I, too, like to portray a position that is by default backing for the position of both major parties and most of Fleet Street as “pissing the powerful off”.
Maybe she’s scared the Lib Dems are going to use their vast network of influence to damage her career.
I do actually find it interesting, by the way. Just not in the way she thinks. It’s grist for my theory “everybody likes to think of themselves as an insurgency, nobody likes to think of themselves as establishment”.
So here’s Grace - smashing it on many media platforms, links to the leader’s office, more reach than you and I will ever manage, giving what is now the default position, as I say - and she wants to think of herself as a rebel.
The Brexiteers are the same - it’s more of a thing in populism, Trump and drain the swamp, Owen and Jez, ignoring the power they hold to pretend they are under assault and fighting a guerrilla war.
But it’s not just populists. Blair posited the forces of conservatism limiting his government 2 years after he’d won the heftiest mandate in decades, Gove going on about “the Blob” in education. They all wanted that underdog mantle.
There’s probably a reason outside of rhetoric people do that. Something psychological. But it is - as someone with no real power, and whose influence is minimal - very noticeable when the creatures of power and influence start playing that tune.
Obviously the left have always tended more to this rhetoric than the right - with, tbf, good historical justification - if you are trying to fundamentally change power structures in a country then you’ll have some reason to think of yourselves as underdogs against a system.
But all that right wing stuff about cultural Marxism and the long march through the institutions and the metropolitan liberal elite shows they have imbibed the rebel meme fully now, as well.
I wonder when it became central to the discourse? I don’t think Ted Heath or Harold Macmillan on the right would have clothed themselves in this rhetoric. Is it the overhang of the 60s, perhaps?
(I suspect Callaghan or Healey likewise - Wilson being a paranoid exception)
(I’d be interested in a long read showing the growth of such rhetoric on both sides. Get to it, people)
Having thought about it some more, this is probably cyclical. Suspect in the period 1917-39, the British right used the underdog motif more - red scare et al. Perhaps its prevalence is a symptom of eras where the consensus isn’t settled. So, 45-mid 70s it fades.
Mid 90s to 08, it fades. And so forth.
It being the go-to leitmotif of all sides is one of Gramsci’s morbid symptoms of the interregnum. Once a societally agreed consensus is formed, it settles down into the mood music of the losing side.
