What kind of person would drag autistic children into the culture wars? The Kemi Badenoch kind | John Harris

The Tory leadership hopeful paints a picture of free handouts and special treatment. As the father of an autistic child, I can tell you that’s a lie

For the past 18 months or so, a bundle of ideas about human psychology has been getting increasing attention on the political right. Like a lot of the most dangerous modern viewpoints, it has very little to do with objective reality, but that does not get in the way of its adherents’ certainty and self-righteousness. Their contention is that a new frontier in the battle against identity politics, the nanny state and the supposed decline of western civilisation has opened up, around the two very different issues of neurodiversity and mental illness. The basic message fits with the nostalgic tone of post-Brexit Conservatism: it is time, some people think, to return to pulling yourself together and maintaining a stiff upper lip.

This opinion has long been cropping up in certain newspapers, and has now been brazenly endorsed by a high-profile Tory politician: the leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who launched a 40-page treatise titled Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class at the party’s recent conference. Quite who wrote the pamphlet remains unclear, but Badenoch endorses what it contains: a meandering and very repetitive argument about the supposed tyranny of “the bureaucratic class”, full of claims about the disasters wreaked by a “new progressive ideology” that now dominates most of our key institutions and organisations.

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