A message has been going around the London free-speech group chats for the past week. “This is a link to a secret party I’m doing with the Jordan Peterson gang to close ARC 2025,” it says. The location has yet to be disclosed, but the attached website promises “the new sounds and styles of an unstoppable subculture”, and also “a heated cigar terrace with cask-aged whiskies. Admission is by invitation (followed by approval) only.”
I get invited, and then approved. But first I have to actually get through ARC 2025. This is the second London conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the conservative political organisation headed by, inter alia, Peterson and Paul Marshall, the owner of GB News, UnHerd and the Spectator. Enduring the conference is harder than it sounds. It’s at the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands, and attending the conference feels a lot like waiting for three days at an airport full of the richest people you have ever met, waiting in vain for one exciting idea to take off.
The actual politics feel a bit dated. Mystagogues and demagogues traded lines on free trade and minimal government intervention, personal embrace of a Judeo-Christian God, and the traditional nuclear family as the bedrock of society. Without all the chatter about diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (which we must regulate) and AI technologies (which we must deregulate), you’d be forgiven for thinking you were actually in America, at the 1980 Republican National Convention, ready to bet on retired cowboy actor Ronald Reagan.
In the Guardian, John Crace, who is watching a paid livestream, calls the event “alt-right”. It isn’t really, and this is one of the strangest things about it. Douglas Murray, Peter Thiel and Nigel Farage all make appearances; I keep spotting influencers who are known for their inflammatory views on gender roles and immigration. But real-world provocations and proposals are mostly eschewed, to speak in the abstract is favoured instead. For Peterson, the stock ARC politics are backed up with parables and episodes from the Bible; others talk about the Founding Fathers (America again), and some use music or performance poetry. I consider walking out of a morning session on “responsible citizenship and the social fabric” when a West End performer comes on in a floor-length gown and performs a song about the important role of the father in the absence of a strong boyfriend. “You showed me men can be great,” she sings, as it thankfully comes to an end.
If this is the vanguard, what of the cadres? At ARC, I meet one of the afterparty’s organisers, Matthew Glamorre. The event will be a joint effort between him, Jordan Peterson’s assistant (also named Jordan), and Sovereign House, a New York venue which is a hotspot for the city’s (post-left? New Right?) “Dimes Square” scene.
Glamorre is a long-term fixture of London clubland; he has directed music videos for the Shamen and was once in a band with Leigh Bowery. He has been wandering around the convention centre in a cassock and visor sunglasses. The aim, he tells me, is to connect the different subcultures around the conference – the free-speech advocates, the New Right, and the working class (the latter of which I hadn’t spotted exactly turning out in force). He also wants to give young people a chance to meet in person. They release the venue that evening: it’s Omeara, a trendy Southwark bar. But the next morning it goes back to being “TBD” on the invitation.
Rumours float around the ExCel. Perhaps they couldn’t actually fill the venue and had to find a smaller one; perhaps it was a setup from the start, and the bar always planned to pull out. It turns out to be an activist effort orchestrated by Fossil Free London, a pressure group who are concerned about the presence of fossil fuel corporations at ARC. “BREAKING: We just SHUT DOWN the far right’s afterparty,” they say on Instagram. Not so fast. For a few hours the venue is simply listed as “Shadwell”. Then another email comes in. The party will now take place at the Cuckoo Club, a nightclub in the heart of Mayfair.
“Please make sure you have your ticket… or you will be required to pass a based quiz from Dankula on the door.” Nobody had to find out what a “based quiz” is – we’d all dutifully brought our tickets – but “Dankula” turns out to be Count Dankula, who is Mark Meechan, the YouTuber who shot to fame in 2018 after getting fined for teaching his pug to do a Nazi salute. He became a free-speech martyr in the process, and has since rattled through a post-Farage Ukip, and stood for election for something called the Scottish Libertarian Party. Now people are talking about his promotion from influencer to doorman in hushed, reverent tones. Security lets me skip to the front of the line because I am the only woman. Several people are wearing “MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN” hats.
On the ground floor of the club, they are playing loud, anthemic classical music. This is probably supposed to be patriotic. But it is also usually a crime-prevention strategy: Beethoven, and Bach is sometimes piped into the toilets of certain London branches of McDonald’s in the early hours of the morning, thought to make them less appealing to criminals. Downstairs there is an open bar and an improbable mashup of Madonna’s “Borderline” and Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady”. A few people are standing around while one woman does a fast, flailing dance that looks a bit like a seizure. “You should interview her,” says a friend. An inside source tells me later that the venue is allegedly a low-key strip club, and the last-minute rearrangement meant that several dancers lost out on their Wednesday shift. The consolation prize was that they were allowed to go to the party. Nobody can confirm whether they actually did.
“This is quite demonic,” says an acquaintance when I ask her for a quote. She’s sitting on the plinth where women usually strip. Suspended above her is an enormous model zebra. “There is something spiritually bad going on.” Someone says they have seen Curtis Yarvin, the alt-right blogger who has had a non-negligible influence on vice-president JD Vance. “He’s the only man here wearing a leather jacket,” they advise me, but he proves hard to find in the packed club. The conservative writer Nina Power and hard-right influencer Carl Benjamin are both floating around, although not with each other. There are several editors from another British magazine. I ask if they have come to report on the party, but they all say they are just there for the free drinks.
I try the smoking area outside, but the men there greet me with a discouraging combination of unwanted physical affection and a total unwillingness to speak on record. The consensus is that the conference was a bit lame. Most of the men I speak to position themselves to the right of ARC. “I would love to comment,” says a Reform voter in his late twenties. “Unfortunately, I hate journalists.” He does give me a quote, eventually. “ARC talked about ‘sensible migration’,” he explains. “I want to stop the majority of immigration into this country.”
Another man I speak to attended as part of a grassroots conservative media organisation. For him, the most pressing political concerns are crime and demography. He thinks women are particularly at risk from immigrants coming from outside the Western world. He gestures to a group of young men who are loitering on the street outside as if to prove his point, even though all of them are white. He asks me what I would do with violent rapists. “Life imprisonment?” I try, as a moderate option. He doesn’t seem happy with that. He has been telling me some of this with his hand halfway across my neck, as if he might be about to choke me.
His friend appears; they’ve got an Airbnb for an after-after party. “Where are you going?” they ask, trying to get me to follow them. I say “east” but don’t specify of what (London, Eden), and then I run away. The DJ downstairs is spinning Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”. The free drinks ended at midnight. A rum and coke is now £21. They cycle back through the Madonna-Eminem mashup from earlier. I have missed a DJ set from James O’Keefe, the controversial investigative journalist behind Project Veritas, who has showed up in an FBI jacket.
I go back outside to the smoking area and speak to the only other young woman. She wasn’t at the conference and came here with friends who work in mainstream media. Politics aren’t a huge part of her life, but she does like listening to Louise Perry’s podcast appearances as she falls asleep. Her biggest revelation came when Perry advised female listeners to serve their own interests more effectively by remaining “orthogonal” to both the left and right. I wonder if she has had the same experience with the men at this party. Then I talk to Luca Watson, a young and prominent fixture of British right-wing X. He is chiselled and slightly disconcerting. “There is no left anymore,” he says. “It died in 2019, with Corbyn.” He is sure the “energy” is now on the right instead. But he says he worked out from his experience at ARC that it hasn’t quite gained a “coherent direction” yet.
A man in the crowd says, “I’ve been people-watching all night.” He makes a point of going to political events all over the spectrum; this one’s got “everyone remotely connected with cultural right politics, but never at the same time”. There are people from the “dissident right”, the ranks of Reform, as well as some he identifies as “Spectator-y”. “A lot of Christians stayed around for a long time and ended up dominating the dance floor,” he says. He estimates the male-female ratio as two to one, although it began to even out during the course of the night. Did more women arrive? “It was obvious that a load of the men gave up,” he says.
On my way out, it occurs to me that the split forming on the right in 2025 might be similar to the one that took down parts of the left in the 2010s. Think Clinton against Sanders, or Corbyn against everyone else. The right-of-centre establishment is still an establishment, and a fairly smug one – most of the people on stage during the ARC conference were elected politicians, academics, clergymen, actors, journalists, think-tankers, and successful entrepreneurs. But its Reaganite orientation has left space for an underground group of class-conscious right-wingers, who are more concerned about inner-city crime, immigration and council housing than religiosity and free enterprise. Jordan Peterson didn’t come up in the smoking area. Instead, I heard mention of Drukpa Kunley, an anonymous anti-immigration Twitter account which makes and reposts memes from the perspective of an underpaid millennial. It’s not clear how much these slight young things truly have in common with their supposed leaders.
A friend from the afterparty texts me at around four that morning. “Did you catch Right Said Fred doing a set?” he says. “Loads of ppl didn’t know it was them I think.” I had no idea they were meant to turn up. He attaches a 12-second video. There they are, amid a sea of excited people. They look the same as they do in their 1990s music videos, wearing patterned caftans and rapping into their microphones. I recognise it clearly: the new sounds and styles of an unstoppable subculture.
[See also: Theodore Roosevelt, the Tories’ new philosopher-king]
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