The Great Reverse Ferret is Underway

It appears to be the season for the reverse ferret, the software update, the narrative whiplash. Call it what you will, but everyone seems to be at it. Boris Johnson said he went far too fast with Net Zero, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride announced with a straight face that formerly Big-Spending-High-Tax-Tories will cut public spending by £47 billion, and Keir Starmer, of all people, explained sententiously that immigration has got out of hand. I was in the audience of a literary festival in Greece last week when Rory Stewart said we had been living in an “extraordinarily deluded age”. He called himself “one of the guilty men” involved in attempting to export liberal democracy and the rule of law to an uninterested world. The assembled audience listened agog as Florence of Arabia dismantled the past few decades of deluded foreign and overseas aid policy. As Captain Alberto Bertorelli used to say in ’Allo ’Allo: “Whata-mistaka-to-maka.”

It is astonishing to contemplate such things. How were these apparently clever, well-meaning folk duped? Did they know they were wrong? When did they know they were wrong? How long did they keep it up? Do they plan to make amends? Could the same happen to us? William Wordsworth had the measure of things when he wrote:

For by superior energies; more strict

Affiance in each other; faith more firm

In their unhallowed principles; the bad

Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,

The vacillating, inconsistent good.

Sometimes such narrative whiplash from unhallowed principles can happen in a heartbeat and no-one remains to defend what was once trumpeted by the thinking class. Who but Ed Davey still insists ladies can have willies? Now that the NetZero Banking Alliance has folded, how quickly will other corporate support for green issues just melt away? Whether motivated by ambition, delusion or cowardice, what are we long-time sceptics and “vacillating, inconsistent good” to make of those who recently admitted to colossal, global errors of judgement?

For those of us who are of a religious disposition, we can reach for Luke 15:7: “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to repent.” However much they may grate, if influential people such as Rory Stewart realise, dangerously belatedly, the error of their ways, then we can all rejoice.

However: it’s still outrageously annoying.

From the small scale scarring of a field close to my home with a disgusting solar farm, to the one million-plus dead in the Middle East after decades of Western intervention, the children maimed with gender hormones, and immigration and welfare dependency causing British cities to once again resemble slums, these newly unfashionable ideologies have not been without consequence.

And on a lesser scale, it is intensely annoying for we regular folk who realised at the time such ideologies were perilously bogus. We who marched against the Iraq War, who thought the hockey stick graph a bit dicey, who knew ‘gender affirming care’ was child abuse, find ourselves wailing like Cassandra, the accurate prophetess whom no-one believed:

No, no, the torment!

Once more, the hideous pain of a true seer.

In response to former Labour party supporter Matthew Syed’s dopey realisation that the state’s “wild move to the Left” is a dangerous thing, Peter Hitchens manages to maintain his dignity, writing: “I was specifically and in detail, explaining and enumerating this 20-plus years ago. I didn’t see you around. Is it possible you were a footsoldier in Blair’s Army then?”

However tempting it is to yell with Cassandra-like frustration: “I told you so, why weren’t you listening?!,’ we might instead attempt to ensure the closed mindsets that made such idiotic ideologies stick do not again deaden the bien pensant class.

As society moves forward, let us not repeat the folly of being certain about the ideas that come next. When this ‘Age of Delusion’ finally passes, let’s avoid making similar catastrophic mistakes because we are sure we are right, convinced we’re ‘on the right side of history’ or too cowardly to voice dissent and follow where the evidence leads. As new ideologies begin to coalesce, we mustn’t fear putting them under rigorous scrutiny. Are we absolutely sure reducing immigration is always a good thing? What about collapsing birthrates? Will fracking and North Sea oil definitely solve our energy problems? Is talk around ethno-nationalism going to lead us down dark paths? What views will we seek to deny in 20 years’ time? Let’s not sanctify incoming new ideas just because the Overton Window has shifted and all our favourite podcasters agree.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai puts it best in The Place Where We Are Right:

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.

And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.