The force that once considered itself the natural party of government has become a cult of bitterness and denial
You may not have heard of Nat Wei, AKA Lord Wei of Shoreditch. Until very recently, the 46-year-old Conservative peer – ennobled by David Cameron, for whom he once did some work on the concept of the “big society” – had certainly escaped my attention. But when he published a brief article on the activist website ConservativeHome, he became the kind of human firework that sometimes briefly illuminates the political sky, before once again falling into obscurity.
There may be rot at the top and, especially after this weekend, huge questions facing Boris Johnson and Nadhim Zahawi (and others) about money, power and entitlement, but Wei’s message was that his comrades ought to buck up. “It really feels like many in the party have already begun to throw in the towel,” he wrote. “Which is unfortunate because the country actually needs us to take action, innovate and solve problems.” Predictably enough, one of the issues he chose to explore was that of “out-of-control wokery in tertiary education” – which, he said, might be tackled using truly ingenious methods.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
