Uncle Nigel (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

British conservatism, as a political force and a philosophical creed, is dying. Brexit has failed. The Tories face destruction at the next general election. Demographically, conservatism faces extinction in the decades ahead.
If it has any future at all it is being formed at the Reasoned Student Summit in the City of Londonâs Dutch Hall. Reasoned is the YouTube soapbox of the Brexit campaigner and pundit Darren Grimes. Today, Grimes has managed to gather around a hundred young conservatives â about 19% of 18- to 24-year olds voted Tory at the last election â to network, and to listen to Nigel Farage, Steve Baker and Daniel Hannan. The outlines of a new conservatism â despairing and angry â can be glimpsed here.
Trembling in his tweed blazer, John is 23, and worried, like many on the Rightâs youthful fringes, about central bank digital currencies.
Soon, he believes, the Bank of England will track your movements, monitor your spending, and push electronic tentacles into every aspect of your life. John tells me that such currencies will be âChinaâs social credit system on steroidsâ. He has the luxury of believing that this depressing moment in British politics is something bigger and scarier â a totalitarian dawn. âIf we could go back in time, you know, we would do something about Hitler.â He thinks the same of the Bank of England.
Johnâs talking points are paranoid and his outlook is bleak. He is representative, not of the young Tories who hole up in the Carlton Club or hand out leaflets for Blue Beyond, but those who form conservative opinion online. They are not yet a movement, like the National Conservatives or the âNew Rightâ in America, though in their frank apocalypticism, stridency, and saturnine sense of embattlement, they are heavily influenced by both.
They remain, in organisation and physical appearance, embryonic. There are trad aesthetes and High Tory Anglicans, young fogeys and BNP haircuts, Turning Point UK influencers, Scrutonians and boys who just love Peter Hitchens. Among this hundred students and recent graduates, there are dozens of ideological tribes. But whether they are suited or slobbish, at Russell Group universities or without a job, what unites them is a sense that Britain is declining. This anger is what flourishes when a generation believes it will be far worse off than its parents.
Like Hitchens, the young men in this room think Britain has been abolished, and that the Conservative Party is not conservative at all. Ambient British culture â whether it is Ru Paulâs Drag Race or footballers taking the knee â bristles with personalities and causes that unsettle them. They see âwokenessâ as a virus, infecting every aspect of British culture.
This is why they love Nigel Farage. In 2016, he proved to them that conservatives â real conservatives â could beat the Left-wing establishment. They are anxious teenagers; Farage is their feckless uncle. As soon as he takes the stage he enters freewheeling bombardier mode. The theme of his speech, pockmarked with jokes, is Brexit: A Revolution Betrayed. âTheresa Mayâ, he says, rolling his eyes, well her deal was the âclosest thing to treachery I have ever seen. Maybe the Tower of London shouldnât be a museum exhibit. Donât quote me on that for Godâs sake. Iâm in enough trouble as it isâŚâ

Farage is in trouble with all the right people. His enemies, listed at length â the Today programme, ESG, corporation tax, Jeremy Hunt, Tory wets, Westminster generally and the House of Lords specifically â are their enemies too. He describes listening to Radio 4 as âagonyâ. This is conservatism as hay-fever. Irritant Lefty spores are everywhere; they make you ill, angry, prickly.
He tells his story about Brexit. He wanted Britain to become âa genuine global trading power againâ. Now, after six years of political bloodletting, we have returned to 2010. Globalists in the treasury, Osbornomics in the ascendant, austerity back on the menu. âThe great unwashedâ and âthe silent majorityâ are ignored once more. âWe are back to where we were before the referendumâ. The ancien rĂŠgime has fluttered back in, deathless as a vampire. To whoops, Farage promises a âthird comingâ â a return to frontline politics â if the state of the nation keeps deteriorating. One better than Jesus.
Their love for him cannot be understated. âNige, big, big fanâ is the way they frame their questions to him. Yet Farage, beyond his Brexit boosterism, is so unmistakably Eighties. His agenda, where it rises above being a disgruntled mood, is not theirs. A global free trading power? At least half of the audience is protectionist, restrictionist, anti-globalist. Farage calls on them to be âhappy warriorsâ, but they are pessimists. Do they want more unreconstructed libertarianism?
I doubt it. They are not like Farage: Thatcherâs children â they are his children. They like Farageâs positions on British identity and borders, not markets. They hoot their affection at Farage, not for what he says about free trade but for the way he says it. Farage gave them 2016, and that year was their political awakening. They would follow him into the deepest ditch if that was what he asked of them. His insurgent energy is undiminished, his pugnacity undiluted, his rhetoric undaunted in the face of all those enemies. More than any Tory in parliament, and though they do not agree with everything he says, Farage inspires this generation of conservatives.
When an actual MP arrives â Steve Baker â the contrast with Farage is sharply apparent. A third of the audience goes outside to vape. His role during the Brexit years made Baker a liberal hate figure â recently called a âcuntâ by Channel 4âs Krishnan Guru Murthy. But in this room he is not Right-wing enough. He is accused of promoting, to loud and prolonged applause, âMarxist Identitarian politicsâ through school reading programmes in his constituency. âI donât know why youâre applauding that,â Baker says, forlornly.
Bakerâs crime is to be involved with the 2022 group of senior black conservatives. They are Tories who are trying to devise ways of shedding the perception among black people in Britain that conservative politics is âtoxicâ. Baker told the group at Conference this year that âfootballers taking the knee isnât a neo-Marxist act, itâs a statement of solidarityâ.
Today, Baker attempts to extract the better sides of these young men from their blatant nihilism. âWe have to think about our moral centres⌠some of the things Iâve heard today are dangerous.â It doesnât work. The young conservatives are not interested in being nice.
When I find him after his speech, Baker is close to despair. Youth politics, whether on the Left, or the Right, is wreathed in gloom. He understands that young people in Britain have the rawest deal. But Farage, who captivates them, only offers âeasy answers⌠a populist shadow of libertarianismâ. Baker broods about the roomâs âradical aggressionâ on migration. (There are calls for the borders to be shut down completely from the crowd.) The young, unjustly treated, are âturning to radical ideologiesâ. Baker worries about them. He is right, but has no idea what to do. Baker cannot see that these young men are as much his responsibility as Farageâs. He is just as complicit in their radicalism. They are the Brexit generation, coming of age.
This generational divide that Baker senses and Farage seems unaware of, becomes ever more apparent. The speakers are less furious than the spoken to. The crowd are unimpressed with another Brexiteer, Dan Hannan. The libertarian boilerplate of his speech, a Trussian paean to enterprise culture and tax cuts, is shredded in the Q&A. âI come from a more tribal school of thought,â says one of the boys. To him, identity matters more than economics. âIf everything is more globalist, then everything will move to London, and my community in East Bradford will become even more of a dump.â

Hannan has no convincing counter-argument. He just looks depressed. Like every successful revolutionary, Hannan was discovering that the people are not what he thought they would be once he had unlocked them from their cage.
Outside, the boys are smoking and giggling. âWe need our own Nick Fuentes,â says one. British conservatives, he says with vehemence, whether they write for the Telegraph or are on the staff at CCHQ, are âspergsâ. Like most of the summit, he looks to the American Right for a model. They are more splenetic, more successful, more based. The idea that Baker had been going on about â that it takes strength to be gentle and kind to strangers â is ludicrous to him. There is none of that âbullshitâ in America.
These young Tories are stripping the American Right for parts. They believe that until the British Right comes out fighting, it will keep losing the culture. Hard-line positions on migration and identity must be found. Cultural enemies must be identified, then ridiculed. For them, politics is about figuring out who hates who, then sharpening those hatreds into flints. âOnce the States are taken back,â one lad says, once Donald Trump wins again, âit will influence conservatives here. Then the Tories will stop being so shit.â
Not all of these young conservatives will end up in politics. I suspect the one who stood up and asked, gesturing to the sub-Brideshead outfits sitting around him, âHow do we make ourselves cool?â, wonât stay the course. But others here want to be journalists, or pundits like Darren Grimes, or to enter the Conservative Party. They want to shape it from within. Soon enough their foetal moods and ironic tweets will be coherent policies, newspaper editorials, and viral clickbait videos.
Do not expect them to sculpt a future of fair dealing, pragmatism, patience, moderation or high intelligence. Expect the restless opposite of these virtues. A generation in the image of Nigel Farage, not Jeremy Hunt. A recent poll found that 61% of 18- to 34-year-olds supported âa strong leader who doesnât have to bother with parliament/electionsâ taking control of the UK. If the 2020s really are set to be the first decade of an âAge of Scarcityâ, then expect a conservative politics harsher than whatever todayâs cabinet ministers can come up with.
The macabre populist shadows Steve Baker fears will become solid one day. Only a fool would try to predict what happens then.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe