American Politics... and Prose Taking Over the UK
Contemplating the upcoming elections from the Churchill Arms near Notting Hill
Dripping in flowers and crammed with memorabilia, The Churchill Arms is one of London’s most famous watering holes. Built in 1750 and previously known as the "Church-on-the-Hill", the pub received its current name after the Second World War and the departure of England’s most well-known prime minister. The Churchill Arms is decorated with all types of things associated with Winston Churchill, of course, yet it falsely claims that Churchill did business and broadcast wartime speeches from its warm environs. Churchill's grandparents, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, and Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane, were, however, patrons of the Church-on-the-Hill in the 19th century — that fun fact is not just pub lore.
The pub has other claims to fame worth mentioning too: its grand flower displays grounded in 100 pots, 48 window boxes and 42 hanging baskets and on which it spends about £25,000 a year, have earned it awards at the annual Chelsea Flower Show. Also, in the spirit of the English tradition of the pint and the curry, the Churchill Arms has it’s own Thai kitchen — the first pub in London to serve Thai food with its ales.
Lastly, the Churchill Arms is the perfect place to have a cozy discussion about the state of the conservative party in England, and how it is moving more to the American right.
Coming to a UK Election near you… Scorched Earth
For two years, at the turn of the century, I reluctantly moved to Washington, DC, the center of American government, and thus, politics. I went in thinking I would do my time, drink a bit of beer with the Mr. Smith-types and have a bit of fun in what George Clooney once called the “Hollywood of the East Coast.” I came out in 2005 with a healthy distrust and overwhelming resentment of American uber-capitalism, politicians on both sides of the aisles and the entire culture of the NGO/think-tank industry. Ultimately, that chip on my shoulder grew so heavy, especially hauling it around New York, that in 2021, I up and left the entire country — my home of 45 years — to get away from the gaping political divide, the culture wars, the deepening Islamophobia, the disregard for gun safety and yes, Trump.
But after nearly 15 years in power, the Tories in London are fighting ridiculously hard to hang on to Whitehall and lately, I have been noticing a sickening familiarity creeping over me, like the one that I had in 2004 and again in 2015. The scorched-earth, doom-and-gloom portrayal of life in a liberal, socialist government that I left behind in the States is seemingly making its way into every UK Conservative political ad I watch and article I read. It’s like the tories have gone over the DC and asked Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush chief communication strategist, for a page from the political playbook. Nothing was more troubling — and actually, more hilarious — than this ad put forward by the Tories last week. Apparently, like Washington DC in the 1990s and New York before that, London is becoming a hellscape thanks to Mayor Sadiq Kahn any Labour reforms that still exist.
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And if London wasn’t enough, a day later, the Conservatives were at it again, this time putting the bankrupt city of Birmingham on display as an economic war zone in a Western country thanks to… that’s right, the Labour party.
The ads had a certain je ne sais quoi about them, but they certainly harked back to American presidential ads that I had once seen in my youth. While no one can rightly say when American politicians quite began their doomsday ads, political scientists attribute Lyndon B. Johnson with green-lighting the first with the “Daisy ad", which imagined a horrifying scenario worthy of Christopher Nolan. Twenty years later, George H.S. Bush, what Americans called back then a “country club” Republican, did the political advertising hall of fame one better when, running against a left-leaning Democrat called Michael Dukakis, deployed the Willie Horton campaign ad to demonize liberal reform and give swing voters the impression that the country was imminently at risk of, well criminal pandemonium.
Hortongate not only lost Dukakis the election, it effectively gave permission for every political strategist in and around DC to go no-holds barred on the attack ads. Commissioned and approved by Steve Schmidt, Americans bore witness to John McCain’s “Broken” ad, making us all feel like Obama was running America into the ground. A year later, a Republican PAC put the LGBT community at the center of certain American destruction with the Gathering Storm ad, which envisioned a doomsday should gay marriage prevail (later spoofed by the Funny or Die site as Gaythering Storm). Trump came along in 2016 and did it better from the get-go with his ISIS ad. The situation has only grown worse.
Late last week, an English souce on another story said “five years” when I mentioned that it seemed as if American conservatives were taking over the Tory party. “It takes about five years, roughly, for the Tories to adopt the same election tactics and strategies as the American Conservatives. It’s maddening.” He’s not the only one dismayed by the gradual Trumping of a party that while not exactly liberal and free-thinking, at least used to hew more to the Economist groupies.
I tried to do a bit of digging to see if any major Republican political consultant had possibly found some work over here (not that it was lacking in the US), and straight away, an article in the Guardian made clear that the “Brink of Chaos” ad had been put together by the central party rather than any U.S. operative of Susan Hall, the Trump-loving, right-leaning city counciler running against Khan. But it wouldn’t suprise me if an few American operatives popped up in the British tabloids over the next few months, as the Tories and Labour do battle over Whitehall.
One name recently came up. Jim Messina, a top aide to Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, joined David Cameron’s Conservative Party as a paid consultant a year later, exporting “the latest innovations in American-style campaigning to the U.K.” He now runs the Messina Group, which has a London office. Karen Hughes, one of George W. Bush’s key advisors, worked for the BCW Global until last year.
Political strategists are like cockroaches. They tend to show up everywhere, eat people out of house and home, and will be last things standing when we meet our mutually assisted destruction. I can’t say that as a former American, a little part of me doesn’t feel a bit proud when I see a kid in Iraq wearing a “Brooklyn” sweatshirt, or young English kid jamming to an U.S. band. But to see these ads here only dims my already dank view of American over-reach.
The sad thing about all this: a country that used to pride itself on reason and dignity is getting sucked into the descending madness of American extremism. Caught up in winning or losing rather than doing the right thing or putting the best person in the job, these strategists — in their effort to “improve Democracy” over here — are actually causing fear and harm. For example, a Guardian survey last month showed that people were less likely to be the victims of crime in London than in other parts of the country. And Birmingham staked quite a lot on the high-speed HS2 railway line, which were axed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in October 2023 — a rather large reason for its recent bankruptcy.
When he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer after suffering a seizure in 1990, Republican stategist Lee Atwater, the man behind the George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton attack ad, had a rethink of his life and career. Paralyzed on his left side and barely able to speak, the much diminished 40-year-old converted to Catholicism and started writing atonement letters to Dukakis and others for the harm he had done by putting mistruths on air. “My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood,” Atwater wrote in an article for Life magazine. “It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
America never did. But the UK still has a chance…