Marie Kondo and an irrevocably split Tory party’s looming clear out
Have you joined the cult of Kondo? Millions of us have. On Netflix, the tiny Japanese tidiness expert presents a hit series that is a charming fusion of the Japanese gift for order and the restless American need to find the next consumerist fad and infuse it with a higher sense of purpose and meaning. Marie Kondo, 37, turns up at the houses of people with untidy homes and teaches her pupils how to declutter. First, she blesses the house, thanking it for being there. I am not making this up.
Then, a room at a time, the smiling but ruthless Marie demonstrates how possessions should be sifted through carefully and divided into what can go and what can stay. Only items that “bring joy” are deemed suitable for retention.
That leads to the best bit. Marie Kondo is the leading world expert on folding clothes. Humans have been folding everything wrong – t-shirts particularly – it seems. Kondo shows us a better way.
Somehow the series has even developed a cult following in Britain. As we Brits are easily embarrassed, and prone to scepticism bordering on cynicism, we find it impossible to ask any Kondo-style question (“does this faded old sweatshirt from 1988 with an acid house smiley symbol on it any longer bring joy?”) while keeping a straight face. But overlook the worst “new age” aspects of Kondo-ism and she is onto something important. Most people, unless they are poor, have too much stuff. Decluttering is liberating.
Sadly, a serious split has developed in the ranks of the Kondo movement in recent days, according to a report in The Times of London. Marie has gone too far and revealed herself to be an extremist in the field of decluttering. She says that she keeps only 30 cherished books, donating anything else to a charity shop once she has read it. Bibliophiles and authors are horrified, with several telling a reporter that this amounts to the promotion of “book murder”.
Confession. Inspired by Kondo I shed perhaps a fifth of my books recently, donating old paperbacks and political tomes I read half a lifetime ago, including Tony Blair’s terrible memoirs. The result has been positive. I can see the decent hardbacks more clearly on the shelves without the clutter. It brought joy during the clear out when I found, kept, and reread, an early edition of a German memoir on classical music first published in 1944. Kondo-ism, in moderation, works.
Also in The Times on Saturday was an interesting column by my colleague Matthew Parris, writing about a different kind of clear out. He didn’t mention Marie Kondo, but Matthew suggested that because of Brexit the Tory party is overdue its own radical decluttering. It is time, he says, for the Conservative party to purge its right wing. The MPs on the Tory right do not bring centrist Tories joy, so they must go. The process will be liberating, he suggests, because the right wing faction will be able to go off and start their own party, perhaps with a few random Ukippers. A more centrist Conservative party, free of the right and presumably any Brexiteers, can then get on with winning. The implication is that this purge of the right happens after the small remainer strand of the Tory party has somehow stopped Brexit.
This is an intriguing notion, but it is predicated on a strange assumption about where the balance of power lies these days in the Tory party. Tories who do not accept Brexit – rather than the right – are more likely to find themselves pushed out in the next few years.
Matthew has long said – correctly – that the Tory party in the country, in its membership, is more varied than claimed and not as right wing as the Tory right pretends. The membership surveys and testimony of non-right MPs bears that out. And no, it is a myth that they are all in their 70s. The average age of Tory members is estimated at 57, only a few years older than the average age of their Labour counterparts.
Nonetheless, it is clear that there is a majority among the Conservative membership and among Tory voters for Brexit. They are not all of the Tory right. They can’t be. There aren’t enough people on the Tory right – by any reasonable definition of what that is – to make a majority. The Tory tribe is a coalition of interests. There is overlay across the groups. There are former remainers convinced that there is now the duty is to get on with Brexit. Among the original pro-Brexit Conservatives are classical liberals and many social liberals. Among those Tories most interested in tackling poverty, in an avowedly moral mission, are many Brexiteers. It cannot be split simply into an old-fashioned left-right divide.
Even in the Commons, the Conservative party is split at least three ways rather than two. It hangs together mainly for fear of a Jeremy Corbyn government and out of an acknowledgment that the British electoral system punishes parties that split.
There are the purest Brexiteers, somewhere between 40 and 60 Tory MPs, some in the ERG. On the Remain wing are about 20 out and out maniacs, who seem prepared to bring down the government and effectively resign from the Tory party (by voting against it and having the whip withdrawn and deselection sought) if they cannot get what they want.
That leaves in the middle 200 plus Tory MPs, generally reasonable and deeply worried about the impact of Corbyn on their country, spanning a body of opinion including moderate Brexiteers and former remainers who now accept the result. There could be a little movement from the centre grouping to either extreme, but the centre of gravity is pragmatic, moderate and accepts that the referendum happened. The party membership accepts and approves of Brexit; Tory voters actively want Brexit; a majority of both groups will be unhappy if they are denied a departure form the EU.
If Brexit is somehow cancelled, does it seem very likely that the majority of Tories will hail Dominic Grieve and show Jacob Rees-Mogg the door? Of course not.
If Brexit does happen, and if parliament cannot stop it via chicanery then leaving is the default in a little more than nine weeks, why would the Tory centre of gravity shift towards a small faction of MPs and a minority of the Tory membership favouring remain or rejoin? It won’t.
A party whose members and voters broadly back or accept Brexit is extremely unlikely to deliver a purge of pro-Brexit people in favour of a small band of Tory remainers in the Commons.
Instead what is in prospect is a Tory party that sits a little more, not wildly more, but a little more, to the right. There will be stray exotic creatures who endure. Presumably Beaconsfield Tories like Dominic Grieve and want a remainer as their MP. Presumably they will continue to trust his judgement, as long as he does not go all out and join a new party.
Other pro-remain Tory MPs, those preparing to potentially bring down the government before March 29th, know that in doing so they will be leaving their party. Some are already resigned to not fighting another election. When the selections take place to find their replacements, to fight a future election, it will be a highly unusual association that picks a candidate who cites Dominic Grieve as a model or who pledges to reverse Brexit.
Obviously, these assumptions could be upended by the formation of a new populist party of the right, formed of angry Ukippers and hardline Brexit Tories screaming betrayal, letting in Labour. That’s a long shot. The realities of the first past the post electoral system and a deep understanding of this across the Tory tribe mean that the incentive is to stay and fight for greater control of the Tory mothership, the Conservative party.
It is a difficult balance to strike. A Conservative party that goes too far to the right, alienating centrists and failing to build a broad anti-socialist coalition, will not win general elections. After the disastrous May they will need a deft leader capable of unifying anti-socialist opinion and moving the argument beyond Brexit, to improve public services and fix broken markets. Until the person who can do that appears, I nominate tidiness expert Marie Kondo to handle Brexit.