For the past 18 months or so, a bundle of ideas about human psychology has been getting increasing attention on the political right. Like a lot of the most dangerous modern viewpoints, it has very little to do with objective reality, but that does not get in the way of its adherents’ certainty and self-righteousness. Their contention is that a new frontier in the battle against identity politics, the nanny state and the supposed decline of western civilisation has opened up, around the two very different issues of neurodiversity and mental illness. The basic message fits with the nostalgic tone of post-Brexit Conservatism: it is time, some people think, to return to pulling yourself together and maintaining a stiff upper lip.

This opinion has long been cropping up in certain newspapers, and has now been brazenly endorsed by a high-profile Tory politician: the leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who launched a 40-page treatise titled Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class at the party’s recent conference. Quite who wrote the pamphlet remains unclear, but Badenoch endorses what it contains: a meandering and very repetitive argument about the supposed tyranny of “the bureaucratic class”, full of claims about the disasters wreaked by a “new progressive ideology” that now dominates most of our key institutions and organisations.

Among the most overlooked catastrophes, the text argues, is the fact that we have allegedly taken refuge in “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation” instead of “building resilience”. Paraphrasing this stuff is almost impossible, so it’s best to directly quote it: “Being diagnosed as neuro-diverse was once seen as helpful as it meant you could understand your own brain, and so help you to deal with the world,” the text says. “It was an individual focused change. But now it also offers economic advantages and protections.”

It goes on: “If you have a........

© The Guardian