Dark Triad: The disturbing personality traits on the British right

A new survey hints at an alarming psychological distinction in political life

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

This is a piece about what in God’s name is going on in the British right.

It’s not about policy. It’s about that feeling you get when you hear a right-wing politician and feel like you are listening to a different species, as if you are alienated not just from their opinions but from any kind of shared emotional reality. It’s about seeing what has happened in the US, where half the voting public has essentially given up on liberal democracy, and trying to work out how we stop that from happening in the UK.

The specific way in which this is going to play out is through a survey of political party members.

Political party members are a real problem. Firstly, this is because they’re completely mad. Many of the worst outrages of the last ten years - the prolonged throw-your-toys-out-the-pram temper tantrum of Jeremy Corbyn, the swivel-eyed carpet eating self-destruction of Liz Truss - were the direct result of party members having terrible, terrible judgement. Secondly, it’s because they have too much power. There is no sane world in which a bunch of people get to decide the next prime minister because they happen to be stupid enough to have joined a political party.

But the most immediate practical difficulty with party members is that we have no idea what they’re thinking. Only two per cent of Brits belong to a party. It’s very expensive and difficult to reach a small subset like that. We should therefore be very grateful to Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona, who’ve been conducting surveys of members since 2015 - pretty much the only people I know who are doing so, which is mad when you consider how pivotal members are to British politics.

Their most recent report summarises findings from surveys sent out just after the 2024 general election. It hints at a really quite distinct personality among Reform and, to a certain extent, Tory members. Something dark and disturbing operating on a psychological level. Many of them don’t want their leader to follow rules. Many value dominance instead of empathy, manipulation instead of integrity. They are, in effect, imagining Donald Trump - a strongman thug type - and aspiring to place him in the British political landscape.

It’s a sign that they, and perhaps the British right in general, is shifting away from a belief in liberal democracy, that we’re losing the battle to prevent American politics taking over here. But it also provides some tantalising suggestions about how we can prevent that outcome.

The first thing to note about party members is that they think, by and large, like the public itself, although usually to a more extreme degree.

This means that there are visceral differences between the views of Conservative and Reform members on the one hand, and Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid on the other.

We hear a lot - rightly - about the shattering of the electorate into multi-party politics. But we hear less about the fact that these parties actually coalesce into two coherent, bounded ideological blocs. On an academic level, there’s something pretty close to consensus that this is how we should discuss party politics. On a public level - on TV news, in party strategy - there is precious little mention of it at all.

The Reform-Tory bloc is right-conservative. It is older with lower levels of education. The other bloc is left-liberal. It is younger and has a higher level of education.

The origin story of the two-bloc phenomenon is Brexit, obviously, although the basic disparity in people’s values was obviously present before that, it just needed something to crystallise it. After 2020, the conversation moved on, but the decline in Brexit’s salience did not really change people’s voting patterns.

In the 2024 election, there was a lot of voter churn, but that served to conceal how little movement there was between the two blocs. The overwhelming majority of pro-Brexit, right-conservative voters stuck with pro-Brexit right-conservative parties. Generally they shifted from Conservative to Reform. The same was true for anti-Brexit left-liberal voters, except that they generally supported whoever was best placed to defeat the Conservatives.

Look at this graph, from this excellent piece using the bloc theory to analyse the 2024 result. It’s basically a one-stop shop for understanding this period in British politics. Here, intra-bloc switching means movement within a party bloc, like a Tory voter switching to Reform, and inter-bloc switching means movement between party blocs, like a Tory voter switching to Labour.

In 2024, there was a surge in the number of voters switching parties within their ideological bloc, reaching over 25%. But the number of people switching between ideological blocs was much lower, staying constant at around 11% to 13%.

British politics looks incredibly volatile at the moment but in fact there is a startling degree of consistency. Once you drop the party labels and accept that the electorate is divided into these two blocs, the basic picture barely changes. It’s like there’s two permanent armies, with a changing cast of generals.

What has happened since the 2024 election? Well, pretty much the same thing. Tory voters have swung to Reform. Labour voters have drifted off to the Lib Dems and the Greens and into the ‘undecided’ category.

What does this mean for politics? Firstly, that success in the next election is not really about winning converts. It is about maintaining a monopoly over your bloc. This is not new. In 2019, Boris Johnson achieved this by offering a clear pro-Brexit offer. In 2024 Keir Starmer achieved it by the extent of tactical voting by left-liberals. The question is who manages it next time. Politics is now fundamentally about bloc equilibrium.

This means that Labour might be screwed no matter what it does. To a certain extent, it is not in control of its own fate. In 2024, as the right-conservative bloc fractured, it could win seats on a low threshold. If all those voters coalesce behind Reform, that will no longer be the case and it’ll be in serious trouble. If I was a Labour strategist, I’d want the Tories to recover really quite a bit from where they are now, but obviously not so much that they can monopolise the vote again. It’s in Labour’s interest for Kemi Badenoch to improve or to make way for someone better, like James Cleverly.

But there is something Labour can do. It can base its strategy on the reality of bloc politics rather than imagine some fantastical 1990s world where it could bring over whole swathes of Reform and Tory voters.

Its anti-immigration policies, for instance, are designed to appeal to right-conservative voters, but in fact serve simply to alienate left-liberal voters. This is a suicidal approach. BES data cited in this very instructive Nuffield Politics Research Centre article shows that 18.9% of 2024 Labour voters are now undecided, 9.4% would vote Lib Dem, 8.3% would vote Green, and just 7.9% would vote Reform. Chasing voters in the other bloc while shedding your monopoly over your own bloc is an utterly illiterate approach given the political dynamics.

The new party member research reflects the demographic trends which underpin the two blocs. Generally speaking, party members are similar across the parties - they’re older, more likely to be male, more likely to be white, and usually, they’re more likely to be middle class. But that traditional similarity breaks down when we get to Reform. The proportion of ABC1s in political parties stands at 90% for the Lib Dems, for instance, but just 59% for Reform.

The same underlying demographic feature is even more starkly laid out when it comes to education. Look at this. The core role of education in predicting vote-bloc membership is very clear. Whereas 80% of Lib Dem members are graduates, just 37% of Reform members are. And before you ask, this isn’t a result of distinctions in age - the Lib Dems and Reform actually have a pretty similar membership on that front.

We then see the political consequences of the two-bloc demographic divide come across quite clearly across a range of issues. On Brexit, left-liberal voters were more likely to have voted Remain, right-conservatives for Leave.

On immigration, researchers asked whether they thought immigration over the last ten years had been too high, too low or about right. Here, members in both camps break down much the same way, with Green, Labour and Lib Dem voters supporting immigration and Reform and Tories opposed. Indeed, the results are really quite arresting on the right-conservative front. While plenty of left-liberals hold mixed views on immigration, the right-conservative front has basically no nuance at all. Negative attitudes towards immigration are essentially universal.

Quick side-note: I really dislike this way of framing questions about immigration. In fact, I am starting to struggle with how it is used in polls in general. I’m obviously about as pro-immigration as it gets but my view isn’t that immigration was too low or even that it should be higher in future. It is that immigrants should be treated with respect, as human beings, not with suspicion, as a problem to be solved. My ideal level of immigration is whatever helps British people have a better quality of life and provides immigrants with opportunity. This is liable to change at any given moment depending on gaps in the labour market, skills, demographic churn etc. It’s not fundamentally a numerical issue.

Anti-immigration figures basically just want less of it, or none. So this framing of the question seems to me to reflect their assumptions about the debate and not mine or those of people like me. But then, this is actually an improvement on what we often see. This week a leaflet came through my door with a survey asking which issues ‘concerned’ me. You can tick immigration. But of course, the assumption there is that it concerns me by being too high rather than because our antipathy to it is corroding our fucking souls and destroying the lives of those who come here. The whole structure of how we ask questions on this subject is tipped towards the antis.

So far the membership data aligns perfectly with two-bloc theory. But it becomes more disturbing when we explore what kinds of qualities members want in a leader.

Some of the findings are predictable. Left-liberal members prioritise leaders with a strong moral compass, whereas right-conservative members prioritise leaders who will stand up for the UK. But things then get very weird when researchers provide members with survey items designed to tap into so-called Dark Triad personality traits. These are narcissism, Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy. They are distinct traits, with a very long and well established academic literature, which also interact with each other in interesting ways. There’s a good paper on the traits here.

These traits, either individually or in combination, are associated with manipulation, exploitation, lack of morality, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, dishonesty, immodesty, lack of remorse, dominance-seeking, sadism, spite, aggression and bullying. Historically they have been treated as a problem, a set of characteristics which may simply make someone disagreeable or could make them an abuser. They’re the kind of thing you’d want to spot and resolve if possible.

I suspect that the reason the world feels so morally insane right now is that the most powerful man in it plainly encapsulates these qualities and the media seems intent on therefore projecting these qualities out as the new normal rather than a temporary aberration.

The Dark Triad personality traits break down cleanly between the two blocs. Labour, Lib Dem and Green members show little support for leaders who are dominant, aggressive, manipulative and hurtful of other people’s feelings. Conservative and Reform voters show much more support.

This then becomes more disturbing when we start asking about the limits of that leader’s power. When researchers asked members whether “Britain needs strong leaders who are prepared to break the rules in order to get things done”, the results broke down predictably across the two blocs. Left-liberal voters and members hated it - although it’s interesting to note that Green party members were much more comfortable with it than Labour or Lib Dem members, with 24% support next to 11% and nine per cent support respectively. Conservatives were split, with 41% of members supporting it. But Reform members were really rather supportive, with 62% backing the proposition.

This is Trump territory - a dark and broken personality given free rein to shatter the institutional safeguards which protect liberal democracy. And it is plainly not a US phenomenon. There is clear evidence here of it pertaining to UK right-conservative party members and voters.

As disturbing as all this is, I actually take something vaguely positive from it. These kinds of relatively detailed findings hint at something which is usually concealed - not just the character of party members, but a deeper political distinction underneath it.

In any political issue, like immigration, we always go into it thinking that there are some opponents whose minds you can change and some you can’t. Roughly 25% of the country is implacably opposed to immigration, for instance, roughly 25% are firmly pro immigration and everyone else is up for grabs in the middle.

These kinds of surveys offer something similar on a deeper psychological level. So yeah, a slim majority of Reform voters believe leaders should break rules. They like the sound of strong-man government. They’re attracted to some pretty fucking dark psychological traits. But a big chunk of them are not. Nearly half of Reform voters oppose leaders who break the rules. A majority of Reform members oppose leaders who show aggression or manipulate people.

That helps distinguish those who are basically lost to us, who are essentially a different psychological species, to those who we can still talk and debate with, who are still using the same moral language as us even if they’re coming to different conclusions, who can be convinced, who might even convince us of a few things, who we still have a lot in common with despite the great electoral blocs which seem to make us alien to each other.

We can talk a bunch about how to navigate the era of two-bloc politics electorally. That’s obviously where the majority of the conversation will lie. We can also talk about the importance of winning a fight for our ideals, and we will - and must. But the most important issue is not about victory, really. It’s about demolishing those two blocs, so that politics can return to a humdrum retail process. No more of this hysterical zero-sum identity war. Back to a world of politicians offering practical proposals for how to improve your life and you choosing whether you like those ideas or the other ones.

The psychological aspects of these surveys seem, on the face of it, pretty disturbing. But there are hints there, if we choose to look for them, for a more constructive approach to politics and each other. It starts by distinguishing between those who simply have different views to us and those who are really coming from a completely different psychological place.

Odds and sods

If you want to read more about party members I strongly recommend Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century, by Tim Bale, Paul Webb, Monica Poletti. It’s exceptional, the key work on the topic. I made very extensive use of it when I was writing How Westminster Works.

This piece is available as a podcast on Spotify or if you just click play at the top of the page. I’m pleased that more and more people seem to be listening and that I’ve now patented my extreme low-fi edit-while-you-read approach to this thing. No one else had yet had the idea of literally recording themselves try to figure out how something should be written, because it is fundamentally such a bad idea, so I finally managed to be the first at something, albeit because it is wrong.

This week’s column at the i paper was about Trump’s high-school sociopath foreign policy and the new age of rampant American imperialism. While I was away, I had a few other pieces go up - one on Curtis Yarvin, the half-arsed anti-democratic blogger who inspired JD Vance, and one on Nigel Farage and his moral and intellectual link to Enoch Powell. There was also one on the relaxation of the Christmas period but let’s not read that, it’ll only depress us in early January.

While I was away, the last few episodes of this season of Origin Story came out - one on the end of Soviet Communism and then a long final episode where we finished the story and unpacked the ideas of the season. I think you can hear in that episode that we are absolutely knackered. We really gave everything on this one. It’ll be a good long time before we do a full-season story again I think. Definitely time for something easier next time. The Origin Story of K-Pop Demon Hunters perhaps.

I had a beautiful few weeks away in Guatemala seeing my family. It was one of the best trips I can remember, just bursting with joy and beauty. By the time I came back my fluid content was 50% Gallo with an additional 30% Zacapa. It’s been difficult acclimatising back to my life here. Before I went out I deleted BlueSky, logged out of Instagram and turned off email notifications. It was bliss. Having to grapple with the news again, especially news in this, the worst of all possible worlds, has been really rather unpleasant.

While I was out there, I finally got around to reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, on the recommendation of a friend. It’s an immense piece of work. The scale is hard to fully encapsulate, in terms of the things he is describing, the wealth of ideas he’s grappling with and the time period it takes place over. It’s not perfect - I wish he was slightly less interested in minerals and I could have done with significantly fewer descriptions of the landscape. But it is a colossal piece of work, one of those things that you do not just admire for its ambition but also enjoy for its ambition. If you’re into politics, sci-fi, or just Mars, well you’ve probably already read it. But if not, it’s a strong recommendation from me.

Cheers all and happy new year - see you next week. Oh and you know - fuck off, obviously.