A Life of Grimes

Darren Grimes is a tedious little shit. But he has proven quite canny in one respect: how to work the outrage machine to lever himself more followers and more attention. Not bad for someone who's barely in the legacy media, and who most people haven't heard of. If you've had a brief brush with notoriety in the public gaze, it does take some skill to build something out of it. In this respect Grimes is much like Katie Hopkins and is treading a similar career trajectory.

Consider how Hopkins got her start. She was an also ran in the 2006-7 season of The Apprentice, and pulled out citing family pressures. Having acquired the eye of the tabloids for a relationship with another contestant, she subsequently levered this into a literal expose of getting "caught" in flagrante in a field with her married lover and had said incident plastered in the papers. She followed this up by doing the rounds on panel shows, chat shows, reality TV, and daytime television. Over time she cultivated an ostentatiously harsh personality. Her shtick as a "truth teller" was (and still is) about belittling and punching downwards, and she was able to build a career out of mocking the motes of others while the media overlooked the beams of her own. The passage into outright racism and anti-immigrant politics was inevitable because this was where outrage-driven attention was opening opportunities for her ilk, and she carried on pushing it - to the point of losing her house in a libel ruling, and arriving at where she is now: banging the drum for anti-vaxxers and getting deported from Australia for flouting Covid precautions.

Grimes by comparison is pond life, but the comparison works. Having started his political journey as a Liberal Democrat, he moved quickly onto matters Brexit and became the go-between/patsy for the Vote Leave campaign and its engaging the data services of AggregateIQ, a firm connected to our friends Cambridge Analytica. Initially successfully prosecuted by the Electoral Commission and fined for breaking the law, this was subsequently overturned on appeal. But for a brief moment Grimes was a cause celebre on the right, a wide-eyed innocent pursued by a vengeful remain establishment for his part in the Brexit campaign. As such, he secured a few non-jobs with BrexitCentral and the IEA in the referendum's aftermath, while poking his head up from time to time on right wing outlets and getting his case championed by the likes of Guido and an assortment of Leave luminaries. However, this was not enough exposure and so he started producing his own videos. This struck gold when he interviewed David Starkey, who dutifully obliged his host by saying racist things, ensuring Grimes went viral and boosting his modest social media presence. However, racist provocations still have consequences and this made him unemployable as far as more mainstream outlets were concerned, a point underlined by the failing GBeebies refusing to employ him.

Thrown on his own meagre devices and priced out of London, all Grimes has left is keeping on pulling the outrage machine's lever. Attacking the England team for taking the knee? Easy, but hard to get traction when A-list right wingers like the Home Secretary were doing it. Delighting in Marcus Rashford missing a penalty? Of course he was always going to do that too. But attacking the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving people in the Channel to catch a ride on the right's anti-refugee bandwagon? Low, and a place few right wingers would tread, despite what they say at dinner parties.

As we've seen previously, there is a furious effort by the right to push socially conservative politics. Indeed, some have misread the situation and fooled themselves into thinking there is a mass clamouring for the war on woke when in fact it's a media/Westminster confection, just like the mythical centre ground and whatever rubbish the hacks and politicians think working class people think. They know in their bones the tide of cultural change is creeping in, obliterating their lines in the sand, swamping the moats and drowning their castles. And the more undermined they are, the more shrill their hot takes and protests become. They want to normalise racism and antipathy to the world outside because the cultural logics of the present point toward a future where divide-and-rule politics become increasingly difficult. And that makes future electoral success for the Tories much harder, unless they adapt. And likewise opportunities for right wingers to enjoy the easy life of mouthing off become more competitive.

This is the imploding universe Grimes has hitched his career hopes to, and he knows that if he stops saying outrageous things he won't matter any more. He doesn't have the connections or the class background to trade this in for a standard media career, and so he's on his own, perpetually looking out for new ways to centre himself in social media conversation, and to suck up to someone who might employ him. Imagine living such a miserable and perpetually exhausting life.

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