We are all in the gutter, but some of us are sleeping under the stars - Diary 27/07/2025

Chris defects to the Tories

Monday 21st July

I am still in Crete with my parents. Back in London, everyone is going apeshit because Chris Worrall defected to the Tories. The official reason is that he was frustrated with the Labour government's acceptance of an NIMBY-lite amendment on the Planning Bill. The actual reason is, literally, that. More generally, he has the usual problems with Labour people and the soft left, but at the end of the day, he is more comfortable being right-wing. I think he was in the Labour Party by default, not because he gave it much thought.

Chris is a demonic mate I made relatively recently, but because we speak the same language (we say what we mean), I developed a certain level of comfort. I have often had shouting matches with him because, earlier this year, we started working on a media project that some of you may have heard of. ‘Left on red’ is a media company, think of it as a centrist Novara if you are British, a platform for shows that broadcast on YouTube and all social media, with professionally done reels for TikTok, Instagram and X. The project is put on ice at the moment. I had already produced a bunch of episodes for my own podcast, which is called ‘Bread and Roses, the political podcast for the politically and aesthetically curious’. Now that Chris has left the party, the project’s initial premise needs to be reconsidered. The point was to create a counter-narrative on social media that is usually only spoken from the mouths of grey, stale voices that few pay attention to beyond those already voting Labour who want to listen. The execution was challenging, but the goal was noble.

Chris is an asshole, so obviously I find him endearing. Like other sufferers of what I call ‘the Blairite mind virus,’ you know what to expect from him.