A great deal of discussion following the resignation of porn-watching Conservative MP Neil Parish has concerned sexism in Parliament, where the working culture is apparently a hotbed of pervy remarks, “noisy sex” in offices, “sex pest MPs” and vomit-spattered champagne parties.
But to me the resonant detail was less the pornography than the tractor. The search term “Dominator” is apparently a class of combine harvester, as well as having more lubricious connotations. This one word slid Parish sideways in a single click from the preoccupations of an old-fashioned Tory to the full-spectrum violence and nihilism of today’s culture of universal pornification.
And he did so in public view, scrolling pornography in the House of Commons — an act as obviously, flagrantly, socially unacceptable as walking out of your front door naked from the waist down. Ascribing behaviour this bizarre to so banal an impulse as sexism doesn’t add up.
Parish called it a “moment of madness”, but psychologists have long recognised that impulsive actions can be revealing. And if you were to read it as a cry of despair, Parish’s act would make eloquent sense — not just for him as an individual, but for those last surviving fragments of conservatism that still somehow cling on in the modern Conservative Party.
For Parish exemplifies a type of conservatism which is homeless. It is incompatible with the Tory Party today and is unrepresented in the increasingly influential “dissident Right”. For inasmuch as there is energy on the Right, it is in this febrile movement, which fizzes with energy — but is wholly estranged from the modern Tory Party, whose aggregate actions (accidentally or otherwise) look more like part of the problem than the solution.
Consider, for example, the current tussle over regulating imported Canadian beef. Canadian officials are pushing for a deal that would oblige us to accept hormone-treated meat, a practice banned by the EU in 1989 and that studies have shown uses carcinogenic chemicals. This is, for Boris Johnson, a difficult circle to square since, much like the once-again radioactive immigration debate, hormone beef pits the Party’s longstanding commitment to “free trade” (ie growth) against what’s left of the Party’s desire to conserve anything at all, including Britain’s increasingly strained and miserable (and hitherto loyally Tory) rural economy.
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