I was a bit surprised, as you might be, by this article from Andy Beckett in The Guardian about ex members of the Revolutionary Communist Party now in or close to government. It is quite an eye opener. Munira Mirza, head of the Downing Street policy unit and Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, now a peer, are former RCP members. Brendan O'Neil from the right wing website Spiked was too, along with Frank Furedi and Mick Hume who write occasionally for the right-wing magazine, The Spectator. Should we be puzzled by it? Perhaps not.
Beckett calls them libertarian provocateurs by the way but I'm not sure they are that.
I used to think the old left-right labels were misleading anyway and political beliefs were not linear but circular. The more extreme you were one way or the other took you around the back where you met and found yourself in agreement with extremists who had made the journey from the opposite direction.
Was Hitler that much different to Stalin? Not really. When you move so far from the political centre I am not sure you have any genuine beliefs beyond sheer authoritarianism and it's that which unifies the extremists.
I think Cameron once said that Gove himself was a "bit of a Maoist" with a belief in the creative destruction of society and institutions. This isn't to be confused with a plan but a hope that if you break something into a thousand pieces other people will fix it in a better way.
One of the reasons the Tory party finds these sort of extreme left wingers interesting is the desire to hold on to power at all costs and the belief that ideological sons of toil have easy access to the thinking of the man or woman in the street - ordinary people as they call them. That's people like you and me. I can say with certainty they do not.
In turn the former RCP members saw an opportunity to hijack Eurosceptic Conservative thinking to produce Brexit.
For me they all have one thing in common. They really don't understand what the EU is or how it works - in some cases deliberately so. The entryists, if that's the right word because most of them are not in the party itself, have recognised the average Conservative party member is a bit clueless. You can see this runs right up to men like Bernard Jenkyns and Bill Cash who speak with a plum in their mouths but have only the sketchiest idea how the modern world functions.
So, the party was ripe for a takeover because it was hungry for change but it had no underlying philosophy on which to base it. Brexit has become that 'philosophy'. We know that Johnson has no convictions either way. What he says in the morning bears no resemblance to what he might say in the afternoon. His thinking is as changeable as the weather.
I think the ability to hold some consistent ideas and to pursue them ruthlessly is their appeal for Boris Johnson. He probably struggles to understand the idea of anything like a steadfast political conviction that society is best organised one way or another. In a sense he is the opposite of Thatcher and is now undoing everything she stood for.
The single market is the first thing to be jettisoned but the government's stubborn resistance against accepting EU state aid rules shows that Cummings and co are determined to roll back her entire privatisation agenda with a lot of public money being poured into industries of the future. I have to say this is bound to fail - even if the WTO and the EU allow it.
In a wider sense the Tories are undergoing a similar transformation to the Chinese Communist party but in the opposite direction. Whereas China now accepts and embraces capitalism, the Tories are beginning to embrace a version of socialism.
Over the next four years we are going to be involved in another giant national experiment of the kind that no other modern western nation has attempted. In 1979 Mrs Thatcher and the Tory shifted the country to the right and essentially decimated our manufacturing industry in the belief that this too would spark some sort of national renewal. It did for a while and the service sector grew to replace jobs lost in manufacturing.
We are now going into reverse. The government wants us to become global Britain and to be in the vanguard of free trading nations. But we need goods to sell which is I assume why Cummings thinks large scale government 'investment' in industry is now a desirable thing.
This is all predicated on the idea that world-class businesses are created by political philosophy dictated from the top. No continental country has gone through two such ideological upheavals or even thought they might be necessary. Germany is the prime example of a nation that sails serenely onwards with tiny course corrections occasionally while we swing wildly from one extreme to the other.
To be successful takes solid step-by-step progress every year but in the same general direction and a desire to BE the best in the world rather than tell everyone that you are when you clearly are not.
Britain grew rich on empire and we were once a global power because of it. But that is no longer true. We need to lower our sights and just concentrate on making life better for out own people by creating the right conditions, by encouraging long term investment and an attitude to actually BE the best while not constantly boasting about it.
Unfortunately, Johnson doesn't care about the country or its people or for anything beyond the satisfying of his need to be at the top of the tree. That's all that matters to him. He is not the answer.
