Nick Timothy’s London and the anecdotal fallacy

Finally, something angers me enough to bang out a furious blog.

A few years ago, the night my divorce papers came in, I got a bit drunk with some friends, then found myself weeping on the tube home. A young black guy, perhaps 21 years old, saw that I was crying and gently asked if I’d like his seat. The last few weeks, for reasons I’m probably going to be obliquely referring to for a while, I’ve been getting drunk and then crying on the tube quite a lot. This has not happened again.

I take from all this no broader lesson than that on the first occasion I was standing and the more recent ones I was not, and maybe that we are as a society not entirely sure how to cope with the phenomenon of a large adult man publicly weeping. I, however, am not the veteran Tory bigbrain Nick Timothy, who is rather more confident in his ability to find data within anecdote than I am. This week he tweeted an, admittedly upsetting, story about a stranger being rude to him and his wife on a Tube platform, shoulder-barging past them, yelling, responding, when confronted, with the immortal words, “Who the f*ck’s talking to you, baldy”. 

“Nobody on the carriage even looked up,” Timothy continued. “I hate to say it but this is what London has become. The feckless and the criminal feel emboldened, and the law-abiding are afraid.” And so it went on.  

London, this week, in Nick Timothy’s head, probably. Image: screenshot from Call of Duty: Warzone/CC BY NC SA 3.0.

There have always been Brits who don’t like London, of course, just as there have always been French people who don’t like Paris, and no doubt Estonians who think Tallinn is for stuck-up metropolitan types, too. Some of this is a quite reasonable reaction to an economically and culturally dominant capital; some, a more questionable distrust of big cities generally, a belief that the reason nobody stops to talk to you in London is because Londoners are rude, and not simply because they pass thousands of people every day and the city could not otherwise function. (This is a phenomenon which social scientists term “negative politeness culture”.)

In recent years, though, the capital has come to occupy an increasingly prominent position in conservative demonology. At the extremes, people will make deeply unsubtle comments about how it just doesn’t feel English any more, but even the less openly bigoted will bang on about knives, gangs and Sadiq Khan, and smugly tell you that they refuse to visit any more. (This is obviously devastating.) How much of this is active suspicion of Remainers, ethnic minorities or young people, as opposed to simple annoyance that the metropolis is increasingly anti-Tory, I’m not exactly sure. But much of the right remains baffled and furious that, two terms in, Khan has relatively few big policy successes to point to, yet remains popular enough that the Tories can barely even be bothered to compete.

So Nick Timothy’s comments would not be worth noting, were it not for the fact they come from Nick Timothy. He was first, long-term Tory binfire watchers will recall, a senior advisor to Theresa May at the Home Office, then her joint chief of staff at Number 10. More recently, he’s been writing a column in the Daily Telegraph, becoming a senior fellow at Policy Exchange and chairing the Future of Conservatism project at Onward – impressive, since his main achievements in Downing Street were writing the infamous “citizens of nowhere” speech and pioneering the “Erdington Conservatism” strategy which helped destroy his party’s majority at the 2017 election and thus lost him his job. (Birmingham Erdington saw a 2.4 point swing to Labour.)

None of this is a reason to doubt Timothy’s account: rude and aggressive people are hardly unheard of, and you’re more likely to meet them in London, where sheer weight of numbers means you’re more likely to meet anyone. His conclusions, however, are another matter entirely, and here he’s fallen prey to the anecdotal fallacy, in which a belief is propped up by anecdote, not data. If he had bothered to look at the latter, he would know that London is one of the safest cities in the world; Metropolitan Police statistics show violent crime is trending downwards. 

This, though, would not fit with the picture of Sadiq Khan’s lawless London that right-wing talking heads wish to paint. “So much of this is about social decay, the destruction of  trust, the loss of norms of behaviour,” Timothy’s thread - which is, remember, about a single rude man who called him “baldy” on the tube - concludes. “If society can’t police itself through restraint and decency, criminal justice policy will have to get more authoritarian.” Such policies are, by a staggering coincidence, exactly the sort he’s favoured for years. 

Timothy did not, on this occasion, mention Sadiq Khan. (On others, he has.) But nor does he draw any link between his perceived social decay, destruction of trust or loss of norms of behaviour and the party which has been in government for the last 13 years, enthusiastically defunding public services all the while. If he ever has reflected on this link, then these reflections - like those regarding his role in the Tory’s disappointing election result of 2017 - have not been made public. Instead, he sees one act of rudeness, and concludes that the world has gone to hell, and needs to do exactly what he always wanted. Only, more so. 

There are, to be clear, worse people than Nick Timothy, in both the Conservative party and beyond. But it’s hard not to see him as a symptom of how we got into this mess, a sort of political equivalent of jaundice. It should just not be possible for someone who screwed things up – for his own party – in such a clear-cut, high profile way to still be offering advice. It should not be possible for him to sit there, blaming others without offering an account of his own mistakes. If that’s the future of conservatism, they might be even more screwed than the rest of us.

Want me to waste more Saturday mornings on stuff like this? Then why not…