The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Forum, which took place last week, was a global meeting of the right. And the speakers were huge: Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Mike Johnson and most importantly Sophie Winkleman, better known as Big Suze from Peep Show.

Like most conferences, the real action would be happening off stage: in the backrooms of the end-of-days bleakness of the Excel centre in east London. Connections brewed, a global network of the right and far right stitched itself tighter together.

The ambition of Paul Marshall – the billionaire funder of GB News and director of the company behind ARC – is impressive, but the conference felt flat. Big name speakers droned on about familiar topics in familiar ways: Jordan Peterson on personal responsibility, Paul Marshall on the problems with net zero, and Kemi Banenoch on the project of renewing our culture. I didn’t watch Big Suze. I just couldn’t.

All the speeches I watched were full of cherrypicked or obvious claims, when they were not egregiously wrong on points of fact. But more deeply, everything was riven with some generalised allergy to being specific or clear. Here’s Badenoch’s most rousing line: “We will have to decide between the true but hard way that needs tough decisions and bravery or whether we have more slogans and announcements, but no plan.”

Why, outside of reducing immigration, was it so hard to nail down anything specific?

Part of the cause of this vagueness syndrome is that the politics espoused here dances on the edge of acceptability. We want to rejuvenate “our” culture. But what culture is that? This question is central to this shadow zone where the conservative right blends into something fully reactionary. Is our culture white people? Is it “classical liberalism”? Is it Catholicism? Is it “the west”? Or, as we were constantly told, “Judeochristian values”?

I asked the people I encountered at the conference for their favourite Judeochristian value. “Democracy?” One proffered. I must have missed the bit of the Bible about universal suffrage. “Universal love?” Now that I can get behind. Is nationalism the form of universal love, I wondered? Are private military security contractors like Erik Prince, who also spoke at ARC, what Jesus was aiming for?

It was difficult to shake the idea that the people I was meeting were perhaps conservative in their ways, perhaps retrogressive in their views, certainly culpable of letting a lot of awful things be excused by highfalutin language, but not exactly the brutal racists of the antifascist imaginary.

Which is not to say that they don’t exist – they do, but they still, for the most part, lurk in the background.

Since Trump won the election, moves to MAGA-ify Britain have accelerated. The right are trying to consolidate their gains internationally – and build the networks that will allow them to shift to the next phase of their project. Britain seems an obvious next target. Clearly some kind of relatively concerted effort is underway to break down the rotted door of British liberalism.

But for a political and cultural lurch to the right to work, it will need ground troops. It will need to develop a serious cultural project that functions natively in the UK. Perhaps ARC’s unofficial afterparty could be the site of that consolidation. Also it had a free bar, so I went.

For receivers of event updates, the day of the party was harrowing. A lackadaisical approach to security came back to bite the party: around 9am the venue of the event was suddenly changed from nightclub Omeara to “TBD”. This was the result, it seems, from pressure from a group called Fossil Free London, a group whose mission is to make the city inhospitable to fossil fuel interests. And there certainly had been climate change denial at ARC.

The new location was released at 8pm: the Cuckoo Club, near Piccadilly Circus.

And, we were told, bring your QR code ticket. If not, you would be “required to pass a based quiz from Dankula at the door.” Who? Mark Meechan AKA Count Dankula, the Youtuber who gained brief notoriety as a free-speech cause celebre when he was taken to court for training his dog to give a Nazi salute and respond to the phrase “Do you want to gas the Jews?” He was fined £800.

This – to be sure – is not Jordan Peterson’s vibe. It certainly isn’t Kemi Badenoch’s.

Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s Chairman and major donor was at the party however, accompanied by a bodyguard. Although he’s currently funding the largest rightwing party in Britain, he would presumably baulk at association with the more extreme right wingers. But they were at the party too, such as internet troll and disaster tourist “Lord” Miles Routledge, who bought his title online and posts 4chan-style antisemitic statements on social media. (Reform UK did not respond to Novara Media’s request for a comment on Yusuf’s attendance at the party.)

While the party was unofficial, it is clear that the sanctimonious and well funded ARC served as a lure for a big slice of the global far right to party together in London. The wait in the self-styled “pleb queue” dragged considerably. I stood among a large number of men who had apparently come alone, as more clouted types were shuffled in ahead of us. But after a lot of sardonic witticisms exchanged with my fellow plebs, we were in.

The Cuckoo Club is a space that aesthetically slides between an Oxbridge club and Magaluf-style glitz. Prince Harry used to go. Lasers pulse across the ceiling. I got a vodka lemonade on the house and tried to work out what everyone else was doing here.

Among the crowd was Curtis Yarvin, a blogger and founder of the “sovereign computing” company Urbit. In a recent profile interview with The New York Times, he declined to condemn Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer Anders Breivik without also condemning Nelson Mandela. After all, they’re both terrorists, right?

Monarchy? Good, actually, Yarvin has argued. Except this time it should be high-powered CEOs in charge of the world, organised through a collection of city states in a system he calls patchwork.

In the same interview, he argued that slaves were not made better off by being freed after the American Civil War. Part of the terror of the present moment is that his newfound adjacency to power means that these decisively won debates – should we have slavery? – may not stay won forever.

At the party, I joined a gaggle forming around him. It occurred to me as we chatted that Yarvin is not a political theorist in the sense we normally understand. He’s a historical fanfiction writer. His writing is an exercise in transporting himself back into the debates of a bygone era – and trying to prize out something profound-sounding from their worst moments. It’s theory for fantasists.

If there is anything that connects Yarvin and Peterson it is the narcissistic titillation they evidently share in espousing their views, their rhetorical strategies of obfuscation, and their voluminous writing and speaking – flooding the zone with shit. Theoretical indiscipline. In short, hedonism.

“I feel safe saying that here”

Elsewhere, there was talk of a need to return to serfdom. Someone spoke wistfully of the Tsarist ultranationalist group Black Hundreds – infamous for pogroming Jews – and its support for the early Nazi party. Where could we find such a force now?

An earnest young man in a cravat told me about the crisis of leadership on the right. Unfortunately, I was told, we can’t rely on any of the current prominent Royals. But, no matter, it might be possible to find a new leader among one of the hereditary peers who Tony Blair removed in his House of Lords reform. From the nobility, a leader will rise, and we will avert our complete destruction.

How? By removing all the “non-native” people. Does it sound like that might make people hate Britain? Not at all. It would contribute to Britain’s soft power: after all, we’ve anglicised them now and they’d go back to their countries with better values.

Downstairs, in a loud corner where David Starkey was holding court, a friend fell into conversation with a young lawyer. “If you’re not a Catholic, you’re a Freemason and if you’re a Freemason, you’re on the side of the Jews”, he informed my friend. “I feel safe saying that here”.

In New York, a much publicised shift has occurred. Some of the aging youth culture there has shifted from supporting Bernie in 2016 and 2020 to Trumpism. Sovereign House, who were also hosting the ARC afterparty in London, has emerged as one of its key institutions.

It is a cultural scene in a wider sense, not just about politics. What makes the reactionary scene in New York thrum along is the presence of artists in the mix. None were in evidence in London. Instead, I met lawyers, finance people, and the privately wealthy. And, let’s be real: Know-nothing mediocrities. Boorish men. Empty toffs. Vile creeps.

The music was classical, and then indie, with bursts of metal. None of it seemed to please anyone. Edward Dutton, a race scientist and plagiarist whose political project is to make hateful nonsense seem jolly, left early, grumpy. “Too loud”. It was one of the most cogent things said all night.

Phones were out by 11pm. Men dressed in suits and ties circulated rapidly. Some of the few women in attendance confirmed that they were the regular dancers at the Cuckoo Club, paid to be there.

Before I get factchecked, OK, there were some women. One of them introduced herself as [her words] “famous for being rude to t*******s online”. And, apparently, there do exist young female mascots of the new right over here, although what they do beyond posting kitsch pictures of Ye Olde Englande online and calling for a return to monarchy I couldn’t tell.

If these are the shock troops of a plan to make being right wing cool in the UK, they weren’t sending their best. Or maybe they were. Maybe this is it. Maybe the new right is not edgy and cool but in fact exactly as boorish and culturally shallow as it seems. Maybe it’s shit.