Some of the top British Conservatives seem to be ever more happy to embrace a low-key version of the same kind of conspiracy theories that the Trumpian QAnoners are into.
Prime Minister Sunak seems to believe that the reason they didn’t win a recent byelection in Rochdale was not simply because the performance of him and his party have been terrible enough in recent years that even a bunch of former Conservative voters won’t vote for them, but rather:
Rishi Sunak has said democracy is under attack from far-right and Islamist extremists as he urged the country to unite to beat the “poison”.
Sure, uniting is good, and I’m not at all excited by the result in Rochdale. But it is possible to imagine that “normal” people just don’t like the Conservatives. And it was literally impossible to vote for Labour after they had their own candidate-removing scandal. Sigh.
This fresh after his claim that Britain is descending into mob rule, with the implication that the mob he’s talking about isn’t in fact his own favoured ne’er-do-well political colleagues.
Even less respectably, we have our previous Prime Minister, Liz Truss, sitting down at the US CPAC conference to complain that her plans were thwarted by none other than the “deep state”. And that the civil service is naturally being infiltrated by trans activists and environmental extremists (as if that’d be a bad thing).
She apparently even likes the same kind of media as they typically do:
In an opinion piece published on the Fox News website, the former prime minister said agents of “the left” are active in the administrative state and “the deep state”.
Nigel Farage was also at CPAC of course.