At risk of upsetting people, and perhaps it’s been happening for a while and I was just less attuned to it when inside, from a distance it seems that there is a real dumbification of the British centre-right occurring. It’s exemplified by many things & not unique to a “faction”

It manifests in some forms as just “ideas by opinion polling” with little leg work into whether things actually work. Gove’s speech extolling evidence-based policy was then followed by a speech by Boris listing a load of investments for which there is little evidence they

will reap economic dividends. In other forms it’s in the internecine centre-right ideas battle, where the views of others are caricatured to the point of lunacy or people wade in without the foggiest idea what those they oppose actually think or have worked on. Pure positioning.

And then it’s the decision to abandon economics in favour of being the other side of the culture war, which is producing a bunch of new writers and commentators with identikit anti-woke views and cliches.

I’m not sure why this slope has been slipped down so quickly. Some is personal incentives: the media love a conservative crapping on other “allies” on the centre right, creating a market for it. Some is because there are a band of young folk who want to be TV personalities.

For others it’s just politics - the idea that winning is the be all and end all no matter what you actually do in government. But the combination is this: the centre-right is less versed in good economics and policy, more shrill, less interested in ideas, and proposes policy

on a bunch of fronts with the thinnest of evidence bases, while lecturing about the need for robust analysis of policy. It’s a movement of cliches with no motivating agenda; defined by what it’s not (1980s conservatism) rather than what it is.