Some of My Best Friends Aren’t Tories

Douglas Rooney on the rise of the brocast, the cringey podcast of the chumocracy and the ascendance of a weird new form of centrism.

I work with a very nice American woman. She is hard-working, unfailingly polite and pleasant. However, we will never be friends. She is a Trump supporting conservative who campaigns for anti-LGBTQ+ Christian organizations. I am a gay man married to a Chinese citizen. It would be utterly bizarre for me to befriend a person who is actively campaigning to undermine my rights. 

I bring this up because we are living through something of a centrist ascendency in the UK just now. The Brexiteers and the Corbynistas have been banished from the two major parties, and the moderates are back in charge. As part of this ascendency, we are all being assured, in the Opinion pages of national newspapers, on social media, in speeches from MPs, and in ‘frenemies’ political podcasts like The Rest Is Politics or George Osborne and Ed Ball’s new show, Political Currency, that it is not just permissible to have friends across the political spectrum, but it is actually a good thing.

The argument goes something like this: we are all living in echo chambers, and post-Brexit Britain is dangerously polarized. We need to talk to people on the other side. This will help hone our rhetorical skills and test the validity of our ideological assumptions in the marketplace of ideas. Oh, and also some of my best friends are Tories. 

But numbering your political opponents among your friends can only happen if politics doesn’t matter. And politics should matter.

Friendship should be based on mutual respect. Take me and my work colleague: we cannot be friends precisely because my marriage matters a great deal to me, and my marriage is an ungodly perversion to her. Our different political positions on the issue of LGBTQ+ rights mean we cannot form a friendship because she does not respect me or my right to have a family.

Let’s take another issue: the Conservative Party has made it increasingly difficult for me to live in the UK with my Chinese spouse. A member of the Conservative Party is, therefore, in a very real way, campaigning against the interests of me and my family. No less than my homophobic work colleague, an activist for the Conservative Party is trying to make my marriage more difficult. And that just doesn’t seem like something I want in a friend. 

Of course, I am not saying that your friends must agree with every single political position you hold: it would be strange to de-friend someone over, for example, a disagreement about the local council congestion charge. However, de-friending someone due to their politics should not be something we discourage because politics can have huge consequences for people, families, and communities.  

Politics is not a game; it is, quite literally for many, a matter of life and death. But I don’t think the centrists currently in charge have quite realized that. Alistair Campbell, for example, is one of the architects of the Iraq War – a war that killed, maimed or displaced millions. But Rory Stewart is not one of those millions, and so he can quite easily discuss the conflict calmy as they have in past episodes. George Osborne’s austerity policies immiserated millions, but Ed Balls isn’t one of those millions, and so friendly political banter comes more easily to him than, say, the 1 in 5 Britons who are living in poverty.

These are high profile examples, but the same is true of any moderate telling you to sit down with your political opponent to “hone your argument”. The ability to turn politics into something you do for fun over a pint does not signify rationality or a level head: it signifies that the politics under discussion don’t matter to the people discussing them. For millions of us politics does matter, and if they matter to you then it is perfectly fine if some of your best friends aren’t Tories.