Step into the world of conspiracies

Conspiracy theories are the junk food of our society: a quick, easy and satisfying hit. What might it be like to be an addict, and how would you see the world?

I wrote about conspiracy theories almost exactly a year ago. They’re coiled round the heart of public discourse now, squeezing tighter and tighter, and they’ve come a long way since my youth. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, they existed, of course: the term may be relatively modern (The New York Times, 11 January 1863, since you ask), but the concept is as old as humanity. I suspect there were people suggesting that the serpent that tempted Eve was a false-flag operation. If you want expert analysis, my great friend and business partner Mark Heywood interviewed Professor Sir Richard Evans, former regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge, about conspiracy theories on his excellent podcast Behind the Spine back in December 2020, and it’s well worth a listen.

I suggested three principal explanations for the popularity of conspiracy theories. First, they’re one way of trying to impose order on the chaos of the world around us, to discern patterns and structures to make our surroundings seem less intimidatingly random. Second, we like secret knowledge, what the great 7th century Byzantine historian Procopius called Anecdota (usually translated as The Secret History). Knowing things that others don’t, and that we’re not supposed to, gives us a double hit of satisfaction. The third proposition I put forward, which is a more recent phenomenon, I think derives from our distrust of and disenchantment with authority, in all its forms. We don’t respect institutions or hierarchies in the way we used to, and so we’re less inclined than we were to believe a straightforward account of anything. It’s the urge summed up by the title of Rob Burley’s excellent memoir of political television, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? (Rob admits freely the phrase came from Jeremy Paxman, for whom it was axiomatic to the interviewer’s art, but Paxman admits he took it from veteran Times journalist Louis Heren.)

Conspiracy theories are endemic in public life now, especially in politics. More and more I notice that social media is full of people for whom their eerie, inaccurate perspective on the world is not a theory, not a slight stretch or supposition, but cast-iron fact from which they will not be dissuaded. Indeed, any attempts at dissuasion only serve to entrench the theory. If I’m wrong, goes the argument, why are you so desperate to change my mind? We are—and I don’t so this lightly, for all that levity is sometimes my downfall—in a desperately serious and perilous situation. We cannot agree on facts, let alone interpretation, and it makes us unable to talk to each other in a meaningful way. And we are forever doubling down, hugging our theories more tightly to us and defending them more aggressively. Again, “this lying bastard”.

This is an election year in the United States, and Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, is seeking to regain the White House, become 47th president and enter the history books as only the second American leader to have non-consecutive terms (the first, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, was Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president who was in office 1885-89 and 1893-97). Trump is the reigning monarch of conspiracy theories: they are his currency and his lifeblood. In 46 years on this planet, I have never seen a public figure who can lie with such ease, such conviction; I genuinely don’t know if Trump actually does lie in the conventional sense, because I don’t know what status the words that come out of his mouth have in his mind. Are they just cynically peddled untruths, or do they somehow transmute in his brain into ideas which have some reality to them, if only through the sheer force of belief?

Trump lies on an unprecedented scale. He will, I think, say anything if it is to his advantage, and certainly shows not even the scruples of a relatively dishonest politician, nor the fear of being caught out. That is partly because he is never in the conventional sense “caught out”, because he does not acknowledge error. He will double down, obfuscate, counter-accuse or simply move on. It doesn’t matter. For him, the issue is in the past. His biggest lie, his thermobaric weapon of mendacity which is central to his continued political being, is that he won the 2020 presidential election comfortably, but was denied the fruits of this victory by massive, widespread vote rigging and electoral fraud. He adduced many factors in this fraud, and during the two-month transition to Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump said 68 times the election was “rigged”, 35 times it was “stolen”, 250 times that it was determined by fraudulent or miscounted votes and 45 times that it was affected by malfunctioning voting machines.

There has never been any proof of significant electoral irregularities. Trump and his supporters filed 62 cases contesting elements of the election: only one, relating to Pennsylvania, was initially sustained, though it affected very few votes, and it was later overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But as a candidate Trump brazenly sustains the lie. A week ago came a typically measured statement: “They RIGGED the Presidential election, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the Presidential election of 2024!” This is what fuels his campaign. He was denied in 2020, so he will have his revenge in 2024.

The British cannot afford to feel smug. Last month, our former prime minister Liz Truss was a speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. The event was first held 50 years ago, as the Nixon presidency staggered towards its demise, and was intended as a rallying point for American conservatives. The first keynote address was given by a former Hollywood star of indifferent cinematic gifts but extraordinary emotional connection with the public, Ronald Reagan, who in 1966 had been elected governor of California and was approaching the end of his second term. His speech (full text here) took as its starting point the biblical image of “a city upon a hill”, which had been immortalised in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachussetts Bay Colony, in a sermon entitled A Model of Christian Charity. Reagan radiated optimism and confidence, possibly his greatest single skill as a politician, and confirmed his status us a figure of his party’s first rank.

(Not everyone approved of Reagan’s transition from showbusiness to politics. On hearing of his nomination for governor, studio boss Jack Warner exclaimed “No, no. Jimmy Stewart for governor—Reagan for his best friend.”)

Liz Truss spoke at an event entitled “Taking Our Parties Back”. Last June, I wondered, with some disbelief, if there could possibly be an attempt underway somehow to rehabilitate her after the catastrophe of her 49-day premiership. It is not longer in doubt: next month she will publish a book preposterously titled Ten Years To Save The West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room, which will argue that ideologically and conceptually she was right, but in practical terms she was betrayed and brought low by an array of opponents whom she identified even while in office as the “anti-growth coalition”, but about whom she also talks as “left-wing extremists”, “the usual suspects in the corporate world”, “the vested interests of the establishment” and the “deep state”.

She is now operating at an impressive conspiracy theory level herself. The breadth of her targets is eye-catching and surprising: at CPAC, she referred specifically to the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Environment Agency and the Judicial Appointments Commission—perhaps the first time those bodies have been yoked together—as she railed against “quangos” which “run everything”. I suggested in The Daily Express recently that she was not as helpless a victim of powerful forces as she makes out: she had been elected leader of the Conservative Party by a handy margin over her rival Rishi Sunak, and she came to the premiership with eight years’ experience as a cabinet minister, having served in seven different Whitehall departments. She replaced almost the whole cabinet, only three members retaining their portfolios, and made significant changes to personnel and institutions around her. The reason her time in office was a failure lies, I suggest, rather closer to home. But a conspiracy is better, more exculpatory and more lucrative.

Last summer, the Policy Institute at King’s College London carried out a survey of attitudes towards conspiracy theories for the BBC. It showed that some common theories have substantial credibility: 35 per cent of respondents said that the statement “Central bank digital currencies will be used by governments to control people’s money and restrict their freedom” was definitely or probably true; 33 per cent believed that the cost of living crisis was “a government plot to control the public”; and 32 per cent subscribed to the “Great Replacement Theory”, the idea, popularised by Renaud Camus’s 2012 book Le Grand Remplacement, that the white population of Europe is being replaced by non-white immigrants.

Even more fringe theories found alarming numbers of adherents. Almost one in five of those surveyed believed the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005 were carried out by the British government “to encourage support for war in the Middle East”, and a similar number agreed that the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 “involved ‘crisis actors’ who pretended to be injured or killed—people weren’t really killed or injured”. Think about those numbers: one in five, rising to one in three. Imagine sitting at a standard dinner table. Statistically, someone sharing your meal thinks 7/7 was a false flag operation, and perhaps two subscribe to the Great Replacement Theory. It makes you think.

This brings me to the idea which spurred me to write about this. I was browsing Twitter last night—well, early this morning—in the wake of the grotesque George Galloway’s by-election victory in Rochdale. It was depressing but not surprising to note that #TelAvivKeith was trending: this is the latest “witty” appellation for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, implying that he is at best heavily biased towards Israel and at worst actively an agent of the state. (Why people think he will be enraged to be referred to as “Keith” rather than “Keir” is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is a pet hate of his, but it’s not Oscar Wilde levels of piercing wit.)

A selection of the comments were grim but par for the course now, unfortunately.

He lied to be elected as leader, has a questionable past and his Zionism are self evident, but what matters is what he’s done and said since he took control, never forget. (Clara Ross)

He should be arrested as a war criminal. As a human rights lawyer he knew better than most exactly how wrong, how evil it was to back those actions. (Alex Cole)

The state of israel are only a phone call away, to talk to zionist starmer 400 years of parlimentary protocol changed #TelAvivKeith #Starmer&hoylezionistsinthehouse #scotsirishagainstgenocidejoe (Jean Mcleoud)

Hes an Isreali agent Traitor to the UK along with his hand picked front bench committed Zionist selling g out our country for personal gain. (Ron)

Now, I concede that some people who subscribe to and amplify conspiracy theories on social media are not necessarily our foremost public thinkers. Many come under the description Jeeves gave his temporary replacement of Bertie Wooster: “By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible—quite negligible.” But these are not all, in a phrase beloved of one of my friends, howling at the moon. Many are otherwise possessed of perfectly normal, unremarkable opinions, well within any kind of mainstream.

This point was made in The Guardian last summer by the journalist John Harris. He described how frequently he would discuss politics with people, find out their general approach and, in many cases, be told that they were not very engaged or connected with the political process. “Then, without warning, somebody will tip the conversation into altogether more exotic territory, centred on a conspiracy theory.” He talked about being in South Yorkshire in 2022, shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, “listening to a somewhat earnest young man’s views about how the deceased monarch had been fond of drinking babies’ blood”. He had also visited Birmingham where he had “listened to two loquacious pensioners talking about how Covid-19 was a fiction invented by the world’s rulers, and global death figures had largely been made up”.

I suspect, in some small way, many of us have had this kind of experience. A conversation, whether with a stranger or someone we know well, can reach a subject we would never have spotted as potentially controversial, and the interlocutor will calmly offer a view which knocks us sideways. (Of course, I admit the possibility that we do this to others too.) I can certainly think of casual encounters which have veered into unexpectedly murky waters over the pandemic, race and, shall we say, tolerance of other views in politics. There have always been issues best avoided—abortion is the one which springs most readily to mind—both because they are highly emotive (often personally) and because the scope for persuasion in any direction is limited. Brexit, sadly, has tended to fall into that category, which I find maddening: that we cannot discuss in civil terms whether the United Kingdom should be a member of a supranational trading body, so freighted is it with other issues, is a failure on all our parts.

The point Harris is making, and which resonates powerfully with me, is that you cannot see these things coming. A generation ago, you could usually spot someone likely to have eccentric opinions and likely to want to share them. I was still just at university (all right, as a postgraduate) when Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code, and that seemed to bring to life a surprising number of middle-aged men, usually bearded, who had put really quite a lot of thought, if too little of it critical, into the history of the Knights Templar (strictly, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, if you’re interested), the Holy Grail and the supposed bloodline of Jesus Christ. These were bores but they were, as the phrase has it, “priced in”.

This occurrence of abrupt cognitive dissonance, if I can call it that, of finding yourself unexpectedly engaging with an opinion which is well off the beaten track, often passionately and pugnaciously held, and which sometimes you know to be wholly false or inaccurate, is jarring. It made me wonder how it must look from inside. What is it like if you subscribe to a prima facie mad conspiracy theory? Of course, you will not think it is mad: it is one of the major elements of transformation in recent years that we are no longer dealing with sheepishly offered ideas or beliefs people cannot quite shake. Often these controversial notions are central to people’s political identities and sense of self.

So I’m going to attempt a thought experiment. As honestly and sincerely as I can, I’m going to look at a couple of theories which I think are absolute hogwash but which I concede some people take as truth, and I will try to imagine how they might affect not just how one looks at the subject of the conspiracy, but how it would affect one’s view of the world as a whole. I cannot promise complete impartiality and lack of bias—it’s a while now since I gave up being a clerk—but let us see if the instincts are still there.

Sir Keir Starmer is a Mossad asset

This sounds like the plot of a novel which was mildly plausible in the 1980s but lost its lustre of credibility after the Cold War ended. But it is certainly an idea to which people are attached. I cited a few tweets above about Starmer’s supposed pro-Israel sympathies above, but many make explicit the accusation that he works for ha-Mosád le-Modiʿín u-le-Tafkidím Meyuḥadím, Israel’s national intelligence service.

STARMER IS OWNED/BLACKMAILED BY ISRAEL/MOSSAD LOBBY (Elizabeth Farrell)

I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Excellence President Herzog, Aman, Shin Bet and Mossad according to law. So help me Jahweh. Keir_Starmer, MP for Tel Aviv South #TelAvivKeith (Dame Alun Roberts)

I wouldn’t be surprised georgegalloway if Keir Starmer was being funded by Israel (Mossad that is) back in 2015, just to get him where he is now. (G.A. Howkins)

Labour not unlike war, what are they good for? Starmer, the right wing sir bought and paid for by Mossad dirty money. (Mark cronan)

There are, of course, pieces of evidence adduced to support this allegation. One is Starmer’s hiring of Assaf Kaplan to work in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office in 2021. Asa Winstanley, writing in The Electronic Intifada, from which you may draw any or no conclusions, revealed that Kaplan had spent nearly five years in Israeli military intelligence’s Unit 8200, responsible for cyberwarfare. The LinkedIn profile Winstanley cites is no longer so forthcoming, but he claims that the unit engages in “spying, hacking and encryption. It carries out blackmail, mass surveillance and systematic discrimination against Palestinians.”

In fact that rather downplays the organisation. John Reed profiled Unit 8200 for The Financial Times in 2015, calling it “the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency and the largest single military unit in the Israel Defence Forces”. A website called Project Nemesis assembled a biography of Kaplan, though some of its conclusions are speculative, for example that his “position implies that part of his job involves examining online conversations regarding the Labor Party” and that some have “argued that Kaplan’s past activities place him in an ideal position to spy and abuse UK citizens on behalf of the Zionist lobby or Israeli intelligence”. It also noted that he “appears to be in contact with several other known UK-based Zionist agitators and lobbyists according to his social media activities”. Two of these “agitators and lobbyists” turn out to be Michael Rubin, director of Labour Friends of Israel, who:

published a fabricated report alleging ‘anti-semitism’ against then-Labour Party chief Jeremy Corbyn, which proved very influential in later attacks against Corbyn and his party,

and Liron Vellerman of the Jewish Labour Movement, “another part of the Zionist lobby in Britain which played a role in the anti-Corbyn public defamation campaign”.

If you begin with the assumption that there was a Zionist-led conspiracy to discredit Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party because of his stance on the Palestinians, then you will be able to join enough dots to make a sinister picture. Not everyone, I would suggest, accepts that premise. Kaplan does describe himself as a “Unit 8200 veteran”, and there has certainly been controversy over the organisation’s role. However, it is worth pointing out that it is largely staffed by IDF conscripts aged between 18 and 21 with an aptitude for computer skills and an ability to learn quickly. There are reckoned to be at least 15,000 people who have passed through Unit 8200, which places Kaplan in a less exclusive group than one might imagine. It certainly is not conclusive proof that Starmer works for Mossad.

One social media user took as confirmation of Starmer’s status as “a Mossad asset” his appointment in January 2024 of former Labour MP Luciana Berger to develop a mental health strategy to help lower suicide rates. One might also note that Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh South, was labelled a “Mossad agent” when he stood for deputy leader of the Labour Party in 2020, on the basis that he had been backed by the Jewish Labour Movement and pledged to address the “stain of anti-Semitism”.

Starmer’s marriage to a Jewish woman is also prayed in aid. Victoria Starmer was a lawyer when she and Starmer met but now works in NHS occupational health. Their children are being raised “to know the faith of her family”, though Starmer himself does not believe in God. They make a point of having dinner on Frtiday night and Lady Starmer’s father will sometimes offer prayers, but the impression is not of anything like a strictly religious household. However, again, if you proceed from the belief that being Jewish makes you automatically parti pris and liable to favour Israel, then you can add some more weight to your chosen side of the scales.

An analogy is often drawn, however implausible on one level, with newspaper tycoon and all-round monster Robert Maxwell. Born to a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewsih family in Ruthenia in 1923, the man who became Ian Robert Maxwell had links both to the Secret Intelligence Service and the KGB, and was widely believed to have a relationship of a close nature with Mossad. Shortly before his mysterious death, Maxwell was accused of involvement in Israel’s kidnapping of nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, accusations eventually repeated under parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons in 1991 by George Galloway and Rupert Allason. Maxwell always denied that he was a Mossad agent, calling the idea “ludicrous, a total invention”. A book entitled Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul was published in 2002, but, again, much depends on supposition and tenuous links.

It is true that Maxwell was given virtually a state funeral in Israel when he died, which was attended by the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, the president, Chaim Herzog, and at least six serving or former heads of Israeli intelligence agencies. Shamir said in his eulogy “He has done more for Israel than can today be told”. It may well be that Maxwell had sometimes assisted the state of Israel when he could. Again, that stops a long way short of him being regarded as a Mossad agent.

The case against Sir Keir Starmer being a Mossad asset rather than a mainstream politicians with a mild sympathy towards Israel is paper-thin. It is characteristic of the paranoia and obsession with conspiracies which marks antisemitism. I don’t think for a second it is true. But what if it were? Let us suppose that Starmer’s accusers were right and had seen through a disguise which had presumably been devised with considerable care. When had Starmer first come under Israel’s influence? Some have suggested that he was approached through his wife, whom he married in 2007, before he became director of public prosecutions.

If he was already acting for Mossad when he took over the Crown Prosecution Service, it would be significant. The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 changed the law so that a warrant for arrest of anyone suspected of war crimes would require the consent of the DPP. Many suggested that this change was made after pressure from Israel, and certainly senior Israeli ministers and officials had prior to that been deterred from travelling to the UK because of the possibility of a private arrest warrant being issued.

The measure was tested that same year. When Tzipi Livni, former foreign minister and at that point leader of the opposition in Israel, visited the UK, Daniel Machover of solicitors Hickman and Rose applied for a warrant for her arrest in behalf of an unnamed Palestinian police officer whose brother, also a police officer, was killed in Gaza in 2008, during Israeli military action sanctioned by the cabinet of which Livni had been a member. Starmer received and considered the application, as required by the new legislation, but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office served the Crown Prosecution Service with a certificate which declared it had “consented to the visit to the UK of Ms Livni as a special mission”, granting her immunity which, according to the CPS, could not be challenged.

Novara Media has gone further. In 2021, Oliver Eagleton detailed the way in which Starmer became DPP in order to “set about remaking the CPS as a tool of Anglo-American foreign policy”. He expanded its International Division, deploying staff “to advise foreign judicial institutions on matters of interest to the UK government, including terrorism, drug smuggling and irregular migration”, and worked with the intelligence services to determine where CPS lawyers should be sent. This meant that Starmer:

increased the judicial capacities of uniquely repressive governments: advising states in West Africa and the Caribbean on prosecuting the war on drugs, and giving ‘counterterrorism’ support to blood-stained client regimes in the Middle East.

It has been alleged several times that Mossad assistance and influence saw him selected for the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras in December 2014; he was chosen ahead of lawyer Raj Chada, council leader Sarah Hayward, doctor Patrick French and West Hampstead councillor Angela Pobe. He was elected in May 2015 with the biggest Labour majority in the constituency since 1997. In September, after only four months as a backbencher, he was made shadow immigration minister. Although he resigned along with 21 members of the shadow cabinet in June 2016, he was appointed shadow Brexit secretary when Jeremy Corbyn reshuffled him team in September, and it was from this position that he sought and was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020.

Since assuming the leadership, Starmer has moved a considerable distance from Corbyn’s advocacy of the Palestinian cause. He has opposed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to limit relations with Israel, rejected the description of Israel as an “apartheid state” and given Israel strong support since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, including initially arguing that it had the right to cut off power and water supplies to Gaza. He has refused to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and in January 2024 he set aside the Labour Party’s pledge unilaterally to recognise a Palestinian state, insisting instead that it must come from an international peace process.

This would seem like a wide-ranging conspiracy of foreign influence if one believed Starmer was indeed under the control of Mossad. It would, in fact, represent the wholesale capture of the Labour Party by the state of Israel and its manipulation for Israeli interests. It might make one think that Israel, although a small and diplomatically isolated country, was able to punch well above its weight internationally through subterfuge and coercion, and would suggest a chilling and ruthless degree of foresight and preparation. One might regard it as a betrayal of Labour’s Muslim voters in the UK—before the Gaza crisis, one survey suggested 71 per cent of Muslims supported Labour—and a cynical acceptance of destabilisation in the Middle East.

Most of all, it would suggest that there were powerful, unaccountable forces directing events at the highest level of British politics: these forces would be loyal to a foreign power, and would perpetuate the suborning of Britains’s 270,000 Jews, many of whom would be exploiting positions of influence to advance their and Israel’s interests at the cost of the United Kingdom’s.

It would, in fact, feel like a conspiracy theory. Well done, you win a prize.

The 15-minute city

This has to stand as one of the most unlikely conspiracy theories, given its wholesome and benign roots. It stems simply from the observation that, before the invention of the automobile and its insatiable thirst for good-quality metalled roads, the focus of such urban planning as existed was the close proximity of those services and amenities required on a frequent and regular basis. Essentially, if most people had no other means of transport than walking, then whatever they needed had to be within a walkable distance. It was posited that this stricture had the effect of producing pleasantly manageable and compact neighbourhoods.

In the 1960s, because this was what the 1960s did, a natural coincidence was reversed-engineered into an abstract principle. Author and activist Jane Jacobs published a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) which argued that “rationalist” urban planners of previous decades had got the whole business wrong. Opening “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding”, she declared that modern city planners like Robert Moses and Le Corbusier had adopted a simplistic approach which had smothered the complexity and diversity of how people lived and how communities functioned. The key to successful planning for those who had to live in the outcomes, rather than those who merely sketched out designs on paper, was dense mixed-use development and walkable streets, which preserved a sense of connection and community.

The case in point of this disjunction between planners and livers, for want of a better pair of terms, was Boston’s North End. She visited the area in 1959, and found it “intimate, safe and healthy”, as well as “alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking”. The secret, she believed, that residents had a sense of ownership of the pavements and pedestrian areas, and therefore a feeling of responsibility for the safety and good order of the neighbourhood. But, according to simple metrics like population density and the age of buildings, the North End was in desperate need of modernisation.

This is an old, low-rent area merging into the heavy industry of the waterfront, and it is officially considered Boston’s worst slum and civic shame. It embodies attributes which all enlightened people know are evil because so many wise men have said they are evil.

When someone described the North End to her as a slum, she responded “You should have more slums like this!” In her view, it proved that “orthodox urbanism”, the set of principles to which city planners adhered, was an “elaborately learned superstition”.

For anyone in Britain who has looked at what the 1960s did to cities like Glasgow, Newcastle or Birmingham, this is immediately resonant. Great, vaulted flyovers and isolated tower blocks were the vanguard of modernism but now, 50 or 60 years later, we see the terrible price those cities paid. So it is easy to get on board with Jacobs.

Fast-forward to 2015. Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist Party politician, had been elected mayor of Paris the previous year, the first woman to hold the position since its creation in 1789. At that year’s COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in her city, she came across the concept of Ville du quart d’heure, the “15-minute city”, proposed by Carlos Moreno, a French-Colombian academic then working as scientific adviser to Guy Lacroix, president of Cofely Ineo, an electrical engineering and information and communication systems company. Hidalgo grasped the popular appeal of the idea and made it the centrepiece of her re-election campaign in 2020.

She benefited from impeccable if otherwise-deadly timing. She unveiled the policy in February, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was gathering its strength, and the first round of the election was in March, immediately after which President Macron announced a nationwide lockdown. The decisive vote, however, did not take place until June. Voters were therefore strictly limited in their movements for three months, during which time they became much more familiar than ever before with their immediate neighbourhoods, and the appeal of localities which were well served with amenities as well as easy and pleasant to walk or cycle around was obvious. Hidalgo won 48.5 per cent of the vote, while her closest challenger, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former protégée and justice minister Rachida Dati, only winning 36.1 per cent.

If the pandemic has been one driver of the 15-minute city, another has been climate change. The concept offers the possibility of reduced traffic, pollution and fuel usage, and a greener urban environment. As Moreno remarked, “People have recovered a desire to live more calmly, more socially, and with greater control over their time”. Its influence has been seen across the globe: the state government of Victoria published Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, which included a section on “20-minute neighbourhoods”; Kirkland, in Washington State, has developed a 10 Minute Neighborhood Analysis tool for its Comprehensive Plan; and in the Netherlands, Utrecht, where everyone can reach vital amenities in 15 minutes by bicycle and 94 per cent can do so in 10 minutes, further improvements have been written into the Spatial Strategy 2040.

Last year, however, something strange began to happen. Existing conspiracy theorists, including climate change sceptics or deniers and followers of the QAnon movement started to portray the 15-minute city not as an opportunity but an imposition, paving the way for “climate lockdowns” which would impose intrusive surveillance and restrict people’s freedom of movement in the name of reducing vehicle use and emissions. Moreno, regarded as the godfather of the 15-minute city, received death threats of astonishing violence and savagery, promising the murder of his family and vowing that he “be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller”. As he reflected ruefully, “I wasn’t a researcher anymore, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler. I have become, in one week, Public Enemy No. 1.”

There is a valid question over how completely the concept, devised in Europe, will translate to the larger areas of the United States, and Harvard economist Professor Edward Glaeser has argued that the idea may subdivide cities without connecting the component parts, and might therefore exacerbate inequalities. But the transformational step was the conflation in Britain of the 15-minute city with low-traffic neighbourhoods. While LTNs are ostensibly designed to reduce vehicle usage and therefore emissions, opponents have suggested they merely displace traffic, make some areas inaccessible and bring with them a heavy-handed monitoring infrastructure of cameras. The controversy was stoked during the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July 2023: the impendiung extension of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to Hillingdon in the constituency was deeply popular. The Labour candidate, Danny Beales, having previously championed the scheme, argued instead that the time was not right, but it was not enough to deny Conservative contender Steve Tuckwell, who called ULEZ “highway robbery”. It may have helped that he worked for a vehicle contract leasing company.

The 15-minute city has, like the most successful conspiracy theories, linked up with and fed into others: its elements of control and surveillance have hit a nerve, especially with memories of the Covid-19 lockdown fresh; its top-down imposition touches on the sensitivities of those already concerned by the anti-democratic impulses of bodies like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization and supposed ambitions to established an unaccountable “world government”; and they seem to fit into the broader fears of a “Great Reset”, a “Liberal World Order” or a “Global Liberal Order”, which arise from Covid-19: The Great Reset, a proposed new blueprint for society by WEF chairman Klaus Schwab and economist Thierry Malleret, founder of the Monthly Barometer.

The fears are spreading. In February 2023, Nick Fletcher, Conservative MP for Don Valley, called for a debate on “the international socialist concept of so-called 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighbourhoods”. He told the House of Commons:

Ultra low emission zones in their present form do untold economic damage to any city. The second step, after such zones, will take away personal freedoms as well. Sheffield is already on this journey, and I do not want Doncaster, which also has a Labour-run socialist council, to do the same. Low emission zones cost the taxpayer money—simple as. However, 15-minute cities will cost us our personal freedom, and that cannot be right.

At the Conservative Party Conference in October, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, attacked the concept in his set-piece speech. Declaring that the party was “proudly pro-car”, he attacked mayor of London Sadiq Khan over the ULEZ and plans for general road pricing. But he went further.

I am calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities. There’s nothing wrong with making sure people can walk or cycle to the shops or school. That’s traditional town planning. But what is different, what is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.

Clearly, many perceive the idea of the 15-minute city as one element of a much wider programme. This is characterised by an attempt to control, to regulate, to take away freedom, a project imposed by elites which flies the flag of altruism and the common good but in fact represents something much darker and more sinister.

So, as with Sir Keir Starmer’s potential Mossad affiliation, what if they’re right? Let’s start with the World Economic Forum, which for many sceptics is the fons et origo of this impulse. Klaus Schwab, German-born but of Swiss descent, was an engineer and economist of enormous academic eminence: he had a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg and was a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While he was at Harvard, Schwab had forged a close relationship with Dr Henry Kissinger, director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program and associate director of the Center for International Affairs, and in 1969 Kissinger had been appointed national security advisor by incoming Republican President Ricard Nixon.

In January 1971, Schwab founded the European Management Forum at Davos, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to promoting stakeholder responsibility, “the concept that companies, in addition to generating economic prosperity, have a responsibility towards society and nature”. He set out the theory in Moderne Unternehmensführung im Maschinenbau (“Modern Corporate Management in Mechanical Engineering”). In February 1971, 450 executives met for the first European Management Symposium at Davos, and the annual event grew rapidly. In 1972, it was first addressed by a head of government, Pierre Werner, prime minister of Luxembourg, and in 1987 it was renamed the World Economic Forum. In 2015, the WEF was designated a non-governmental organisation with “other international body” status by the federal government in Switzerland.

In 2016, the WEF established the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. Described jargonistically as a “future-oriented global platform for multistakeholder dialogue and cooperation”, it now has 16 global centres pursuing more than 60 initiatives; Schwab published a book of the same name. The WEF runs a forum of Young Global Leaders, and its annual meeting at Davos attracts around 3,000 delegates every January. It has become one of the weightiest assemblies of political, economic, financial and business leaders in the world.

Davos has become a victim of its own success, however. By the 2010s, there was really no-one too big to attend: Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was present in 2013; Leonardo DiCaprio was presented with an award in 2016; President Xi Jinping of China attended in 2017; Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, gave a keynote address in 2018, the same year as President Doanld Trump attended; President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro spoke in 2019, as did Greta Thunberg. This gave the organisation huge influence and reach, and made it an unmissable opportunity for networking, but it brought reputational challenges.

The first problem of perception is the one which attaches to any blue-riband event which seeks to address poverty, sustainability and other ethical and humane issues: can a group of middle-aged men in a luxury skiing resort in Switzerland be credible as champions of the poor and disadvantaged? Allied to that perceived hypocrisy was a sense of remoteness and unaccountability, that decisions are being made in private, behind closed doors, and instructions then handed down de haut en bas to the people. In 2016, the European Parliament’s Think Tank produced a report entitled The World Economic Forum: Influential and controversial, which noted that the WEF’s critics regarded it as “nothing more than an opaque venue for political and business leaders to take decisions without having to account to their electorate or shareholders”.

There are valid questions to ask about the justification of the WEF’s vast influence. Its finances are sometimes opaque, and there is little or no transparency or accountability in how decisions are made, invitations issued and so on. The WEF has made itself close and indispensable to organisations like the United Nations: in 2016, the Transnational Institute, a Dutch think tank, warned that “this unaccountable invitation-only gathering is increasingly where global decisions are being taken and moreover is becoming the default form of global governance”, and concluded that the process was “nothing less than a silent global coup d’etat”.

In 2019, more than 400 civil society organisations and 40 international networks wrote an open letter to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to cancel the United Nations—World Economic Forum strategic partnership agreement because they believed it represented the “corporatisation” of the United Nation, would “provide transnational corporations preferential and deferential access” to the organisation and would generally rob the UN of legitimacy.

The WEF responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by launching the Great Reset Initiative. This intended to make fundamental changes to capitalism and “build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems”, and identified three main components: directing the market towards fairer outcomes; ensuring that investment drove objectives like equality and sustainability; and addressing health and social challenges through the progress of the much-vaunted Fourth Industrial Revolution. Clearly the pandemic put the international economic and financial system under tremendous strain, and some of these targets and priorities are worthy enough. But the Great Reset carries its ambition in its grand name. If we are reshaping our world so drastically, we are entitled to ask Klaus Schwab (let alone the then-Prince of Wales), who asked you? Who decided these were the most pressing priorities? Who decided on the now-contentious economic, social and governance (ESG) metrics?

I don’t tend to quote Tony Benn—whom I prefer to think of as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, because it seems more authentic—and this is perhaps a hackneyed quotation, but it has some relevance here. He used to argue that anyone in a position of power should be asked five questions, which first expressed in a lecture in 1993:

What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?

In the case of the WEF, they are not easy to answer satisfactorily. An NGO founded by a Swiss-German engineer half a century ago, still under his leadership, which self-potentiates through its own membership but has no real structures of representation or accountability, has made absolutely foundational pronouncements on the future of human society, or at least the way it allows itself to continue and support itself. It is not impossible to trace dotted lines from the grand prescriptions of the Great Reset to restrictions on individual freedom for the greater good.

One has to take this argument in steps, each of which is of course contingent. If one accepts that the WEF, and therefore Klaus Schwab, have disproportionate and unaccountable influence over global public policy, it is fair to suspect that this will not always be wielded solely for the greatest good of the largest number, but will sometimes fall prey to the vested interests of those who wield it: the financial establishment, large corporations, traditionally recognised organisations of civil society and political, social and cultural elites. Moreover, because any expression of power is liable to be expansionary, this influence will not spontaneously confine itself to strictly economic and financial matters, but will try to effect change, however altruistically intended, in more and more spheres and, given the way in which technology is developing, on a more and more micro level.

If you were minded to accept this chain of logic, it would give you, I think, a gloomy outlook on the world: you would feel ignored, patronised, disenfranchised and fundamentally robbed of agency over your future, the future of your family and the future of your community and country. Gloominess would be likely to become sullenness, and, quite quickly, that would become anger and resentment. That is a dangerous emotional journey and one which would lead many to seize any opportunity which presented itself to register a protest, to rebel against authority, to kick against the pricks. It is the sort of mentality which would easily find an outlet in voting for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, because that is a disruptive act which demands change; in voting for Donald Trump to be president of the United States, because he is a disruptive figure who rejects and disdains traditional political authority as well as social and cultural norms; and in supporting a British government led by Boris Johnson, a figure who refuses to respect or take seriously mainstream political niceties and conventions, and who offers an essentially light-hearted and mischievous approach to the weighty business of public affairs.

It would also make you more likely, I suggest, to accept political views or platforms on all the fringes, from the unreconstructed, heavily Marx-influenced socialism of Jeremy Corbyn to the radical, ethno-nationalist populism of Éric Zemmour and the libertarian, almost anarchist minarchism of Javier Milei. You might well be drawn to these positions partly because ideologically or materially they struck a chord with you, but also out of exasperation and frustration that your views, expressed in more cautious terms, had simply been ignored. And that, of course, is exactly what we have seen happen.

Let me be clear. I don’t think that 15-minute cities are a sinister attempt to control people’s lives in minutely detailed ways. On the contrary, I think the concept which Carlos Moreno distilled at COP21 springs from a generous and humane impulse for people to live in pleasant, welcoming surroundings which are constructed on a scale we find manageable. I don’t think they are a microcosm of a larger sinister and co-ordinated attempt by vested economic interests to impose themselves on the population, or that the WEF is a front for a kind of single world government, or that Klaus Schwab is a baleful and malign mastermind. If nothing else, more than a decade working in the public sector, seeing politicians, bankers, business leaders and civil society operating at close hand gives me very good reason to think that institutions generally lack the competence and capacity to execute that kind of overarching plan (or conspiracy, if you will). I think those who do hold those views are steeped in paranoia, and it is a paranoia which reinforces itself, which is forever doubling down and becoming more extreme.

On the other hand, I can see very easily the single steps which make up the 1,000-mile journey of that conspiratorial world view. I can see the relentless logic which drags people who are not fundamentally unhinged or disordered to accept, in bite-sized chunks, a way of understanding public affairs which seems from a standing start to eb ludicrous and overblown. To put it simply, I don’t think it’s true, but I see how one could get there, and how it would be a matter of evolution which at every stage was plausible and reasonable. That is exactly why I can see that it is so dangerous.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding…

Conspiracy theorists are ripe targets for mockery. They are often bound to their views with impenetrable certainty, frequently aggressive against attempts to persuade them of alternatives or debunk their beliefs, and they can very easily be caught in a vicious circle. Many are out-and-out cranks, ill-intentioned actors motivated by prejudice and hatred, but many are not. Some find themselves caught in a spiral from which logic cannot break them free, and a huge proportion of them are essentially frustrated, disheartened and frankly scared by the world around them.

A select few may indeed have stumbled on truths which were designed to stay hidden. I hope I am an informed and thoughtful observer of the world: certainly I seem to spend enough time reading about politics, history and society. I think this, added to the experience of being in my mid-40s, makes me reasonably shrewd and realistic. But it is quite possible that there are so-called conspiracy theories which I dismiss and which may, in the fulness of time, turn out to be much closer to reality than I had ever imagined. If and when that happens, I hope I will be mature and generous enough to acknowledge any errors on my part and adjust my view of the world accordingly.

That being said, I think most conspiracy theories are just that, conspiracy theories, which for reasons I’ve explored provide a misleading perspective on what is actually happening in the world. That does not mean that I don’t accept how widespread they have become, how broad in scope and how passionately some people believe them to be true. I think all of us who think seriously about public life need to accept their extent, and therefore their influence. It’s important to try to grasp why people adhere to them, and try to imagine, as I have tried to here, not just why they take hold but the effects they have on people’s beliefs, actions and behaviour.

I have to confess that I am not optimistic. I think the conditions in Western society, at any rate, hold out no promise of a sudden burst of stringent rationalism, of brutally sceptical examination of ideas and suppositions in a way which makes us less inclined to accept them than we are currently. It is not just that we find comfort and reassurance—perhaps I should say reinforcement—in them; we have accepted political leaders who see their power and understand with increasing sophistication how to weaponise them. Conspiracy theories have become the junk food of contemporary society: quick, easy, convenient and gratifying. For those of us, then, who at least try to think healthily, there is a long road ahead.