This deep (via the Daily Telegraph):
Conservative Party interns have been asked to complete “privilege walks” to highlight the career advantages of the white middle class.
The walk, also known as a diversity test, quizzes employees on their race, gender, sexuality and disability, to help staff identify whether they are more fortunate than their colleagues.
The exercise, which has been known to take place outside the Margaret Thatcher boardroom at the Conservative Campaign headquarters in London, is run as part of a workshop led by charity the Patchwork Foundation.
Participants who took part in the exercise in 2021 and 2022 said they were asked to line up before a series of questions and statements were read out.
If a participant answered “yes” to a question, they had to take a step forward. The person who travelled the furthest during the exercise was deemed the “most privileged”.
On the plus side:
Interns were also taught table manners, including how to position a knife and fork when a meal is finished, alongside basic political trivia.
Party officials have attempted to head off criticism with a sad attempt at an excuse:
“These meetings are run solely by the Patchwork Foundation and are not influenced by CCHQ.”
But:
A spokesman for the charity said: “As part of the Patchwork Foundation’s delivery of CCHQ’s internship programme, the organisation has delivered skills training relevant to the interns’ work placements.
“We continue to iterate our offer based on feedback and consultation with participants and the CCHQ team to ensure sessions are in line with workplace best practices and tailored to the young people taking part in any given year.”
In other words, it’s highly unlikely that those Tory officials did not know what was going on.
Oh, yes:
The Telegraph understands that the interns were paid for the development days and could not refuse to attend.
One of the most important failures of Britain’s Conservative Party (and there are many, many failures to choose from) has been its failure to push back against the leftward drift in Britain’s institutions and culture. There are plenty of reasons for that failure, but they include an inability to grasp the extent of the challenge it faces, laziness, political miscalculation, and cowardice. And maybe there’s something else. Read stories like this, or study, in particular, the leaderships of Cameron, May, and Johnson, and it’s hard not to think that the Tory hierarchy is happy enough to go along with a broadly progressive agenda, so long as it proceeds at not too alarming a pace.
And when Labour wins the next election, well . . .