It’s important for politicians to have some kind of cultural hinterland. So perhaps we should be reassured by Kemi Badenoch’s revelation on the morning broadcast round that her favourite author is the literary legend Terry Pratchett. The Tory leader apparently has all but one of Pratchett’s 60-odd books, which blend sci-fi and fantasy with searing social commentary. She finds them “very funny”.
Nonetheless, one question remains: has she actually read them?
Post-structural theory dictates that readers may take whatever meaning they like from the content they consume. If Trump and his fans want to play “Born In The USA” at a Maga rally, the fact the song is a scathing critique of the Vietnam War and the arrogance of American leadership shouldn’t stop them. The artist’s own politics or intentions are irrelevant. So Badenoch is perfectly entitled to enjoy the Discworld novels, set in a magical disc-shaped land that flies through space carried by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It makes a change from her previous top reads (the works of Thomas Sowell and Friedrich Hayek’s Road To Serfdom), but if she can find joy in tales of witches and werewolves and a wizarding university with an orangutan for a librarian, all the more power to her.
Yet something about the image of Badenoch settling down with a dog-eared copy of one of Pratchett’s masterpieces doesn’t quite compute. It’s not just that it’s hard to imagine a woman who insists she doesn’t make gaffes seeing the amusing side of such exchanges as: “We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?” “Why?” “It saves time.” For while Pratchett’s books are indeed “very funny”, and it’s technically possible just to lick the sugar-coating of humour off the top, the politics beneath are about as un-Badenoch as it could possibly get.
How, for example, would Badenoch interpret the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness as detailed in Men At Arms, that notes how rich people can afford to make a single purchase of high-quality products (like boots) that last forever, whereas the poor are forced into a cycle of buying cheap goods that wear out quickly and must be frequently replaced, costing them far more over time? Does she see the innate injustice of trapping people in grinding poverty, or does she just think it is good for economic growth to sell as many cheap boots as possible?
Similar points may be made about other Pratchett musings on poverty, power and class dynamics. For instance, the observation in Feet of Clay that “while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions”, seems distinctly un-Tory in its nature. “At its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault,” wrote Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna in response to Badenoch’s claim. “I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.”
It isn’t just about economics, but empathy. What did Badenoch, of “not all cultures are equally valid” fame, make of the mindless patriotism of Jingo, in which two countries go to war over the stubborn certainty that each is the morally superior civilisation? Is the anti-woke culture warrior who has denounced her own Nigerian heritage moved by the celebration of diversity in the ode to London that is the city of Ankh-Morpork, where dwarf delicatessens have sprung up next to troll bars? How does she feel about the fundamental belief, outlined in The Fifth Elephant but imbued throughout the entire Discworld multiverse, that “It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren’t the people the people who made up the phrase ‘people are people everywhere’ had traditionally thought of as people”?
That is not to say that one has to be devoutly left wing to love these books. One of the most wonderful things about Pratchett is his willingness to poke fun across the political spectrum. The parodic takedown of left-wing revolutionaries in Night Watch is joyous (“the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people”). PC culture does not escape his glare, with the “Campaign For Equal Heights” and victim mentality of a woman who has become a vampire by marriage.
Nor is Pratchett blind to the challenges of immigration, which becomes a central theme of his work. It’s hard to think of a better exploration of the sectarian tendencies and tensions that come when migrant communities struggle with integration than Thud!, which sees historic racial prejudice played out on the streets of a modern city. But never once is the proposed solution to stop people from coming – quite the reverse.
Going Postal, meanwhile, champions free-market enterprise triumphing against monopolistic vulture cronyism (decide for yourself how that fits with the modern Tory party). Small Gods can be read either as paeon to atheism, or a celebration of the enduring power of human faith. And there is a deep love of traditions, of old-school small-c conservatism and the value of place and community sweeping across the more rural Granny Weatherwax novels, from the Dark Morris danced to signal the coming of autumn to the frequent motif of otherworldly evils attempting to invade the pastoral bliss that is clearly a homage to the English countryside.
But if there is a strand of Conservatism in Pratchett’s work, it is the Chestertonian kind. Indeed, Pratchett once listed G K Chesterton – whom we have to thank for “Chesterton’s fence”, the principle that we should hesitate to tear down a fence (or regulation, or social norm) until we are certain why it was erected in the first place – as his favourite under-appreciated writer. Chestertonian conservatism is based on a belief in preservation, of maintaining timeless and traditional values even if you don’t necessarily understand them, pursuing reform that is incremental in nature and recognising the importance of institutions. It’s hard to see how that chimes with the Badenoch worldview, in which “the system is broken” and must be torn down and rebuilt from first principles.
It’s not just that Badenoch would be quick to decry a magical university full of wizards messing around with space and time as “woke” and dismiss the orangutan as a DEI hire. If there’s one theme that runs throughout Pratchett’s work, it is an inherent distrust of people who think they know better, who are arrogant enough to assume they have the answers which have evaded lesser mortals. Whether aristocratic snobs attempting to bring down the monarchy, headstrong would-be witches thinking they can harness demonic forces, or generals sending troops out to die for a cause no one can remember, Pratchett’s antagonists are consumed by a misguided self-belief which blinds them to the corrosive effect of power.
Badenoch, who is so full of self-belief she won’t even sing Gloria Gaynor’s anthem I Will Survive, is within her rights to not see the irony. As Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows pointed out when a debate was raging about whether or not the author (who died in 2015) would have supported trans rights, “You take away from books what you bring to them, and often the reader’s views are confirmed rather than challenged, regardless of the author’s intention”. Maybe she sees herself as the one of the Discworld’s heroes, battling against injustice only she can see just like Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax. Maybe she hasn’t thought too hard about the politics of the Discworld at all.
But it’s hard to reconcile a politician who expresses her despair at living “in an era where emotion and sentiment are prized above reason and rationality” with the Pratchett worldview that it is “imagination, not intelligence, that makes us human”. And next time she mentions her love of the Discworld, someone should probably ask her what she thinks about the economics of boots.
[Further reading: Robert Jenrick declares war on the judiciary]
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