In June 2017, Nick Timothy left Downing Street for the last time: disgraced and demoralised, in a few short months Timothy – with his co-Chief of Staff Fiona Hill – had steered Theresa May from an exalted status as the new Iron Lady to a vanishingly slim victory over a Labour leader she had been set to trounce. Just over two years later, and with an acquired reputation as a maverick bumbler, Timothy’s political hopes were again dashed as he failed to secure selection for a prize Tory safe seat. Hardly the biographical details typical of those history remembers for reshaping a nation’s politics. Yet despite this undeniable record of personal political failure, Timothy is slowly carving out a space for himself as the architect of a revolutionary new vision of British conservatism and as one of the most powerful, provocative, and influential voices on the British right – a spokesman for the political revolt which secured Boris Johnson in Number Ten six months ago, and which is set to shape Britain for a generation.
Timothy’s latest book, Remaking One Nation has not received the reception it perhaps deserves – released in March at the height of coronavirus panic, this polemical challenge to 21st-century liberalism received few reviews. Of the few, they were either knee-jerk affirmations in the Tory press, or short and glib critiques: writing for Foreign Policy one reviewer compared the work to the rhetoric of Viktor Orban and confusingly denounced the book as an exercise in ‘Putting Lipstick on a Bigotry’[sic?]. The Guardian’s Andrew Rawnsley delivered a more biting rebuke that Timothy’s “thoughts will be less influential in shaping society than a microbe” in the current pandemic-oriented political climate. There may be something to Rawnsley’s critique, but it would be a mistake to dismiss Timothy’s influence on the doctrinal evolution of the Conservative Party and on Britain’s post-liberal philosophical moment.
I. Against the Ultra-Liberals
At the core of Timothy’s book is a lacerating assault on what he terms “the ultra-liberal ratchet”, a set of beliefs he associates with two strands of “elite liberalism”, namely “market fundamentalism” and “militant identity politics”. These two sets of beliefs are, as Timothy confesses, rarely united in any one individual. But, in his telling, they become a sort of combined ideological force, above and in control of the individual political actors who execute it. In this sense, the “ultra-liberal ratchet” is best seen as analogous almost to the role played by ‘Capital’ in Marx’s theories: a never-quite-defined force beyond history with which no individual or group can wholly be identified, but which, in Timothy’s pessimistic retelling of the political trajectory of the Western world since the 1970s, has nonetheless propelled us all along. This is hardly an original critique, and although Timothy never uses the term himself, his arguments will be familiar to many on the left better versed in criticism of neoliberalism. Likewise, Timothy’s assertion that modern identity politics represents the other side of the coin to neoliberal economic hyper-individualism shares more than a blush of similarity with the Marxist theory of ‘capital recuperation’, which argues that capitalism neutralises and co-opts social radicalism to further its own agenda. In this case, that agenda is social atomisation, the elevation of the individual and his rights above all else, and the destruction of the nation-state rooted in a particular cultural and political community in favour of a Lockean/Nozickian state dedicated solely to the enforcement of contracts, and the defence of the property and security of the individual. It is here that Timothy’s left-wing economic critique turns to service right-wing cultural ambitions, rooted in both a moral rejection of the socially corrosive impact of individualism on the community and a tribalistic ontology of human nature.
In the first case, Timothy hews closely to the traditional ‘One Nation’ Toryism for which his book is titled and to which he publicly pronounces his allegiance. This is the tradition of Timothy’s hero Joseph Chamberlain, but also of Disraeli, the ‘Tory Socialism’ of Randolph Churchill, and to some extent the ideology of his son Winston, a tradition whose day came to an end with the rise of Thatcher and the triumph of British neoliberalism. It is this strand of Timothy’s thought which is so clearly influential in Downing Street today, and which has shaped Boris Johnson’s strategy to “level up” Britain’s regions and challenge the prevailing laissez-faire economic consensus of the past half a century. In the face of this decline, Timothy boldly reasserts One Nation principles, and argues that whilst both what he terms ‘Core Liberalism’ (defined in terms of basic liberties, equality before the law, freedom of speech, expression, and assembly and so on) and the capitalist market are essential to the enjoyment of human liberty, they are not ends in themselves. Indeed, on the contrary, Timothy argues that unrestricted individualism can be socially destructive, and must at all times be wedded to a vigilant concern for the preservation of social order.
The many ills modern Britain faces today can, in Timothy’s view, be traced back to the British political class’ failure or refusal to do so, and to their relentless pursuit of economic liberalisation and unlimited individual freedom. As a consequence, the unfettered forces of the global market have proven ruinous to the poorest in our society, whilst enriching an increasingly socially, regionally, and culturally contained elite. Whilst Britain’s richest areas, particularly in London and the South East are some of the most prosperous in Europe parts of Wales and the North East of England are as poor as Eastern Europe. As this staggering wealth inequality grows, our economy seems to be hurtling towards a two-tiered service economy with lawyers, bankers, and consultants at the top, and perilously employed gig-economy workers and those on fixed-term contracts at the bottom.
But Timothy also argues that social liberalisation has had a sinister impact on our society, producing a society of atomised consumers with little concern for the good of their families, communities, or nation. In a particularly impassioned invocation of this idea, he draws on
John Gray’s cogent critique of Mill’s harm principle, the idea that the individual can do whatever they wish so long as it does not ‘harm’ anyone. But this view often papers over the subtler, yet equally consequential, social costs associated with self-harm. Britain’s contemporary debate around drug legalisation or decriminalisation is a case in point. As Timothy rightly notes, every drug addict has a family and a community who are also harmed by their behaviour, be it through the immense pain of the loss of a loved one, or the economic burden of supporting drug addiction, all of which is masked by the harm principle and its individualist assumptions. Drug decriminalisation is one of the few areas in which ultra-liberals of the left and right typically agree, but, as Timothy argues, in viewing freedom in terms of an individual’s right to dispose of their own life however they wish as long as they cause no physical harm to others, such debates ignore the interconnection of all human lives, and the harm to society of viewing citizens as nothing more than atomised individuals pursuing only their own happiness. These two approaches, he argues, are inextricably bound together: economic individualism begets social atomisation and vice versa, and together lead only to social disintegration and the collapse of any bonds of community or shared identity.
Thus, the much lauded “crisis of liberal democracy”, the rise of the populist right and left, increased political polarisation, and the decline of a basic framework of shared facts and a mutual acceptance of truth is a product of this social disintegration, and of the dramatic acceleration of international capitalism over the last forty years. To counter it, Timothy argues, both major British political parties – but the Conservatives in particular – need to start thinking seriously about empowering communities and putting the rights of all first whilst preserving a long and noble British tradition of individual freedom. But it is in his prescriptions for what sort of community we ought to defend against this corrosive ultra-liberalism that Timothy errs worryingly towards the far-right, and it is in order to defend an ideological vision of it that he constructs a phantom ideological enemy against which to argue.
II. Whose nation is it?
This communitarian challenge to the political individualism of the neoliberal project is hardly new: it bears a striking resemblance in some regards to Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner’s republicanism, or indeed to the ‘Agonistic’ populism of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. But where Timothy’s conservative communitarianism diverges sharply from these left-wing critiques of political individualism is in his understanding of what makes a community, and why we ought to defend it. Like these communitarian thinkers, Timothy argues that the survival and flourishing of the state depends upon its citizens’ willingness to put the interests of the community before their own, but he diverges from them in his analysis of what binds the members of a political community together.
In the continental republican tradition, the unity of the community is understood in terms of values, beliefs, and ideals: to be a Frenchman and a citizen is not to have been born in France, but to subscribe to certain central tenets about the proper way of living in and serving a society. Within the polity there may be division and dissent, but the plurality of opinions expressed by citizens are expected to be expressed as differences in how to achieve the central mission of the state. But whilst Timothy at times borrows the rhetoric of this tradition, as he writes towards the end of his book, “a nation cannot be reduced to concepts as vague as a ‘sense of fair play’ and a belief in democracy”. Instead, it must be understood as the product not of institutions or ideals, but of “a long and messy story that takes in our history, our shared stories and our collective experiences”, a “reverence of particular places” and of a particular culture, all amounting to a collective national identity, one Timothy is at pains to define in terms of its exclusivity. To an extent this is unobjectionable: if anyone can enjoy the rights of citizenship within a political community without the obligations to the community it confers then citizenship becomes meaningless. This exclusivity, however, becomes dangerous when defined in terms of an organic ‘nation’ whose membership is made exclusive by cultural and – implicitly – ethnic inheritance.
Timothy does not outline such a position directly, but it is implicit in his criticism of liberalism’s “warped view of citizenship”, and his alternative to the liberal ontology of human nature. Where liberalism at its most abstract conceives of the world in terms of the rational, self-interested individual for whom all relationships are transactional, Timothy builds his conservatism from the starting point of a radically different interpretation. He argues that “humans are both ‘selfish and groupish’”, but that within the “groups” to which we belong, we are not only cooperative, but altruistic – our nature points not towards atomistic individual competition, but to collaboration within “tribes”. Although Timothy pays lip-service to the idea that, within these groups, “[d]iscrimination against anybody on the basis of a disability or illness, or their gender, race, sexuality, or social class should be prohibited”, he also advocates for a strict and integrationist immigration policy and declares that “as a society becomes more diverse, trust, solidarity, and support for redistributive policies fall.” In effect, this amounts to saying that although diversity may be nice in theory, it is ultimately as socially deleterious as runaway capitalism or socially irresponsible individualism. Instead, only those who subscribe to particular “laws and ways of life” should be recognised as members of the community for its own good, and this way of life can only be adopted through the wholesale embrace of ‘British culture’ defined in a long and nostalgic list of cultural identifiers. Any values which go against this must be excluded and even stamped out – yet curiously where Timothy engages in a prolonged assault on what he sees as the formation of Islamic “parallel communities” in Britain, no time is dedicated to tackling the rising wave of far-right extremism in this country which should surely be recognised as anathema to the British values he claims to hold so dear.
Whilst eliding a definition of national identity based on race or identity, then, Timothy nevertheless implicitly defines it in terms of an exclusionary conception of ‘Britishness’ rooted in the irrational attachments of a people born into a community and a lucky few able to integrate into its culture – but only if they abandon their own. Clothed in the language of a progressive economic programme and the familiar social critiques of the left, Timothy’s proposals have at their heart a nationalistic worldview distrustful of the ‘other’ and dedicated to the preservation of a particular national group against a world of enemies. And it is in constructing the “enemy” against which to define legitimate membership of the community that Timothy’s ideology begins to appear horrifyingly similar to the British Orbanism decried by his critics, with worrying implications for the new conservatism which it has inspired.
III. Friends and enemies
In the 1930s, as Europe was gripped by the last great crisis of liberal democracy, the now infamous German nationalist jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that all politics is, at its heart, a conflict between friends and enemies. As Samuel Huntington would put it a generation later, “People know who they are only when they know who they are not, and often only when they know who they are against”. In this “anthropologically pessimistic” view, as Schmitt described it, to be human is to belong to a group, and such belonging only exists in opposition to others. Political theorists and ideologues almost universally define the movements which they hope to shape in such terms: for liberals, the enemy is the irrational, the conservative, the collectivist and the authoritarian. For Timothy’s conservatism, it is those whose existence and values stand opposed to the absolute sovereignty of the people as a homogenous ‘nation’.
This is an essentially populist distinction between the purity of the sovereign people and their united will and its opponents. It is a way of looking at politics rooted in a profound paranoia that every dissenting voice, every plea for restraint, moderation, and forbearance, and every proposal to limit the power of the many to protect the few is at worst incompatible with “true” democracy and at worst a front in a conspiracy against the people. This is nowhere more obvious than when Timothy rails against the European Convention on Human Rights for “mak[ing] it harder for countries like Britain to keep their civilians safe”. It is the key to understanding Timothy’s disdain for elite “ultra-liberals”, who he sees as willing to sell the country down the river for a short-term profit by outsourcing manufacturing to East Asia and turning it into a hyper-capitalised paradise for the rich. But its darker side can be found in public pronouncements like Timothy’s claims in a tweet of 2018 that George Soros was behind a “secret plot” to stop Brexit. Timothy has rejected all accusations of antisemitism, but the image his words evoked of a foreign Jewish billionaire undermining British democracy are chillingly reminiscent of the rhetoric of the far-right. The same can arguably said of Theresa May’s infamous claim that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere” – a line with more than a little resemblance to the old antisemitic stereotype of the “rootless cosmopolitan”.
Indeed, the great failing of Timothy’s manifesto is that, for all it takes aim at ultra-liberal elites, far too often the likely targets of its proposals seem to be not the wealthy and powerful, but the most vulnerable in our society. His attacks on modern feminism and identity politics play, again, to a growing illiberalism on the fringes of the British right. When he speaks of “hold[ing] back the tide” of immigration, for example, Timothy may couch his concerns in legitimate criticism of an elite willing to import a new serf class, but taken in the context of the totality of his work, it is not hard to wonder if this, and not a set of more sinister impulses, is the true reason for his opposition to immigration. Likewise, when he describes the movement for transgender rights as a product of elite “identity obsessed left-liberalism” which “might undermine the privacy or security of women born as women”, his opposition may be targeted rhetorically at a cabal of cultural elites, but its real victims would be a persecuted minority group whose rights are being eroded every day.
This politics of friendship and enmity is central to Timothy’s book, even if it is not often brought to the front of the stage, and it is equally central to the new Conservatism for which he is emerging as a leading intellectual advocate. Boris Johnson’s very public commitment to building a fairer and more equal Britain is admirable: but as a Downing Street memo leaked in September 2019 revealed, it is coupled with a desire to weaponise “culture war issues” (particularly trans rights) to the Conservative Party’s advantage. This is the dangerous dark side of Timothy’s conservatism in action. Timothy claims, both in his title, and throughout his book to have been inspired by Benjamin Disraeli, quoting favourably that great Tory statesman’s injunction that Britain ought not devolve into “two nations”, the rich and poor. Such an impulse is undeniably found in Timothy’s work, but so is another set of impulses long intertwined with it in the history of British conservatism and best expressed by Disraeli’s contemporary and friend, the nationalist poet Monckton Milnes in his poem Lines from a Judge,a darkly nostalgic statement of a reactionary cultural conservatism which still rings true.
“Oh! flog me at the old cart’s tail / I surely should enjoy /That fine old English punishment / I witnessed when a boy! / I should not heed the mocking crowd / I should not feel the pain / If one old English custom / Could be brought back again!”