How a conservative conference morphed into a crisis of liberalism

One of the few benefits of Britain leaving the European Union, at least for denizens of Brussels, was that Nigel Farage all but disappeared from the city’s parliament, pubs and speaking circuit. The blowhard Brexiteer’s return to the Belgian capital on April 16th will have done little to rekindle his passion for the place. As the former MEP addressed several hundred fellow-travellers of the hard right at a conference, Belgian police swooped into the venue with orders to shut the event down. Outnumbered, the coppers ended up beating a discreet retreat, allowing Mr Farage to deliver a few more quips about gravy-train Eurocrats and fake-news media. After some to and fro, the police opted to seal the conference venue instead, leaving the afternoon’s speakers stuck outside and—worse, for attendees including Charlemagne—caterers unable to deliver food. Not to worry: lunch was replaced by a stern lecture from Suella Braverman, Britain’s former home secretary, about the dastardliness of human-rights lawyers.

The half-hearted police raid at a reactionary gabfest was the culmination of a discomfiting series of events around the “National Conservatism” conference on April 16th-17th. At the ninth such jamboree, organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, an American outfit, the star attraction of this iteration was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s proudly illiberal prime minister. Unsurprisingly, some speakers held views outside the centrist consensus, albeit ones endorsed by plenty of voters. This lèse-libéralisme sent local Belgian authorities on a misguided mission to prove the “cancel culture” decried by conservatives is not just a conspiracy. A policy that aims to exclude hard-right parties from coalition governments, known as the cordon sanitaire, metastasised into an ugly variant whereby merely expressing such ideas is beyond the pale.