WI the first pop culture-aligned UK political movement is Tory?

[RobinCarmody]

Here's a suggestion. Francis Beckett (it'll be on the Guardian website somewhere) put forward the notion that, had John Smith lived and won in 1997, a 'New Tory' movement led by Michael Portillo (who wouldn't have lost his seat because Labour's majority had been more modest) would have led the way in terms of the increasing alignment between UK politics and pop culture. He suggested that this movement would have remained in opposition, but would have been a more credible opposition than the Tories actually were in the late 90s/early 00s (not a hard task, admittedly, but chiefly because such a movement would have stood for and represented an important generational shift in the culture which Labour would not have been representing as they obviously did in OTL) and would eventually have come to power, at much the same time Cameron actually became PM, when the eurozone imploded: Smith, he suggested, would have kept Britain out of the Iraq war but joined the euro, and the latter would have done for his government's reputation as the former did for Blair in OTL.

I think Blair's role in the pop culture-isation of British politics can be overstated: the changes often associated with him would have happened anyway through the mass retirement, around the time of his ascent, of the last pre-rock generation from senior positions in authority and institutions, and the rock generation reaching critical mass in terms of becoming headteachers, university professors etc. (Where Corbyn is concerned, I think his desire to associate himself with pop comes mainly from memories of how many of his generation were excited by Labour but turned away from them - to the most unlikely Tory leader in the world for such a thing, in retrospect - by the Marine Offences Act, and his determination for no such thing to be repeated.) This would have been bound to happen long, long before 1994: Smith living, or Gordon Brown becoming leader after he died, couldn't have stopped it; Beckett is right to suggest that, had Labour not filled the need a lot of people were feeling for such a movement, someone else would have done. In OTL, the Tories only really made their peace with pop after the Golden Jubilee and the concurrent demographic shift in the music where it started to be made much more by people from the backgrounds they were most comfortable with, but had they led the way in this field a decade before the Cameron ascendancy, I wonder what might have been different?

Might the Sun have continued to support the Tories on the grounds that its own geopolitical agenda was better served by such a movement - the Campaign for Free Radio basically taking over the party it had largely aligned itself towards rather than taking over Labour as it did in OTL - than by John Smith?

Might some traditional conservatives (Peregrine Worsthorne or Peter Hitchens, say), who loathed Blair and fanned the flames of the last great wave of anti-pop Right-wing paranoia at the turn of the century in OTL, have supported Labour against such a Tory movement because, in the post-Cold War climate, they felt more sympathy for a Left Fogey government than they did for what they would have seen as a betrayal of what Conservatism ought to be, culturally?

Might - contra Beckett - the Left Fogeyism of the Smith government (or the Brown government had he become leader in 1994) have seemed so out of place with the way the culture would have been changing anyway, with the boomers taking over every institution and altering their balance and outlook as a result, that such a Tory movement would have had a chance of coming into power some time before 2010, c.f. the fate of Gordon Brown in OTL but earlier?

 

[overoceans]

Caveat, while I know most of the people mentioned in the OP, I lack the poster's intricate knowledge of British politics and how they all lined up culturally.

That said, extrapolating from other times and places, I'm hard pressed to think of an example of a major right-wing party successfully branding itself as hip, at least relative to the left. Even if the "post-rock" ascension is across-the-board(ie. boomers and Gen. X move into important positions in both parties), it almost always ends up being the left that's most able to ride the wave, so to speak.

The pirate-radio thing was a bit of an anomaly, because what Labour was fighting for, I would assume, was government monopoly on the airwaves, not cultural traditionalism per se, even though there was a dovetailing between the two interests, in that particular case. Now that the multichannel-universe horse has been gone from the barn for decades, I'm not sure you're gonna see a similar issue come along to align the stars like they did over the pirates.

In Canada, there is a certain Left Fogeyism still somewhat in play, High Tory types who now gravitate toward the Liberals(like New Labour) and the NDP(like old Labour). They're epitomized by guys like Michael Valpy, a virulent monarchist who once wrote a column denouncing Howard Stern as representing the vulgarization of Canadan culture by the low-class Yanks. Among younger people, this sort of thing is not so much laughed at, as it is ignored.