{"id":714,"date":"2026-07-27T14:41:01","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=714"},"modified":"2026-07-27T14:41:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:41:01","slug":"dispatches-from-the-first-great-british-cpac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=714","title":{"rendered":"Dispatches From the First Great British CPAC"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

If you have spent any time on the British side of social media\u2014Elon Musk\u2019s X, in particular\u2014you will know that the United Kingdom is being invaded by foreigners.<\/p>\n

Read more The War on the UAW<\/a><\/p>\n

They arrive professing their love of the place. They are made welcome. Then they settle in like Penelope\u2019s suitors: occupying the hall, running down the estate, insulting the kingdom, and maintaining throughout the assumption that one of their own will soon be master. They hold British norms in contempt. They don\u2019t speak proper English. They infiltrate British politics and influence it against British interests. They are convinced that their culture and religion are superior, and they won\u2019t shut up about it. They are here, above all, to extract.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not be politically correct. We all know whom I am talking about: Americans.<\/p>\n

For the UK, the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d has always been an unrequited love. Westminster will stay up until the last state is called. Washington cannot reliably remember that we have a chancellor of the Exchequer rather than a treasury secretary. In the past 10 years, Brexit and the war in Ukraine have turned the British desire to please Americans into the necessity of appeasing Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Through conferences and sponsorships, media ventures, no-bid State Department grants, and fat public-affairs contracts, the MAGA industrial complex has spent 10 years trying to buy British politics.<\/p>\n

The question is whether MAGA got the return on investment it expected. Has Trumpism won British hearts and minds? Or is the sight of his brand on British soil no more meaningful an endorsement than a Kardashian holding up a bottle of gummies?<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s purchase of X was the first turning point. British tabloids are even more swayed by what trends there than their Washington counterparts, and the dominoes fall fast: Whatever is trending by breakfast is what some minister has to answer for on the morning round. Back then, being liked by the man who owns the algorithm felt like a massive undeclared political donation. Now it is starting to feel like the kiss of death.<\/p>\n

Michael Gove\u2014\u201cBaron Gove\u201d\u2014was once one of the most powerful men in the Conservative Party. A former cabinet minister, he is now editor of The Spectator<\/em>, the oldest surviving magazine in the world and a home of British Toryism. He is critical of Trumpism\u2019s entertainment-industry metastasis in the UK.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people within it sustain a cartoonish view of the country\u2019s problems,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n

You see this most clearly in the conferences funded by American evangelical, cryptocurrency, defense, and technology interests: CPAC, NatCon, and Turning Point.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have a pantheon of demons, but you will never see them seriously engage with the fundamental problems, like improving transport or making devolution work,\u201d Gove says.<\/p>\n

At the first Great British CPAC, held last week in London, I encountered a parade of increasingly uncomfortable, formerly respectable British Conservative figures dancing like bears at a Gypsy wedding for rich Americans whose political agendas are irrelevant to the British public. This spectacle has become the British right\u2019s greatest political liability.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sad what happened to Liz Truss; she morphed from a serious political figure into the ringmaster of a circus,\u201d Gove reflects. \u201cCPAC used to be a useful exercise for American Republican politicians to test their message, but it has become an amalgamation of baby podcasters, YouTube Zoomers, and thrill-seeking transgressives who want to \u2018own the libs.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: The Tantalizing Mockery of Thanksgiving, 1931<\/a><\/p>\n

A Young Conservative volunteer I meet has been tasked with handing out free tickets the day before the conference, in order to avoid the embarrassment of a hall containing more left-wing journalists than right-wing attendees. He maintains a perfect stiff upper lip as I quiz him about the event\u2019s obscene aesthetics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is grifting,\u201d he sighs. \u201cIt has nothing to do with British values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ed Vaizey\u2014\u201cBaron Vaizey\u201d\u2014another former Conservative minister and a radio presenter, is also unimpressed and most certainly not in attendance.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeaking the same language doesn\u2019t mean sharing the same culture or interests,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWhen Obama came to support the Remain campaign, Brexiteers were outraged. Now they are happy to have Trump tell Britain what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing about the Second World War in The Lion and the Unicorn<\/em>, George Orwell credited British hypocrisy with fascism\u2019s failure to take hold among the British elite. Or, as the American self-help guru James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits<\/em>, identity drives behavior. A person who identifies as health-conscious waves away the dessert menu without thinking about it. A Briton whose identity has been forged in the national myths\u2014Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of the Nazis\u2014cannot bear the idea of Trump\u2019s White House.<\/p>\n

There is, as Gove puts it, \u201ca residual British belief that governing should include dignity.\u201d Replace the quiet dependability of a press release with the vulgarity of race-slop memes? No, thanks. We are British.<\/p>\n

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, the right-wing party competing with the Tories, and CPAC GB\u2019s headline speaker, personifies Trumpism\u2019s failure to win genuine buy-in in Britain. The right-wing press that courted him for a decade has found the meme-king kleptocracy impossible to stomach.<\/p>\n

The first crack came with Christopher Harborne, Reform\u2019s biggest donor, a Thailand-based billionaire who gave Farage \u00a35 million personally\u2014a sum Farage failed to enter in the Register of Members\u2019 Financial Interests. Jacob Rees-Mogg, his fellow GB News presenter and a former Conservative minister who has argued for a Reform\u2013Tory merger, tactfully suggested that he give it back. The commentariat held its nerve.<\/p>\n

Two months later, it ran out.<\/p>\n

George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster who has cowritten a book about grooming politicians into corruption by picking up the bill for nondeclarable expenses such as travel and accommodation\u2014which is precisely what he did with Farage\u2014turned out to be a mainstay of Reform\u2019s political operation.<\/p>\n

Here is one thing I learned in 14 years of living among the British: They won\u2019t show you contempt to your face. You\u2019ll see it in what they do.<\/p>\n

For all their aversion to earnestness, every English politician secretly wants his Love Actually<\/em> moment. Hugh Grant\u2019s prime minister, repelled by an American president who has made a pass at a junior No. 10 staffer, does something astonishingly un-British: At the joint press conference, he takes the microphone and says the quiet part out loud.<\/p>\n

The relationship has gone bad, he tells the room. The president takes what he wants and ignores \u201call those things that really matter to, erm\u2026 Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever the financial desperation of individual British right-wingers, the small-c conservatism of the British psyche may prove more resistant to the MAGA grift than progressives have been bracing for since 2016. The next time American money comes knocking, I hope the British do what they do best and tell it to go back where it came from.<\/p>\n

Read more This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: The Passion of Amiri Baraka<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nDispatches From the First Great British CPAC - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=714\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dispatches From the First Great British CPAC - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=714\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-27T14:41:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Dispatches From the First Great British CPAC\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-27T14:41:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714\"},\"wordCount\":1190,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/d74991038abb86aac99d113e79155120.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=714\",\"name\":\"Dispatches From the First Great British CPAC - 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