In our poisoned politics, the Conservative leadership race is a reminder of how social norms can wear away in a democracy

Nigel Farage has an echo. A rather tinny one, admittedly, but it’s uncanny all the same. Whatever he says, somewhere from the cavernous depths of Robert Jenrick’s ambition those words come floating back.

Farage spends his summer campaigning for Donald Trump to be president? Back in August, Jenrick said he too would vote for the man whose own former chief of staff calls him a fascist. Farage endlessly portrays migrants as violent and dangerous, threatening to leave the ECHR because apparently Britain is being “walked all over by foreign criminals”? Jenrick too complains to the Daily Telegraph of what he calls “an institutional cover-up about the costs of mass migration” (by which he means ministers won’t keep a public record of crimes committed and benefits claimed specifically by migrants) while saying that leaving the ECHR would help “remove dangerous foreign criminals like rapists, murderers and paedophiles”.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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