If it has any future at all it is being formed at the Reasoned Student Summit in the City of London’s 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 — about 19% of 18- to 24-year olds voted Tory at the last election — to network, and to listen to Nigel Farage, Steve Baker and Daniel Hannan. The outlines of a new conservatism — despairing and angry — can be glimpsed here.

Trembling in his tweed blazer, John is 23, and worried, like many on the Right’s 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 “China’s social credit system on steroids”. He has the luxury of believing that this depressing moment in British politics is something bigger and scarier — a totalitarian dawn. “If we could go back in time, you know, we would do something about Hitler.” He thinks the same of the Bank of England.

John’s 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 “New Right” 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.

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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 — whether it is Ru Paul’s Drag Race or footballers taking the knee — bristles with personalities and causes that unsettle them. They see “wokeness” as a virus, infecting every aspect of British culture.

This is why they love Nigel Farage. In 2016, he proved to them that conservatives — real conservatives — 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. “Theresa May”, he says, rolling his eyes, well her deal was the “closest thing to treachery I have ever seen. Maybe the Tower of London shouldn’t be a museum exhibit. Don’t quote me on that for God’s sake. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”

Farage is in trouble with all the right people. His enemies, listed at length — the Today programme, ESG, corporation tax, Jeremy Hunt, Tory wets, Westminster generally and the House of Lords specifically — are their enemies too. He describes listening to Radio 4 as “agony”. This is conservatism as hay-fever. Irritant Lefty spores are everywhere; they make you ill, angry, prickly.

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He tells his story about Brexit. He wanted Britain to become “a genuine global trading power again”. 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. “The great unwashed” and “the silent majority” are ignored once more. “We are back to where we were before the referendum”. The ancien régime has fluttered back in, deathless as a vampire. To whoops, Farage promises a “third coming” — a return to frontline politics — if the state of the nation keeps deteriorating. One better than Jesus.

Their love for him cannot be understated. “Nige, big, big fan” 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 “happy warriors”, but they are pessimists. Do they want more unreconstructed libertarianism?

I doubt it. They are not like Farage: Thatcher’s children — they are his children. They like Farage’s 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.

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When an actual MP arrives — Steve Baker — 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 — recently called a “cunt” by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy. But in this room he is not Right-wing enough. He is accused of promoting, to loud and prolonged applause, “Marxist Identitarian politics” through school reading programmes in his constituency. “I don’t know why you’re applauding that,” Baker says, forlornly.

Baker’s 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 “toxic”. Baker told the group at Conference this year that “footballers taking the knee isn’t a neo-Marxist act, it’s a statement of solidarity”.

Today, Baker attempts to extract the better sides of these young men from their blatant nihilism. “We have to think about our moral centres… some of the things I’ve heard today are dangerous.” It doesn’t work. The young conservatives are not interested in being nice.

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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 “easy answers… a populist shadow of libertarianism”. Baker broods about the room’s “radical aggression” on migration. (There are calls for the borders to be shut down completely from the crowd.) The young, unjustly treated, are “turning to radical ideologies”. 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 Farage’s. 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. “I come from a more tribal school of thought,” says one of the boys. To him, identity matters more than economics. “If everything is more globalist, then everything will move to London, and my community in East Bradford will become even more of a dump.”

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. “We need our own Nick Fuentes,” says one. British conservatives, he says with vehemence, whether they write for the Telegraph or are on the staff at CCHQ, are “spergs”. 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 — that it takes strength to be gentle and kind to strangers — is ludicrous to him. There is none of that “bullshit” 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. “Once the States are taken back,” one lad says, once Donald Trump wins again, “it will influence conservatives here. Then the Tories will stop being so shit.”

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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, “How do we make ourselves cool?”, won’t 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 “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections” taking control of the UK. If the 2020s really are set to be the first decade of an “Age of Scarcity”, then expect a conservative politics harsher than whatever today’s 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.

There used to be, too, a difference between the things people said — remarks intended to vanish on the air — and the things they wrote and published, which were generally more considered: physically laborious to produce, and passed through selected gatekeepers in order to reach a mass audience.

And then came Twitter, the most powerful modern illustration of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Here, the flow of news is continuous, unregulated and fierily interactive. The instant, throwaway nature of conversation has been imported into a published, preservable medium. Spats that arise on Twitter now regularly flow back into the “old media” of print; and then — with the ease of retweets and replies — it has technically enabled the rapid amplification of praise or abuse, the latter resulting in the “pile-on”.

As with the emotional contagion that sweeps through a physical mob, the particular structure of Twitter encourages users to behave in ways which would have been contrary to their “public self” five or ten years earlier — although it may, sometimes worryingly, have unleashed the private self to speak more freely. Those who join in often sport the blue ticks denoting a verified account, and it’s clear that they don’t think of themselves as bullies, but as the righteous enforcers of a fluid but tangible moral order.

One recent episode involved Darren Grimes, a young, gay, pro-Brexit conservative commentator who has over 150,000 Twitter followers. In the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final, when emotions were running high, Grimes posted a tweet in which he tagged in the young England footballer Marcus Rashford — who had missed a penalty — and said “penalties not politics from now on, aye?”

It was a snide tweet, partly designed to set the Twitter hive-mind buzzing in irritation. It was unfair, too: plenty of hard-training players miss penalties — and since the press and public spent years berating footballers for their boozed-up, skirt-chasing antics, it seemed weird to deride one young player for dignified campaigning on free school meals. Many people disagreed with Grimes’ tweet, and said so. But the blue-ticked rugby pundit Brian Moore went one better, tweeting of Grimes that “this little done-nothing twat deserves a good kicking.”

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The kicking was duly delivered elsewhere, in electronic form. A different tweeter, from the now-defunct account @hepcatsector, came up with the dubious story that his cousin had gone to school with Grimes, and that in year 9 he had a nickname associated with masturbation under a desk. This tweeter also posted a series of messages between himself and Grimes, which later turned out to be fake. The allegation was designed to be both sexual and shaming. Twitter adored it, naturally, and sent it viral — endlessly hashtagging the alleged nickname, expanding on it, illustrating it with obscene memes and videos.

Grimes replied that he didn’t have that nickname at school, but that he was certainly called “poofter,” “fag” and beaten for being “gay”.

The Twitter rumour wasn’t directly homophobic, although certainly nasty. But anyone who recalls homophobic taunting from their schooldays will remember how frequently it caricatured gay adolescents as inappropriately sexual, prone to getting “turned on” in situations and ways that allegedly repelled their tormentors. In effect, the baseless rumour that Twitter spread about Grimes as a schoolchild is precisely the kind of rumour that school bullies spread about gay teenagers. Those revelling in it would mostly count themselves on the “progressive” side of politics, and would no doubt officially deplore homophobia. Yet somehow that line of attack arose – and they all joined in.

The spat had barely cooled when Giles Coren, a columnist on The Times, posted a tweet about Dawn Foster, a Left-wing fellow journalist who recently died suddenly aged just 34. Foster, who could be a combative Twitter presence herself, had made acerbic comments about Coren some years earlier. These had rankled, and upon her untimely death — to sum up his tweet, which was later deleted — he wondered aloud about a response which began in faux-commiseration and ended in gleeful laughter.

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His tweet itself suggested someone playing a high-stakes game of risk, not only with the boundaries of taste in the aftermath of a death, but with a huge and volatile audience: a kind of Russian roulette with a “post a tweet” button, testing if this might be the one that triggers disaster. And Twitter did indeed respond, sometimes with pained disbelief, and sometimes with foul insults and escalating threats of real-life reprisals over many days.

British speech was once heavily associated with understatement, which itself was tied to civic virtue. The most inconceivable pressures and agonising wartime losses, for example, were often described in stoically minimal terms such as “a spot of bother” or “a bit sticky”. Quite the opposite mode of speech, however, has spread throughout social media: the language of wild overstatement. It frequently employs adjectives once applicable to the extreme depths of human behaviour – “vile” “disgusting” “horrific” – to perceived minor transgressions of some fast-moving social code. This fury is often triggered by nuance, while leaving major, real-world offences untouched.

The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, for example, recently described Scarlett Johansson’s “sensuous cough-syrup purr” in a review. The actress is known in Hollywood for her seductive voice: in my days as a film critic I wrote about it myself. Yet this mild expression of admiration drew the ire of an LA features editor called Alisha Grauso, who tweeted her anger at a “middle-aged male film critic” being “so GD f*ing creepy when writing about female characters.” Thanks to outrage inflation, a key element in the Twitter economy, a large band of Grauso’s 27,000 followers were soon rocking away in performative horror like the young maidens of Salem: cue vomiting GIFs, fierce accusations of “fucking gross”, and the now-formulaic imitation of stunned disbelief: “…I just…what…”

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What is this? Anger looking for a place to earth, I suppose. Restless anger coming out, sometimes skimpily dressed as satire, and attracting more and greater waves of anger to it, as a kind of confirmation of its existence. Boundaries of what it’s acceptable to say are being dissolved. And, increasingly in modern Britain, physical boundaries are being crossed too. Twitter’s mechanics are reshaping national codes of behaviour.

Last June a crowd demonstrated outside Dominic Cummings’ family home, erecting a giant screen. A different crowd recently sought out the place where it thought the chief medical officer Chris Whitty lives. Whitty himself was mauled, jostled and filmed in a park by two young men, who had just been to an anti-lockdown rally and had its speeches ringing in their ears. The wall outside Coren’s house was daubed with Foster’s name, and dog excrement left on the pathway.

In every case, the people crossing the boundaries believed that outrage and circumstance had given them the moral authority to behave outside normal codes, and to take the argument directly to their opponent’s door, sometimes to family homes in which partners and young children also live. What people do when they think they’re allowed, of course, is what part of them wanted to do when they weren’t. Regardless of what one thinks of each individual trigger, this is cause for concern.

I grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a conflict in which physical boundaries were frequently crossed in the most horrific ways. People were shot as they answered the door or blown apart when starting up their car. It didn’t begin with that, of course. It began with the gradual heating-up of rhetoric, the stentorian sectarian speeches of the young Ian Paisley, the impassioned orations at IRA commemorations, all fanning the existing fears and resentments of their listeners into uncontrollable action.

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For conflicts more explicitly activated by the media itself, one need only look to the central role that the Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines played in the Rwandan genocide. Its hate-filled patter inciting murderous violence against Tutsi “cockroaches” was woven in with jokes and songs, pop music and phone-ins. Conscious of the part the station was playing in directing genocide, human rights groups including the US Committee for Refugees asked that US military resources be used to jam their broadcasts. The US government refused: for reasons outside Rwanda, it had a strong commitment to broadcast freedom, and was culpably slow to see the urgency of the argument in this case.

We’re a long way from these horrors in the West, but a strange inversion has already taken hold in the thinking of many — especially those who are most vocal on university campuses. It’s said that ideological difference, even when thoughtfully and politely expressed, is “literal violence” and deserves a commensurate response. But actual, direct threats of stabbing, raping, killing or bombing are meant to be interpreted as metaphorical.

The area where this pattern of thought is most apparent is in the current highly charged argument over trans issues. It was evident in a recent article in Jezebel magazine, in which the writer, Ashley Reese, berated JK Rowling for making public a tweet wishing her “a very nice pipe-bomb in the mailbox”. Discussing the tweet, Reese mocked the idea that anyone would feel directly threatened by a Twitter user who in this case describes themselves as “a genderfluid lesbian and a cybermarxist” and uses an anime avatar.

Yet the article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of who issues violent threats, and of what such threats — even if not enacted — are intended to do. Is there really a “type” from whom we should take threats seriously, and another we should comfortably ignore? History suggests that would be foolish. The Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, for example, were intelligent, highly attractive young women who had attended teacher training college. In 1973, aged 19 and 22 respectively — fired by a belief in the purity of their cause — they participated in the IRA Old Bailey bombing which left 200 people injured and one dead. The journalist Neal Ascherson remembered Ulrike Meinhof as a “tender and vulnerable” 30-year-old journalist, the mother of young twins. That was before she “took up the gun” as a leader of a gang responsible for a wave of bombings, shootings and assassinations across Germany.

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Soon after the tweet that Rowling highlighted — one among many threats she has received — another piece of writing came to light, this time from a paper written by an LSE Gender Studies student, Matt Thompson. In it, the author makes an explicit threat to “TERFs” or gender-critical women. “Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness in your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.” It’s the type of statement frequently found on Twitter, now immortalised in an academic paper. Thompson self-defines as “an autistic genderfuck” and also someone “who loves cats, running, books and plants.” By Reese’s logic, who could possibly be afraid of a student who loves cats?

And yet it seemed Thompson very much wanted certain women to feel afraid. There’s a negative, insidious power to open threats of harm, which is exactly why people and paramilitary groups make them. They deliberately invoke fear to shut people up. They take root in the victim’s psyche, stealing their peace of mind, making them feel that violence might be just around the corner. And sometimes death threats do come true.

We cannot put the genie of social media back in its bottle. But we can certainly stop persistently lying to ourselves — as individuals and as a society — about what it is permissible to say to those we dislike or disagree with, and how we say it. The truth is that, most of the time, the state’s not going to stop you from bullying, smearing or even directly threatening someone online: there’s simply too much material for it to handle. But brick by brick, word by word, we’re either building or tolerating a world that we will all then have to live in. And most people in the UK are simply not prepared for what that could entail.

“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

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I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

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Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

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Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

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The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.