Sarfraz Manzoor

This is reprinted from my column in G2 today:

I have a friend who I will call Matthew, because that’s his name. Matthew is great. He is great company, he has great taste in music and films - meaning it is the same as mine - and he has a great girlfriend. The one thing that is not so great about Matthew is that he is a Tory: a full-fat, Boris-backing, Cameron-cheering Conservative. He is a Tory and he is my friend: how the hell did I let this happen?
“Know thy self, know thy enemy,” counselled Sun Tzu. We know who we are by who we are not, what we love by what we hate. It used to be easy to identify my enemies: when I was growing up I knew for absolute certain that I hated all Tories. Happily I did not actually know anyone whose parents voted Conservative;
everyone was Labour, except my friend Richard, who could never invite me to his home because his dad voted National Front. I loathed Toriesbecause they didn’t represent my class, because they epitomised everything I despised and because hating Tories was just so easy: if you couldn’t despise the Tories during the 80s you simply weren’t trying. Creepy Norman Tebbit, slimy Kenneth Baker, oily Cecil Parkinson and, leading them all, the Darth Vader of British politics, Margaret Thatcher: how I hated them and their odious ilk, and how I miss those times.
Conservative leaders used to be easily divided into the evil and the ineffectual. Thatcher and Michael Howard: evil; John Major, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague: ineffectual. At the time I despised them all, but lately just as David Cameron has blown my evil/ineffectual classification system out of the blue water, so the old Tory leaders have slowly been rehabilitated. Hague is now warm and witty, not the tweedy Tory embryo boy we used to mock, and Duncan Smith has somehow reinvented himself as the champion of the socially excluded. Howard, however, is evidence that rehabilitation cannot perform miracles, and I still find it hard to
believe that Major was actually prime minister. Themost extraordinary rehabilitation, though, has been of Thatcher, who we now treat like an old 70scomedian: the jokes may have been appallingly offensive at the time but one needs to understandthe context. The woman I spent my life hating is now the inspiration for saucy BBC4 dramas and in line for a state funeral.

I find this relentless rehabilitation of the formerly loathed deeply unsettling. If identity is not only about who you are but also who you hate, then the harderit is to identify acceptable targets to hate, the less sure I become about who I am.

I need to compile a “to hate” list. I went to acomprehensive school and most of my friends were white and working-class, the sort of people who are sneeringly called chavs; it would be easy to hate them if I was middle-class and hadn’t grown up with them. I can’t hate the working class, but I could at least hate the privileged: one unmistakable sign of the enemy used to be that they had been privately educated. I now have friends who are, sometimes reluctantly, sending their children to fee-paying schools. They tell me that they feel guilty, but that they’re doing it for their children, who they don’t want to see mutating into knife-wielding thugs - not that we are allowed to hate teenage troublemakers since they are, of course, only that way because of a lack of male role models and youth centres.

So no Tories, no toffs, no “chavs” and no hoodies. It’s enough to make me envy the Muslim-haters; at least they have an all-purpose target. Sadly, what with being Muslim and all, that’s not an option available to me. Tony Blair roused almost Thatcher-like levels of hate, but Gordon Brown inspires more sadness and pity than loathing. There was always George W Bush of course, an amoral compass to remind me of all that I opposed, but he will be heading back to the ranch soon. If Barack Obama wins, I expect most of Europe to spontaneously combust with orgasmic delight, but even if he loses and John McCain secures the White House it is hard to hate a war hero and cancer survivor.

Cameron has effectively decontaminated the Tory brand, which is another way of saying that he does not make you want to conduct root-canal work on him with a rusty nail. He lives quite near me and I bumped into him once in my local supermarket. I kept telling myself he was a Tory, trying to summon up the old hate, but it just wouldn’t come. Cameron’s Tories resemble a remake of a horror classic that just doesn’t scare like the original. And the more benign the Tories appear, the more I hate myself for not hating them. Is it they who have changed, or is it me? Maybe not hating Cameron and having Tory friends such as Matthew is a sign of maturity, an acknowledgement that reality is more messy than the certainties of youth. Still, I do miss the good old bad old days when I blithely judged and happily hated.