I WAS alarmed to hear that this season’s Conservative Party leader has been spending time in Washington to attend something described as a ‘global alliance of the centre right’. The Tory patient is on life support and Kemi Badenoch’s care pathway seems to include mainlining the dual toxins of ‘globalism’ and ‘centrism’ into its struggling system. Don’t be amazed if this doesn’t end as well as she hopes.
I heard about this jolly via Paul Collits’s great piece for TCW on December 12. Paul’s analysis is spot-on and makes a helpful reference to the work of the American political philosopher Patrick Deneen. ‘Muscular liberalism’ – as endorsed by Mrs. Badenoch – is self-refuting both historically and philosophically, because ‘liberalism’ is at best useless (and at worst incoherent) without an accompanying account of how it conforms to virtue. Conservatives are fond of saying that freedom comes with obligation; they are less keen to acknowledge that it is maximised, not compromised, when ordered in the direction of ‘the good’. And what counts as good or bad is a matter of dynamic revelation; it is shown not through the dark glass of human reason, but through the traditions and customs which glue together the social order, past, present and future.
One such tradition is that of ‘the lunch’.
In a Christmas interview for The Spectator, Mrs Badenoch for some reason felt the need to say the following: ‘What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I eat and work at the same time.’
I’ve no idea if she is declaring war on lunch in general. It could just be that she’s doing one of those performative things that politicians do in the mistaken view that to appear to do something is better than to sit in a quiet room and read a book. Either way she’s been badly advised. This unprovoked and theatrical piece of passive aggression suggests political incompetence, phoney conservatism and – worse – a casual attitude to good manners. I’ll take these in turn.
The political lunch is active statecraft. It offers an opportunity to trade in the politician’s favourite currency: gossip. Mrs Badenoch seems to think that eating and work are in competition when in the lunch the two can come together to pleasing political effect. If history tells us anything, it is that over a shared meal – adequately lubricated – alliances can be formed, enemies identified, countries bought and sold. To swerve all this in favour of a takeout at your desk is like declining gold in favour of the euro.
It’s depressing that anyone would think there’s anything ‘conservative’ about this attitude towards an institution so beautifully described in Plato’s Symposium, the Gospel of John and in literature and art more generally. Boswell notes the irregular dining habits of Dr Johnson and suggests that this was viewed as a moral failing, albeit one made right by the literary output it facilitated. Jesus’s practice of ‘open-table fellowship’ is an announcement that all are called to share in His company, and that this high form of friendship is the only version of communism worthy of worship. The metaphysics of food is given its most sublime expression in the description of the Eucharistic sacrifice.
I get that Mrs Badenoch doesn’t ‘do’ God, but it’d be nice if she ‘did’ a bit of conservatism, and at least paid lip service to the possibility that not everything need be evaluated in exclusively functional and transactional ways. To be a conservative must include an openness to the possibility that even (especially?) the most humdrum daily routines might carry significant attachments to tradition.
Which brings us to etiquette. To eat at your desk is egregious. It is a gateway to the even more unforgivable offence of eating in the street – a barbarism to which I was reluctant to surrender even for the two years I was homeless. It is in the meal that we internalise habits of deference, minor sacrifice and negotiation. When we lunch appropriately, we cultivate manners more generally. The New York Mafia, for all its faults, at least understands this. Hence the tradition of the ‘sit-down’ which allows for the settling of grievances without resorting to people getting ‘whacked’. Usually.
While in Washington Mrs Badenoch met with the Vice President-elect. I don’t know if this was over lunch – presumably not. J.D. Vance is from the Mid-West and therefore emphatically not a wimp. Mr Vance, as luck would have it, is friendly with the abovementioned Professor Deneen, and is familiar with his work. We must hope that he pointed out to her that conservatism is not easily codified in the limp language of consensus liberalism, but that it can be made to speak in normal language to the deeper needs of the human soul.
Vance and his boss, who is possibly the one true political genius of recent decades, were able to smash through the settled assumptions of the Washington rent seekers by weaponising the routine affections of Real America, be they for sport, fast food, popular music or the garbage collection.
Kemi Badenoch could do worse than copy that. And she should start with a mea culpa in praise of lunch and its splendid history.
