Why the Andrew Sabisky incident was not a one-off – and why there will be plenty more where that came from

The Downing Street career of Andrew Sabisky was very short-lived. Much has been said already about his interesting angle on eugenics and marital sex, so I won’t rehash them here. The only thing I will say is that I find it odd that Dominic Cummings puts out a very long blog post requesting “weirdos and misfits” in a search for “cognitive diversity” and ends up picking a guy who could have emerged from a factory that churns out stereotypical Tory young men. Why ask for different and then choose someone who looks and sounds like most of the interns working at CCHQ at any point over the last thirty years?

Yet for all the hoopla that was created, the Conservative party are going to emerge from this incident completely unscathed. This is because instead of learning from their errors, the Labour Party are stuck in some sort of death spiral that Keir Starmer is going to have to be a secret political genius to help them emerge from within the next four years. On a day when a Tory prime minister would not directly deny that he shared the position of one of his advisers that black people were less intelligent than white people, we had a contender for the Labour deputy leadership stating on television that all children are born sexless. I can’t think of a worse place for the Labour leadership contest to go right this second apart from the trans-rights black hole. Help me here, I need to get this straight: the Corbynistas think that the party was too Remainery for their old working-class voters, but the way to win them back is by publicly ripping each other to shreds about what qualifies as a man or a woman? I’m not saying the trans-rights debate isn’t important – I’m saying that there are very few things it would have been less helpful for the Labour leadership contest to have become about.

Meanwhile, Corbyn hogs the leader of the opposition chair, essentially rendering it de facto empty. We don’t really have a leader of the opposition at the moment, and it’s not yet clear whether we will have someone effective in the role come April 4th given how low the leadership contest has sunk. We even have RLB and others hinting that Corbyn could be allowed back into the shadow cabinet is which twenty shades of unhelpful to a party that should be trying to move on. I would say it’s like the Labour Party have come to a point where they actually enjoy losing, but that’s facetious and doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The Left are sucked into some sort of weird death spiral, getting deeper and deeper, further cementing the Right’s hold on power. I genuinely think they might next start openly debating whether Stalin’s purges and show trials weren’t good ideas after all. I’m being serious here – I don’t think we’ve reached the bottom for the Left yet.

This is why there will be more Andrew Sabisky style incidents in the future. For now, the eugenics and the icky incel posting were too much for public consumption, but give the Left another year of talking to their own navels and we might see people with current National Front memberships in key government positions being met with little more than a shrug. Say what you will about press scrutiny; we have a system of government that relies on a strong opposition keeping the government on the straight and narrow. Years and years without that have had an inevitable unbalancing effect. If things go on as they are, expect it all to get a lot worse.