US politics is still madder than British politics

An encounter on Super Tuesday between Emily Maitlis and Trump-supporting Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reminded us how nutty the far right is in the US.

Interviewing Greene at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Tuesday night, Maitlis asked the Georgia congresswoman why so many Trump supporters “love conspiracy theories”, such as Greene’s claims that “Jewish space lasers” had ignited the Californian wildfires of 2018.

“Why don’t you f*ck off?” said Greene, touted as a possible running mate for the 45th US president in his bid to return to the White House.

Another press-hating Trump loyalist is Kari Lake, a former Fox news anchor and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate who is campaigning for a seat in the Senate.

Like Greene, Lake is an election denier, that band of Donald acolytes who insist the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential race from their man. She is also in denial about her own defeat in the governor’s race of 2022 and has spent her time since, when not cheerleading for Trump, trying to overturn that result in the courts.

Lake doesn’t look unhinged but actually believes she is the lawful governor of Arizona, that God did not create women to be equal to men, and she would outlaw abortion without exception, and end all Medicare and Social Security.

She is also a potential running mate, though even Trump is said to find her a bit too Trumpy (definition: brash, arrogant, outspoken; known to make contentious statements that turn out to be factually incorrect).

Those wacky Americans! The fact that Trump has stormed the Republican primaries and could very plausibly be back in office despite spurring an insurrection in 2020 – despite everything, including the 91 criminal charges he still faces – is a marvel to Brits.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so smug. Who was that sharing a platform with Trump uber ally and convicted criminal Steve Bannon last month but our very own Liz Truss. 

The woman who less than two years ago was in Number 10, albeit briefly, sat silently as Bannon declared Tommy Robinson, leader of the white supremacist English Defence League, a “hero”.

Truss, still a Conservative MP, was in Maryland to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which has become a MAGA (Make America Great Again) fest. Playing to the crowd’s paranoia, she embarrassed herself, and Britain, with references to the “deep state” that destroyed her career.

“Western civilisation is doomed,” according to Truss’s conspiracy theory about the financial establishment, bureaucrats and media that she believes did for her premiership.

Even more woo woo than Truss is her former Conservative colleague Andrew Bridgen, who has been captured by the anti-vax cult, said his wife in an interview with The Times.

Bridgen was suspended from the party in January after sharing a post on Twitter/X comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. He was later expelled and now serves as an independent MP.

He went from being a relatively sound, if undistinguished Tory, to a raving fantasist, now trying to mobilise “Andrew’s Army” of anti-vaxxers ahead of the general election.

Nevena Bridgen, who is divorcing her husband, criticises the Conservative party and the parliamentary authorities for failing to protect him from “radicalisation”.

She believes he won’t be the last MP to be targeted by conspiracy theorist groups and warns that Parliament can’t guard MPs against indoctrination.

But there’s no need to panic. While Bridgen has been embraced by the likes of Laurence Fox, such an outlier that even GB News had to drop him, he is destined to remain on the fringes of British political life.

Bannon has predicted there will be a populist nationalist uprising in Britain within five years, following a Labour government, with Nigel Farage – who was also at the CPAC – installed as Prime Minister and the Reform party, led by Richard Tice, assuming greatness akin to MAGA.

That’s not the way we do things here, however. There may be a “shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality”, as Rishi Sunak told the nation a week ago, but the difference between Britain and the US is that we do not put our zealots in government.

The last time we experimented with political radicalism in this country, it ended badly, with Truss’s out-on-a-limb economic measures freaking out the financial markets, crashing the economy and sending mortgages sky high.

For such irrational risk-taking, she was marched out after just 45 days in power, something else we can do here in the rare instances where the loonies accidentally take over the asylum.

We may not be immune to eccentrics – George Galloway is an MP again and Truss can still command rebel support on the Conservative backbenches – but voters tend to be spooked by hardliners.

With apologies to Stealers Wheel (for the uninitiated, a Scottish folk rock/rock band formed in Paisley in the Seventies), we have clowns to the left, jokers to the right, but the British electorate is stuck in the middle, and thank goodness for that.

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