The Cockwomble Industrial Complex

If you tell Boris Johnson he's a wankspangle long enough surely he will explode.

Previously: The columnist blue screens

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Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

— Love Me, I’m A Liberal by Phil Ochs (1966)

Dogs hear tone rather than substance. If you — a monster for doing this — tell a dog it is a “fucking arsehole” in the same tone you usually reserve for saying it is “a good dog”, its tail will hammer away just as happily. As with puppies, so with liberals and especially the retweet-addicted, like-farming grift kings and queens of the FBPE/Cockwomble Squad (Provisional Wing).

No one is immune to cringe; the coolest person is condemned to one day have their child / any child sneer at their cringe — there are plenty of people who think I’m unbearable — but compound swearword Twitter seems to lean into it with absolutely no shame. They genuinely seem to believe that hashtags, pun games, and performative ‘Britishness’ (very white, very much tutting in the queue at Waitrose) are revolutionary acts. They’re miffed! Terribly miffed!

Last month, Josiah Gogarty wrote a perfect summary of the Cockwomble Industrial Complex for The New Statesman — ironically itself a major producer of liberal cringe content — in which he observed:

The centre-left is, fundamentally, unexciting; it largely advocates a reshuffling of widely held principles. That’s why it jars so much when its acolytes take on the rhetoric of radicalism. Cringe was supercharged by the Brexit vote – witness the Remainiac obsessions of the philosopher AC Grayling – because it signalled a loss of power far more acute than when David Cameron entered Downing Street. And in the aftermath of the 2019 election, Russ Jones was one of many who turned his cringe on the left. “Fuck off, Jeremy Corbyn, you hopeless old tatterdemalion,” he wrote, presumably after thumbing through a thesaurus.

In line with the liberal love of style over substance, a “tatterdemalion” is a person in tattered clothing. If you have a smart suit and an expensive enough haircut, the libs may forgive you almost anything.

I usually ignore the tweets and published output of RussInCheshire aka Russ Jones because it’s not for me. But yesterday, a 9-tweet thread he had written following Boris Johnson’s resignation as an MP bobbed up into my Twitter feed like one of those turds that refuse to flush. It began:

It’s easy to predict chaos. Much harder to describe the exact form that chaos will take. Johnson just kickstarted chaos again. Undermining trust in parliament, undermining Sunak, emboldening the Braverman / Badenoch wing who are already plotting their takeover of the party. 

I read the whole thread but the first tweet was enough to irritate me. People like Jones actually love Boris Johnson and his many horror show allies because they provide a set of easy targets and play to a Scooby Do villain-of-the-week level of political understanding. Jones has made out like a bandit by pointing at the behavior of the Tories and appealing to FBPE brain worms. His ‘jokes’ — such as they are — have no structural understanding to underpin them and are basically just Thick of It rips off garnished with sub-Charlie Brooker (Guardian era) insults.

Jones is part of a whole cast of chancers — ‘authors’, ‘campaigners’, ‘chefs’, ‘doctors’, ‘pseudonymous novelists’, ‘supergirls’ — who have tapped into a kind of lazy and self-satisfied attitude among Remainers since Brexit¹. Their utopian vision was captured in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, which they consider a summation of all that is wonderful about Britain rather than a well-produced propaganda coup that covered over the riots of 2011, the austerity that was ravaging the country, and the missiles atop East London tower blocks.

Along with this bizarre idea of what 2012 was about, Jones and the rest of the Cockwomble constituency endlessly search for “the good Tory” and pretend there was some beautiful era when the Conservative Party wasn’t a gang of robbers extracting wealth for themselves and their donors. It’s a delusion and it relies on the same kind of sick nostalgia that the FBPE army hate in Tories.

Jones replied to my thoughts on his tweets — I didn’t tag him but his fans made sure to send them to him with much gnashing of teeth — but I was asleep:

I just realised: I don’t care. You’re entitled to your opinions. I’m entitled to mine. For some reason, you’ve taken against me, but I can’t help that, and there’s nothing to be gained from discussing it. Have a lovely weekend. Genuinely. Cheerio!  

While it’s entirely tactical, Jones has a better idea of how Twitter works than a lot of his very defensive fans. But it’s interesting to see how someone who has made a name for themselves criticising others — often focusing on how they look rather than what they say — responds when they receive criticism. Look how he ignores my substantive points to suggest that I have simply “taken against [him]”. I don’t know him as a person but I’ve seen hundreds of his tweets and know quite a lot about his worldview.

The ‘reasonable’ Russ was also less present in a reply to someone else which I was included in:

He’s just a stranger on the internet with a blog and an opinion about somebody he’s never met. Basically, the same as everyone else here (including me). 

“… a stranger on the internet with a blog” is a common burn but it’s not accurate as anyone who reads this newsletter or my other work knows. And anyway, as Jones notoriously has an old sex blog that he cannot delete as he no longer has the password, it might be wise not to throw jibes about blogs around.

Genuinely — to borrow a word from him — I don’t hate Jones. I don’t know him but I do hate his public persona and the way he analyses politics in a puffed-up and self-satisfied manner while pretending to just be an ordinary bloke. He may have been when he started but with a large audience, which he ruthlessly monetises, he’s no longer exempt from critique.

The following passage from The Fence’s review of Jones’ book launch in November last year is telling:

The final question asks what Russ is going to do if and when Labour gets into power. Russ replies that his heart won’t really be in the ‘Week in Labour.’ And then the Q & A is finished, and the audience breaks up for more drinks. As much as I would stay and take in the scene, it’s time to head home, but not before buying a copy of The Decade in Tory at £25. It’s the size of a tombstone, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity of having it in pride of place on my sitting room mantelpiece.

If he cared about corruption and political malfeasance rather than simply seeing the team he prefers win, wouldn’t Jones keep his coverage up? But, of course, Tories bad, Labour good, is the limit of his offerings and once a Starmer administration is in place — he assumes — he can go onto the next thing because the man who looks like a Prime Minister from a cheap ITV midweek drama will be in Number 10. It won’t matter anymore; the Cockwomble Clan will be happy and secure, safe in the knowledge that they are untouchable. And if not, they can always riot, right? Here’s Jones’ plan for that from June 22:

Can we do a riot now? Is this the time? I'll pack sandwiches and bring a camping chair and silver blankets in case we're outdoors all night.

It’s just a game and he only cares if he and his friends are laughing.

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Thanks for reading.

1. For the avoidance of doubt, I voted remain.