Why was wokery on the lips of so many ministers at Tory spring conference?

Ministers draw a link between Ukraine, war, statues and personal pronouns, writes Andrew Woodcock

Brexit minister Jacob Rees-Mogg was among several senior Tories to make a disparaging reference to ‘woke’ culture (PA)

One of the more peculiar features of this weekend’s Conservative spring conference was the connection which so many present appear to have drawn between Ukraine’s valiant struggle against Russian invaders and their own – somewhat less heroic – stand against the forces of “wokery”.

In speech after speech, ministers mentioned with relish their belief that the seriousness of events in eastern Europe would mean an end to squabbles about personal pronouns, statues and gender-specific language.

In the face of the threat from Vladmir Putin, said Jacob Rees-Mogg, nobody would any longer care about banning MI6 spies from using macho words like “grip” in their reports, as a recent memo reportedly did.

In a “serious” world of life-or-death struggle, quibbles over language were exposed as “trivial nonsense”, he told activists, declaring that he would not be forced to use “socialist” words like “chairperson” and might start calling Beijing by its former name of Peking.

Foreign secretary Liz Truss went a step further, arguing that Putin had been emboldened by a “culture of self-doubt” in the West which manifested itself in “ludicrous debates about language, statues and pronouns”.

“Our history, warts and all, is what makes us what we are today,” she said. “We live in a great country, a great democracy and we should be proud of it.”

And even Boris Johnson got in on the act, announcing in the middle of his discussion of the Ukrainian situation that “We don’t need to be woke. We just want to be free.”

At first glance, it might seem odd that people with such a strong aversion to talking about “woke” issues should seek to shoehorn them so often into their debates.

But that would be to misunderstand the centrality of “wokery” to the worldview of the Johnson administration and to their plans to secure another term in office.

Most of those actually using terms like “chair” or “Ms” or “person of African heritage” or sticking to the pronouns which an acquaintance has indicated they prefer probably feel that they are doing it to be polite and considerate – something which Mr Rees-Mogg normally puts a premium on.

But Johnson and his ministers know that to a certain section of their core Conservative audience, any such concern is an infringement of every Englishman’s God-given right to speak his mind and call a spade a spade. Bashing the “woke” is a surefire way to win the approval and applause of activists at conference.

More importantly, however, ministers know that there is a far wider group to whom the whole issue feels like a battery of ever-changing instructions and rules waiting to trip them up and put them in the wrong.

For this group – who are probably not much engaged in debates on gender or race, but would certainly not want to appear rude – the Tory “war on woke” sends the reassuring message that there is nothing wrong in them feeling irritated or frustrated by this complication of modern life.

It is said that one of Donald Trump’s great attractions for voters who objectively speaking had little to gain from his economic policies was that he spoke to their anger at being lectured and condescended to by middle-class people with degrees. For today’s Tories, “woke” plays much the same role.

And it has the added delicious advantage of putting Sir Keir Starmer and Labour in an unwinnable position.

With his determination to pull Labour back to the centre ground and win back the traditional working-class Red Wall seats lost to Tories in 2019, the last thing Starmer wants to do is get embroiled in arguments about gender-critical language or the UK’s involvement in slavery and colonialism.

But Mr Johnson knows that there are many Labour supporters for whom little is more enticing than a debate about the minutiae of precisely these subjects, all too many of which soon descend into ferocious internal warfare, which can only be calculated to turn voters off.

At the same time, use of the term “woke” frees Tory ministers from having to engage in the actual debates. Whenever Mr Johnson discusses statues, it is always Churchill – who nobody is seriously considering removing – who he mentions, rather than the slave-trader Edward Colston, whose memorial was dumped into the river in Bristol.

When Ms Truss says that Britain’s history “warts and all” is what made it great, she doesn’t spell out whether it is slavery that she is talking about.

Challenged over a specific case of language sensitivity, Mr Rees-Mogg immediately conceded that he had, in fact, switched from saying “The Ukraine” to “Ukraine” – though, oddly, he said that this was out of respect for the bravery of the country’s inhabitants, rather than the fact that in this case the definite article indicates the area is part of the “borderlands” of Russia rather than a state in its own right.

Equally curiously, when Mr Rees-Mogg says that the seriousness of war means there is no appetite for trivial discussions about statues, he seems to be forgetting that it is at times of war and revolution that these edifices are most vulnerable.

When the citizens of eastern Europe tore down all the Soviet images of Lenin and Stalin, or when the massive statues of Saddam Hussein were toppled in Iraq, are we to take it that their destroyers were desecrating the history of their nations which needed to be preserved? Or were they marking in physical form the change in political era that their country was undergoing?

So we are left with the strange political phenomenon that the people who don’t like “woke” language and wish everyone would stop banging on about it have every incentive to bang on about it themselves, while those accused of being “woke” find it to their political advantage to keep quiet about it.