Last month, a successful British film director predicted that we’re only a few years away from the first television drama series to be created entirely by generative artificial intelligence.

That same week, broadcasters Oprah Winfrey and Piers Morgan spoke out after deepfake versions of their images had been used to endorse an American social media influencer's controversial self-help course.

A few days earlier, the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan had warned that a deepfake audio of him apparently calling for pro-Palestinian marches to take priority over Remembrance Day events had very nearly provoked “serious disorder” on the streets of the nation’s capital.

It wouldn’t be the first time that far-right groups had used the latest technology to promote disinformation designed to prompt violent reprisals.

But this technology is getting ever more convincing and its use more and more commonplace. In this case, even its subject, Mr. Khan himself, had admitted that “it did sound a lot like him”.

There is increasing power in the virtual. And, as that mayor’s own party is starting to realise, there’s increasing influence in virtual power.

Towards the end of last month, the Speaker of the House of Commons stoked Conservative outrage when he broke procedural precedent in order to allow an Opposition amendment to be debated alongside a government amendment to a parliamentary motion tabled by the Scottish Nationalists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

(This is extraordinarily technical and abstruse, but it should usually only be the government’s own amendment which would be given time for debate in response to an opposition motion, rather than an amendment proposed by another opposition party. Try not to think about it too much. It appears the Speaker didn’t.)

It was said by some that the Speaker, who was originally elected as a Labour MP but is meant to be politically neutral, was acting as if Labour were already in power.

It was suggested by others that he was courting the support of the party most likely to be in government at the end of the year, in a preemptive bid to hold onto his job.

There were even allegations that Labour leader Keir Starmer had personally put pressure on him.

Whatever the case, Sir Keir must surely have relished this feeling of virtual power as a foretaste of the real power which most commentators believe will soon be coming his way.

But virtual power isn’t the same as real power any more than an AI-generated politician is the real deal.

The Labour amendment calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza passed – and therefore prevented a damaging spat between members of Sir Keir’s own top team – when the government chose to withdraw from the debate.

But the Scottish Nationalists – who’d proposed the original motion in an attempt to highlight splits in the Labour Party, but whose own motion never went to a vote – were furious, saying that, by allowing the debate to be hijacked by Mr. Starmer, the Speaker had treated them with “complete and utter contempt”.

Amidst calls for his resignation, and as the House of Commons descended into angry chaos, the Speaker himself apologized and said he regretted his decision – a decision thought by some to have capitulated to Sir Keir’s demands.

Related News

News from Nowhere: The abuse of power

It’s official: British Army facing extinction

The following morning, the national newspapers decried the “fury” and “chaos” which had overtaken Westminster’s proceedings. There was a general consensus that the parties had been playing political games while civilians continued to suffer and die in Gaza, and that nobody had come out of this well, least of all the very people the debate was ostensibly intended to support.

After the Speaker had defended his decision on the grounds of safety concerns for MPs at a time of heightened ideological tensions, the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman was moved to declare that “Islamist cranks are in charge of Britain”.

Then, not to be outdone by the notorious ‘Cruella’, former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson immediately added that Islamists had “got control of” London Mayor Sadiq Khan. It appeared he may have taken that deepfake message rather too seriously.

This proved too much even for the Conservatives and, as a result, Mr. Anderson was suspended from his parliamentary party.

That same week, yet another hardline Tory clinging onto the scraps of virtual power, the former Prime Minister Liz Truss, took a further step into the Alt-Right hall of fame when she addressed America’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference – appearing alongside the likes of Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

She announced that true Conservatives needed to find “a bigger bazooka” in order to “challenge the system itself” – and that, if they were to fail to do so, “Western civilization is doomed”.

She borrowed a phrase from Donald Trump when she chose to condemn RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – and what she called CINOs – Conservatives in Name Only.

Yet, despite the fact that she now seems quite psychologically unhinged, the Tory-till-I-die mentality of such conservative ultra-nationalist Trump supporters seems increasingly attractive to those growing numbers of people in Western nations disaffected by mainstream democratic politics.

It’s unclear whether Sir Keir Starmer’s anodyne, compromising and vacillating brand of soft centrism, and his virtual commitments to ephemeral policies, will offer anything near what’s needed to pull those people back from the brink of populist frenzy, and on towards a more progressive path.

But if his multiple embarrassments over recent weeks are anything to go by, it looks like he’ll have an uphill struggle if he really wants to turn that tide.

A week ago, in the immediate wake of Lee Anderson’s suspension from the parliamentary Conservative Party, the Daily Telegraph reported that Tory MPs in the north of England were warning of an electoral backlash from their Brexit-supporting voters, generations left angry, alienated and abandoned by successive Westminster administrations.

The following day, The Guardian reported on messages sent by Conservative parliamentarians on a hardline WhatsApp group which suggested that the British government was “owned by fear of Islamic rule” and described Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as “weak and feeble” and called for him to go.

Mr. Sunak had the day before condemned Mr. Anderson’s remarks as “wrong” and “unacceptable” and had gone on to repeat his belief that the United Kingdom is the world’s most successful multi-ethnic democracy.

He'd first expressed that sentiment last year in response to one of Suella Braverman's higher-profile attacks on multiculturalism.

But it must have disappointed his more moderate allies that, while he seemed happy to censure the unapologetic Mr. Anderson, he wouldn’t go so far as to call his comments Islamophobic, and fell well shy of criticizing the much more influential and inflammatory Ms. Braverman – even when she described the outcry against Anderson’s slurs as mere “hysteria”.

The reticence of the likes of Sunak and Starmer to take swift and strong action to expel the extremists who continue to haunt their own parties’ ranks may yet – like the Republicans’ tolerance of the resistible rise of Donald Trump in the United States – have the most devastating impacts upon Western democracy.

The lies, hatred, and worst instincts of such cruel madmen and madwomen have crept up on us, and now seek to overwhelm us, even while we sleep.