest vote share of any winning party in British political history. I’d thought I was engaged in a titanic ideological struggle: the left against the centre, socialism against neoliberalism, democratic politics against managerial administration, the red flag against the McDonald’s stand at Conference. My side had done what it could but lost, badly, and now our enemies were triumphant: they would get to make the Labour party electable again by repeatedly calling us antisemites. But in fact, none of that had even slightly mattered. The reason Corbyn lost and Starmer won is that in 2019, Nigel Farage stood his candidates down in hundreds of seats to avoid splitting the right-wing vote, and this time he didn’t. Keir Starmer gets to sit behind a big serious desk at No. 10, but only because Nigel Farage decided to put him there. All our ideological battles were between children, splashing around on the bright surface of a very deep ocean, and all the while the dead-eyed form of Nigel Farage was rising out of its cold abyss…
And he was here. At first it was whispered. Nigel’s here. Apparently Nigel’s here. The terrifying presence, in a party full of losers, of a man who actually wanted to win. Faces turned pale at the mention of him. Some of the hacks and pols gained a tiny tremor at the tips of their fingers. Others were suddenly ruddy with courage. Let’s find him. Let’s get him. Like big game hunters, if they were stalking the rhinoceros for its quote. I went with them. Sniffing after his trail. Someone said she’d passed Nigel Farage on the stairwell. Someone said he’d found himself next to Nigel Farage at the urinals. It sounded like a good strong stream, he said, but Nigel was also humming to himself while he pissed in a sort of unsettling way. That was good to know; that was good intel. We moved in a pack. Methodically went through the entire building. We couldn’t find him anywhere.
It didn’t help that half of the people at this party looked exactly like Nigel Farage. I kept scanning the crowd for some sign of a balding, weak-chinned, knobbly-faced, sallow-skinned, gulping, froglike man—and every time I looked, there were twenty of them within spitting distance. Nothing but lightly blubbered faces the colour of a nice boggy ale, as far as the eye could see. Yellow suits. Smell of wet dog. There’s a mildly annoying turn of phrase that diversity-and-inclusion people used to trot out, about how people need to see themselves in the media they consume. I’d never understood it, but suddenly it occurred to me that all these people could very literally see themselves in Nigel Farage. He wears their face. He turns the TV into a mirror. I found it difficult to look at those long froggy faces too long. After a moment’s examination, Elgar would start playing in my head, along with dreamy visions of rolling green fields, Norman churches, fruit machines buzzing in newly redecorated pubs.
Weirdly, this scrum of Farage-alikes took the pressure off. Maybe I didn’t need to find Nigel Farage. Maybe there is no Nigel Farage. Maybe he’s just the eternal spirit of England, grubbily charismatic but formless, laughing on the wind. He’s a TikTok filter. You can still pay £90 on Cameo to see his digital ghost read out a birthday message for your mate. For a while, there was genuine concern that some of his candidates had been AI-generated. And everyone who’d seen him at the Spectator summer party had only seen a flash. A figure descending a stairwell. The humming, pissing outline of a man. It’s socially forbidden to actually look at someone when they’re using the urinal. But if I really wanted to talk to Nigel Farage, I could talk to any of the men who wore his face. I already knew exactly the sort of thing they’d say. They’d say they just wanted their country back. They’d say their politics were just plain common sense. They’d say things were better in the old days, when there weren’t so many foreigners around, when boys were allowed to be boys, and ordinary people were free to adulterate their cattle feed with cheap meat byproducts, inadvertently producing an epidemic of violent cannibal cows with virulent prion diseases that would go on to make their way into the consumer supply chain and slowly aerate the brains of nearly two hundred people until they died. They’d intone this hallowed liturgy, and all of them would be speaking in the eternal voice of Nige.
So I dropped it. I hung around and gossiped and smoked one cigarette even though I’m supposed to have given up. But I really have given up cocaine, so by the time the party had shrunk to a single room and people were beginning to think about swapping liquids for powders, I said my goodbyes and set off home. It was raining. Up I trudged back along Whitehall. Windows dark in Downing Street. Bedtime for the Prime Minister. I felt the first tug of tiredness deep in my bones. How nice to be Sleepy Keir, all tucked up and warm. I sat on the top deck of the night bus and watched my reflection hover over empty streets. Darted to the door of my estate as the heavens opened again. But when I got up to my flat, wet and bedraggled, I discovered that Nigel Farage was in my kitchen.
He was going through my cupboards. Ah, he said, looking up at me, just the man I was looking for. Do you happen to know where the teabags are around here? Reckon it’s got to that point in the night, don’t you? There was a half-drunk pint of Timothy Taylors Landlord on my counter. I didn’t say anything. Yes? he said. No? Teabags? They’re in the tin, I said, the sort of Chinese biscuit tin with the flying ducks on it. Chinese biscuit tin, said Farage doubtfully, while looking directly at it. No matter. I’ll stay on the piss if you don’t mind. He picked up the half-drunk pint. So, he said. I heard you were out looking for me. Seems like you have some questions you want answered. He wandered over to my sofa and sat himself down with a long satisfied sigh, which was followed by a small but merry burp. Come on then, he said. Ask away. I don’t bite. Wait, I said, what are you doing here? Ah, said Farage, that’s an easy one. He propped up his feet on my coffee table, and when he spoke again it was with a deeper, stranger voice.
I am here, said Nigel Farage, because you were not satisfied with weakness. You scorned your enemies for their peevishness and their hysteria. Very well: I have none. I am not here to complain that you and your globalist friends have eroded British sovereignty, frustrated the will of the people, and swamped us with third-world immigrants. None of that matters in the slightest. I am simply here to tell you that I will win and you will lose. You are too late for the world, Mr Kriss. You still think in terms of ideas and ideologies. There are no ideas. There are no ideologies. There is no left. There is no right. All of that is a very old language, and it’s dying faster than you can possibly imagine. Have you not noticed what’s happening? Across Europe, the parties of left and right are collapsing, and every day the parties of nation and people grow stronger. We’ll take France: not now, but next time. In five years King Charles will be inviting me to form a government here. The future is ours, because all the people want is simply to be French again, to be German, to be British. That’s the only politics; all questions of policy will flow inevitably from there. I believe in parliamentary democracy, because parliamentary democracy is an ancient expression of the British way of life. It is right for us; it may not be right for the Sudanese. Likewise, I believe in commerce, the free market, and individual liberty. These things are in our blood. Along with, it may surprise you to hear, our ancient Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism, our seafaring openness to the world. I too enjoy a vindaloo. I can even recognise your smug disdain for your own people as a fundamentally British phenomenon. It would be a rare Fuzzy-Wuzzy who fancied himself a cosmopolitan. But while I am prepared to uphold democracy, the world that’s coming will be cleaner, starker, harsher; it will have no room for thought. Our democracy and our intellectual sphere must always express not ideology, not confused and fractured opinions, but simply spirit, the eternal and unified spirit of the nation. The population, too, must be made to express the national spirit and no other, whatever its recent ancestry. And I am the spirit of the nation. You know this to be true. You’ve thought it yourself. That, Mr Kriss, is why I am here.
To be honest, I hadn’t really been paying full attention. No, I said, why are you here? This is my home. I live here. How did you even get in? Nigel Farage looked slowly at his surroundings. Your home, he said. Is that what you see? Is that where you think we are?
He did leave eventually, but not without repeatedly belabouring his joke. Oh no, Nigel Farage said, chortling, I’d hate to turn up uninvited in someone’s home. We mustn’t make anyone feel like a stranger in their own home now, must we? How very rude it is, to come to someone’s home and make life difficult for them. Yes, I said, yes I get it, very clever, now please leave. I tried to close the door on him, but his grinning face was in the way. Help! he wailed, mock-struggling. I’m being deported! I thought I had the right to asylum in your kitchen! Help! Afterwards, I just sat in front of the window and watched the rain outside as it poured down through the orange robes of streetlights and disappeared. My flat felt very small. I wondered where I really was.