Russell Jones's Week Moment: The Blonde at the Bar
Why are the Archbishop of Cognitive Dissonance and the Ozempic Root Vegetable turning themselves inside out chasing right-wing voters who are already going home with Nigel, asks Russell Jones
If the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind is remembered for anything— and frankly, it really shouldn’t be—it is the monumentally simplistic depiction of John Nash’s Nobel-prize winning Equilibrium Game Theory as a fancy algorithm for pulling. As Nash’s friends argue over who gets to go home with the blonde (and the movie doesn’t give much consideration to her own views on the matter), Nash has a flash of inspiration, rewrites Adam Smith on the spot, and explains that chasing “second choice” is the only way for “everybody to get laid”.
They call economics “the dismal science”, and seemingly for good reason: 174 years separate Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and John Nash’s theory, and during that time apparently not one economist had realised it was possible to hook up with a brunette.
The movie’s key scene would be stupid enough on its own, even if you weren’t made aware that it doesn’t actually use any aspect of Nash’s Equilibrium; but I think I have finally found a purpose for it: as a perfect diagram of Britain’s political parties.
At the risk of lending credence to Russell Crowe pretending to be a genius by writing with crayons on a window, what we see now is Labour, the Tories and Reform busily ignoring the brunette in the room— the parlous state of our nation—because they’re too busy competing to go home with what they clearly consider to be the hot blonde at the national bar: right-wing racists.
Which brings us to the current—although set your stopwatch—leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The lady is not for turning”. Badenoch rotates so predictably, she would serve a greater social purpose if you painted MOT up one side of her, TEST up the other, and stuck her on the ground outside Kwik Fit.
This time last year she was explaining to the Telegraph that “We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border… their feet may be in the UK, but their heads and hearts are still back in their country of origin”.
Now she expects us to believe such rules don’t apply to her.
And why? Because the woman who campaigned for leadership by sticking makeshift “Men” and “Ladies” signs to unisex toilet cubicles, and as Minister for Equalities defined a policy of opposing self-identity, has now decided to self-identify as not at all Nigerian, actually. It’s the political equivalent of announcing you’re a vegan between mouthfuls of steak.
She clearly feels she’s on a roll, however, and went on to explain that while the Joseph Fritzl case made her lose her belief in God. Somehow, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the entire Old Testament get a pass.
But let’s not get bogged down in logic or consistency. The fact is, Joseph Fritzl made Kemi certain there is no God, but — and she wants to make this absolutely clear — she is definitely still a Christian, just in case Tommy Robinson fans are tuned in.
Such effortless wooliness of mind might qualify her to be a Church of England priest, or possibly the Archbishop of Cognitive Dissonance, but not a national leader.
Yet you know precisely why she’s positioning herself like this: to appeal to the hot blonde with the swastika, and to try to remain relevant in a world where her voters, her councillors, her former colleagues, her former party chairman, and even the right-wing press have defected to the defective, and fully embraced Nigel Farage.
Meanwhile her main rival to take over the ashes of the Conservative Party, Ozempic root vegetable Robert Jenrick, has taken a step further, declaring himself an “Anglofuturist”. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, lucky you. The principles of the movement are set out by Alexander D’Albini, its great intellectual figurehead—and I use all three of those words quite wrongly.
D’Albini describes Anglofuturism as, “not socialist, not progressive, nor conservative, or nationalist”. He also says it is, “non-political and non-nationalist”, “not civic-nationalism”, and that it “eschews modern British values, but it fights shy of embracing the older definition.”
Any moment now, he’s going to tell us it’s a Red White and Blue Brexit. Politically, all D’Albini has managed to do is tell us what his movement isn’t, and I can do that in a single word: sane.
If you ask him what Anglofuturism actually is, he’ll explain that it “means the culture of the people who came from the British Isles — so that it can include not just Great Britain but the former colonies of the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”
Just say “white”, mate. This is taking ages.
And yet this movement — with its plans to fill Britain with spaceports, nuclear power stations, super-powered robots, and scrap building regulations to create hundreds of new towns (“all of them beautiful”, somehow) is the latest landing ground for champion bandwagon-leaper Robert Jenrick, and once again it’s easy to see why: he wants to go home with the blonde.
But the truth is, the blonde is going home with Farage — as all good Aryans should — leaving Jenrick, Badenoch, and Starmer (with his “island of strangers” speech, disgracefully aping Enoch Powell for clicks) standing at the bar with their drinks going warm.
Meanwhile, a huge swath of metaphorical “brunette” voters are completely ignored. Sure, if you ask them, half of UK voters will say they want to reduce immigration — but 45% want it to remain the same or increase.
Those numbers seem perilously close to the cursed ratio of 52:48, but the devil is in the detail, which is why Nigel Farage never wants to discuss details. Once you start asking “anti-immigration” voters which specific people they want to stop coming into the country, their entire argument collapses. You’d expect such voters to be accepting of more immigrant doctors, and they are—77% want the same or more.
But 63% want more immigrant waiting staff. 70% want more seasonal fruit pickers. In polls, voters supported more immigrants for every single type of job that was asked about. Clearly, plenty of flimsy ideas get jettisoned on the bumpy road from the general to the specific.
The truth is, the country has never been asked to look at the details, only to get frightened about the headlines. Even if you accept that headline figure of 50% wanting fewer immigrants (and the evidence suggests it’s a fallacy), there remains a massive grouping of voters who are being ignored by the three main parties, and their opinions are woefully underrepresented by politics and the media. Three quarters of us support a wealth tax. Seven out of ten support or strongly support Net Zero. A majority of each party’s voters opposed cuts to disability benefits. Four out of every five believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The country is far more progressive than you might expect. We are just led by people a long, long way from having a beautiful mind, who are mesmerised by the hot blonde racist at the bar. If only one of them could remember sometimes, the thoughtful, reasonable brunette is almost always the better choice.
Russell Jones’s new book: Tories: The End of an Error is available for pre-order from Byline Books, click here.
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