Brexit and the Blob

Remembering Michael Gove and the Death of British Conservatism

The two most important years in the last 50 years occurred in 2016 and 2020.

Congratulations, unless you are a seven year old article reading prodigy, you lived through both of them and now fully understand the meaning of the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”.

The times are very interesting. The people, not so much.

Especially the people in politics or people talking about politics. They tend to be boring, as my wife frequently reminds me.

And the more boring they are, quite often, the more respectable they are. The more successful they are. The more they are likely to be picked and promoted and end up on the (alleged or illusory) top of the pile.

Everyone in the system loves a yes man (or woman) they can predict. The capacity to think clearly isn’t rewarded. The capacity to think deeply definitely isn’t rewarded. And the capacity to think in an original way is positively terrifying.

The more insane the regime, the more it will insist on bland frontmen, and the more lack of thought and lack of originality will be the markers of success.

This was the polite consensus of western politics ever since World War Two. This was the Civil Service way, the expert way, the ‘adults in the room’ way, and the Deep State way. Parties might contest in their sham battles and public theater disagreements, but the same kind of guy sat on the benches.

The Uniparty is a creature as much of shared lack of imagination and social class protection as it is of out and out corruption and malign manipulation (none of these things are absent, they are in balance).

American RINOs or British Conservatives who let radical social progressivism and Globalism take over the world did it as much because they weren’t very bright and weren’t judged on anything but respectable conformity as they did it because all the money and perks and dinner parties were now controlled by billionaires who wanted (for their own reasons) this mad, mad world we now live in.

They were on the payroll but they also were scared about not being invited to join the golf club or country club they wanted. They were going along with whatever fresh madness had social approval now but they were also just naturally and emotionally unimaginative conformists.

When mediocrity becomes safety and conformity becomes respectability, then the people who rise are the least imaginative, the least original, the least capable. The power behind the throne favors weak nonentities on the throne. This is the psychological truth that makes such a sick joke of the view of themselves that the most respectable and the most progressive hold-that they are the free thinkers, when of course they are the conformists.

What people don’t usually connect as explicitly as I am doing here is that the purple haired school teacher with the Pride flag and the Antifa and Hamas sympathies who broke down in hysterics when Trump was elected, and the Mike Pence and Bill Barr types who got close to Trump in order to betray him, are essentially the same person.

They look different, they say different things, they dress differently, and they claim to hate each other. But psychologically they are the same, and politically they do the same thing.

They are NPCs who either in the name of rebelliousness or the name of respectability do the work of smarter people without ever being aware of their own unimaginative mediocrity.

The election of Trump in 2016 and the vote for Brexit in 2016 have long been understood as populist shocks to the system. Both however were something more than just that. They represented the point at which majorities of ordinary voters realized that it was the respectable choices that were dangerous. In that moment, the whole managed decline fate of the West was challenged AS WELL AS the whole system of corruption by which parasites fed on the wounded beast of western nationhood.

The social class that assumed they and they alone had the right to decide policy were being rejected.

The policies that make things inevitably worse and that sell things always getting worse as the only possible realism were being rejected.

The capacity to reward yourself from your nation’s deliberately engineered decline was being rejected.

The ordinary voters of the US and the UK had realized they were trapped in a system that rewarded mediocrity, hated greatness, loved conformity and punished originality. They realized that such a system did not serve them. They realized that such a system could only keep spending more, wasting more, and achieving less and that the end result would hurt them (ordinary people) rather than hurting the architects of slow disaster.

They had seen those architects bailed out in 2008.

The kind of people who could expect to be bailed out or have some special protection didn’t and couldn’t see it. The favored clients and agents of the State either didn’t see it or lied about it whilst knowing they were lying. The comfortable financially were just as comfortable with mad ideas now being promoted as normality-after all, these ideas were not making THEM any poorer (yet).

It was the working class who both saw the reality and expected it to factor in the halls of power. When it didn’t, they demanded change and voted for change.

But in the midst of the system some of its creatures were a little smarter and a little more original.

It’s here we come to British Establishment supporters of Brexit like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Johnson is the one who still gets the majority of attention.

But both of these two main Brexiteers had a quality very unusual in contemporary mainstream politics. To some extent, they were both original thinkers. To some extent, they could intuitively (Boris) or calculatedly (Gove) grasp the true public mood. And they were willing to gamble their personal fortunes on backing that mood.

They went against the existing leaders of their party and its declared policy preference, and they defied the Civil Service mandarins and the consensus of the political and media class. They backed Brexit.

Boris, by far the more charismatic and obviously interesting of the two as a personality, is actually the less interesting one psychologically and politically. It seems clear now that Boris is empty in the same way that a Blair or Keir Starmer is empty. Boris is someone who says all the right things (from a populist) perspective whilst not in office, and equally someone who does all the wrong things (Globalist rule) when actually in the Big Seat.

His connection to Brexit was based on the calculation that this was his best chance of becoming Prime Minister and clearing away old friends and rivals who stood in his path and were backing Remain. Once that real objective (becoming PM) had been achieved, the rest was negotiable again. This is both why Boris backed Brexit and why he delivered a Brexit deal that was identical to the one crafted by Remain advocate Theresa May. It was a vehicle to ride into power, and nothing else.

Looking back on it now, the almost painfully obvious manipulator Gove was a much more interesting person when the Boris entertainment factor is discounted. Gove was the Poundshop Iago to the Johnson Othello. Few snakes have slithered this way and that quite as noticeably as Gove did, who established a metronomic regularity to his betrayals. Gove too could easily be understood as someone just out for himself and just aiming for the highest post he could achieve. But there was something more there.

Physically and by air, appearance and mannerism, Gove reminds an observer of one of those slimy little clergymen in Jane Austin novels and TV drama adaptations. He has a gulping, bulging eyed, weak chinned, somewhat frog-like look about him. But there is no doubt that this is a clever frog. Gove had the reputation of being one of the two cleverest Conservative MPs (which is a bit like the reputation of being the fastest tortoise in town, but all the same…). Since lack of thought was generally rewarded, the suspicion that Gove might be capable of actual thought did not really aid his efforts to advance. Instead it hung over him as something of a black cloud in the shape of a question mark, like being suspected of heterosexuality in the fashion industry. Whatever the cause-a certain clamminess, too much cleverness-nature had endowed Gove with all the qualities of a kingmaker and conspirator, and none of the qualities of a king.

The Gove claim of course is that he backed Boris (when he backed him) out of principle, and he betrayed Boris (when he betrayed him) out of principle too. But Boris was just one of multiple Gove shifts of allegiance. This was a man who seemed to do very little except plot first one path and then the other, almost as if he would engineer opportunities to betray a colleague more out of an enjoyment of the process than out of a pursuit of power itself. At some point in the public and private disintegration of the British Conservative Party, which went through its collapsing clown car phase following the 2016 vote right up till the 2024 election of the equally shambolic Labour Party (interrupted only by that brief illusion of competence in Johnson’s 2019 win) even Gove himself must have wondered what it was all for.

If ever there is a film made about a man who gradually realizes that his constant betrayals aren’t the clever machinations he imagined but a compulsive plot device given to him by a celestial author of a bad novel, that role should be played by an actor who studies Gove…if not (for added inauthenticity and meta-narrative) by Gove himself.

Perhaps its his very obviousness as a conspirator, together with his superficial cleverness, that made Gove out of all of the Collapse Era Tories the one to best express the nature of the system itself. Whilst Liz Truss (the shortest serving PM in British history) has adopted the language of populism to describe her own near-immediate removal from office by talking about the Deep State and the role of the Civil Service and Bank of England in the coup that forced her resignation, Gove expressed the true nature of the real enemy of both democracy and competence much earlier.

When serving as Minister of Education, Gove attempted reforms to the educational system. These policies (including ones that were never enacted and ones that were only rumors and fever dreams) sparked panic and outrage amongst the whole panoply of teaching unions, ministry officials, civil service advisors, focus group coordinators, ‘stakeholding’ educators and university academics. For the more limited sphere of British educational policy, the panic and hysteria involved can be described accurately to American readers as similar to the Democrat reaction to Project 2025.

The smelling salts were in demand, even before anything was done.

British teachers hate Tories, just as US teachers hate Republicans. The same bias and indoctrination applies. But Gove….Gove they especially hated.

In turn, clever Mr Gove gave a perfect description of what a Conservative attempting anything actually conservative would face. He described the educational establishment that hated him as ‘the Blob’, after the carnivorous alien amoeba of the 1958 sci-fi horror classic that launched the acting career of Steve McQueen.

It’s a perfect metaphor for the blind voraciousness of a thing that grows and grows at the expense of others, a thing that is as mindless as it is malign, a thing that absorbs everything into itself, a thing made of every element imaginable except thought and competence and sense. And it’s a description just as valid (sometimes more) as Deep State, Swamp, or Corruption.

It describes the parts of a bureaucracy that work in a malign manner without even necessarily needing consciously malign direction (which is of course there as well) and the parts of a conspiracy that operate by not thinking as much as by thinking hard about self-interest.

Like the term NPC and Elon Musk’s use of the phrase “the woke mind-virus” it captures the automatic nature of much of the vested interests reaction to populist reversals or serious challenge. The Blob quivers with fury. The Blob must absorb all. The Blob never questions itself.

But unlike these the Blob is also better at expressing the collectivist nature of the whole thing by a horrific and exact type of imagery. Because the Blob oozes and slithers and pulses its way into everything. There is no boundary it will respect. There is no discrimination or discernment in what it absorbs. And there is more real body horror in its pulsing amoebic advance than there is even in the thought of a mind virus.

We are trapped and digested by this thing.

Such an image does not apply solely to the educational establishment. It applies to the system as a whole. It applies to reactions to Trump and MAGA, and it applies to reactions to Brexit and what happened to Brexit.

Brexit was swallowed by the Blob. It made the Blob quiver with rage, and the Blob absorbed it. We got our departure from the EU, but only in name. All the real qualities of Brexit (not paying the EU, not following or aligning with EU law and EU regulations and EU orders) were abandoned to give just the name of the escape, and none of the characteristics of an escape.

Still, today, we have Remain voices telling us, with increasingly and re-emergent stridency and arrogance, that Brexit was a disaster, that Brexit failed, that Brexit destroyed the economy, that people regret Brexit, that Brexit wasn’t worth it. With gloating smugness they assert that Brexit has been tried and tested and shown to have been a wicked mistake.

But they never let us try it. Not really.

People like Boris and Gove were midwives determined to deliver the baby Brexit stillborn, just as more obviously Remain figures were. Boris did on Brexit what he did on COVID and everything else-immediately submit to globalism, progressivism, to institutional authority, to Deep State direction, to woke mind virus and to Blob mentality and Blob authority.

The whole giant quivering mass, of which the EU is but one significant pseudopod.

Gove was a person smart enough to give perhaps the best name of the beast. But he wasn’t and couldn’t be a person with the kind of integrity needed to really resist. This was a man so desperate to stay ‘in power’ that he was one of the Conservatives in office paying court to the shocking stupidities of Green apocalypse. He was a minister ready to sit beside Greta Thurnberg gurning happily at her hysterical nonsense because that’s what the Blob wanted him to do.

The Little Iago was swept away just like the Bumbling Othello.

The charming fool is gone, and the slimy clever clogs too. And this was the best that Collapse Era Toryism could offer.

And Brexit never really was. The dream of freedom was killed not just because our leaders were and are mediocre men, but because we thought that one part of the Blob could be challenged in isolation, and not the whole quivering horror of it all. But if you reject the EU, you have to reject the rest too. You have to clear our Westminster to clear out Brussels. You have to intend to slay the UN as well as the EU.

You have to see yourself trapped in a beast with a thousand heads, like some Lovecratian devouring entity, composed of this incredible gigantic self-serving blind malevolence that only knows hunger and hunger again. This bulk of unnecessary institutions. This Deep State. This permanent administrative state. This body made of both everyone official, everyone blind, everyone stupid, and everyone working for as well as controlling a thousand thousand NGOs.

The Deep State is not particular to a single nation. Its not just a branch of government. When I was researching for my next book I discovered just how many NGOs there are, just how many institutions and bodies linked to the UN or the EU or an endless list of similar organizations identical to them in their attitudes and impositions. Its not just Deep and hidden. Its wide and obvious.

Where will you find just one of these bodies that really serves its declared and original purpose?

Where will you find just one of these bodies that actually serves you?

Where will find just one of them that you agreed to?

Did you ever say “I demand a World Bank!”. Did you ever say “Give me FEMA, or death!”. Did you ever feel deep in your bones a love and connection to the Belgian bureaucrat and all his hard work writing 24,000 pages on what makes a banana a legal banana that can be sold as a banana?

I’m not taking to you, Remain voter. I know you love that brand of madness.

The Blob swallowed Brexit and then the Blob tells you Brexit failed.

And it’s the continued existence of the Blob that makes 2016 matter so much and that makes 2020 matter so much. These were the years when the Blob first trembled in rage, and then gave up the pretense of being anything but a carnivore that wants to swallow everything.