On the rise of 'No Tories'

and the perverted culture of dating apps

Last month I found myself at a dinner party in North London where the never-not-fascinating topic of online dating came up. An imminently divorcing girlfriend, a science journalist in her late thirties, was canvassing the table on whether she ought to put “No Tories” on her app profile.

Inwardly, I groaned. 

“Yes, absolutely. You must!” said several of the guests, including the very single gay architect (late-40s) to my right. He explained he had “NO TORIES” in full caps on all his profiles, then allowed with a wink that the slogan had served him well. 

“How so?” I asked irritably for reasons I could not understand, since I have never voted Conservative in Canada or Britain.

“Um, because it repels Tories?” the architect said.

(Everyone laughed.)

“But aren’t the apps just mostly about sex?”

“Well er,” the architect coughed, “I prefer to call it ‘connection’. But yes.”

(More general laughter.)

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t have a spontaneous hook up with a super hot guy who, let's just say, happened to vote strategically to chuck out Gordon Brown in 2010?”

The architect gave me one of those goggle-eyed ‘calm down darling’ looks that implied I was being overly intense, which probably I was. Then he explained that in truth he had no idea how most of his fly-by-night lovers voted or whether they voted at all, except he was sure it wasn’t Tory because, well, it’s easy to sniff out a Tory – especially in bed.

(The table roared.)

I took the bait and pushed back, wondering aloud if No Tories wasn’t really just a narcissism-of-small-differences-thing? A lame in-joke born of the fact that people on dating apps in London tend to be more liberal, more foreign, less rooted in tribe and class, less small and big “c” conservative and hence more open to exploring their own proclivities and by extension more (I cringed before saying the dreaded word) “woke”?

This did not go down well. In fact it went down so badly, I was then asked – as a kind of point blank challenge – whether I personally would ever actually consider shagging a Tory myself?

I honestly did not know what to say, except the obvious: I wasn’t telling the truth.

(Of course! Of course I’ve shagged a Tory! It’s like wearing a thong or going to a strip club in your twenties, hasn’t everyone? Come on!)

But I wasn’t saying that. Not to this crowd.

So I said nothing, except that it was the strangest question I could remember being asked at a dinner party since moving to this country nearly twenty years ago, when a young man – undoubtedly a Tory – asked me where I went “to school” (meaning before university) and I had no idea what he meant.

At that point, the married guests reached for the single guests’ phones and hopped on the apps. This, by the way, is what married people do for fun at parties now instead of charades. They commandeer the singleton phones and start swiping away furiously for fun. It’s always the same, a study in evolutionary biology: The wives wrinkle their noses and shake their heads while the husbands mutter things like, ‘Oh come on, he’s five foot ten, give him a chance!’ The women, being women, are picky, while the men, being men, tend to cast a wider net.

And sure enough, there it was, everywhere you looked, on one app after another, dozens of unconnected profiles: “No Tories,” said Andrew, 48, a ginger divorced dad accountant from Putney via Kent. “Nooo feckin Tories,” declared Becky, 27, a recently separated hair stylist from Glasgow. No Tories either for the alarmingly young-looking Kirsty, perched on her ruffled bedspread in Reading in just a tank top, trainers and pants. No Tories for the Camberwell goth deep into kink, nor for the heavily tattooed bodybuilder from Wembley, nor for Betsy, the ethical polyamory vegan on the outskirts of Cardiff.

There were no other political aversions. Not a single “No Labour,” “No lefties,” “No feminists” (though surely?). Only Tories, it seems, are openly spurned on the apps. The slogan is, if not quite ubiquitous (in London there’s obviously financial services to account for), it’s certainly right up there with “better in person,” “healthy lifestyle,” “positive vibes only” and – the mother of all casual sex euphemisms – “let’s see where it goes.” 

But why?  Honestly, of all the possible “no’s” a person might put on a dating app profile, which is (let’s face it) an advertisement of one’s sexual/romantic availability offered to the infinite human morass that is the Internet – why has this particular ban, of all bans, taken hold? 

It’s a virtue signal, that’s obvious, but an awfully weak one as choir sermons go. It seems designed to indicate a kind of hardline progressivism, which is confusing since on the apps (especially the more “alternative-lifestyle-friendly” apps where it really proliferates) surely the whole point is that anything goes? I mean, if you’re cool with gender fluidity, recreational stimulants and ethical polyamory, would you really be so repulsed by the idea of casual sex with a bond trader from the Richmond who golfs?

Look I get that singles, especially left leaning women, want to cull the herd in advance, but why not be more specific? Why not, “no tax dodges,” “no date rapists,” “no malignant narcissistic underminers” or upskirters or gropers or idiots who tell women to smile on the street?

Like most sentient people in this country, I’ve spent countless hours in the past few years complaining about one incompetent Conservative government after the next, yet the dating app thing irritates me profusely. It makes me tempted to start my own PornHub channel. Seriously, I’ve got it all worked out: Woke Blonde Canadian MILF Shags Tories.

Gruelling work certainly, but according to the Netflix doc, all the best, most perverted porn is. And just think of the potential scenarios: Woke Blonde Tag Teamed by the European Research Council. Woke Blonde Spanked Hard by the Backbench. Woke Blonde Schooled by Hat Mancock and Priti Patel!

It’s a bottomless money-making orgy of filth.

I began to wonder if my inability to fathom the “No Tories” thing might, in fact, be a function of my North American guilelessness or worse, my age, so I called up a younger, single, male acquaintance. Let’s call him Tom. Tom is English, mid-30s, well-travelled, gainfully employed and like many men of his generation, alarmingly well-versed in the apps. Naturally he works in tech.

Did Tom have thoughts? Hoooh boy, did he ever! You see, before moving to London, Tom lived in Bristol and in Bristol, he explained, the No Tories thing exists at a whole other level and pitch.

“A lot of women, like a lot a lot, maybe one in ten, one in five? Literally shed loads of women put it on there,” he told me. “It’s everywhere you look. And not just No Tories, it’s No TERFs, no SWERFs and no whateveritis as well. Just a lot of ‘No’s.”

“It’s quite off-putting,” he added crisply. “I generally swipe right.’”

Tom, I should say at this juncture, does not identify as a Tory, however it’s safe to assume that, like me, he’s related to a few. And if you are closely related to Tories (even without being one yourself) you will have learned to navigate certain topics of deep political and generational division at the Christmas and Easter lunch table in recent years with delicacy and fatigue. You will also know that Tories aren’t monsters, they’re just people after all – and in some cases they’re your people. Perhaps this is what irritates some of us so profusely about the No Tories thing: If our own mothers had put it on their dating profiles, we simply wouldn’t exist.

 Tom and I agreed that it was – and is – baffling that so many single people, most of them women, would list a strong political preference on platforms devoted to dating and casual sex. But unlike me, Tom (being a man) had developed a theory, and his theory was this: That the No Tories thing isn’t really political, or even particularly virtuous. That in fact it stems from something deeper, something twisted and darkly ironical. A basic carnal urge.

“There’s a weird power thing in the online dating world where you don’t want what you know you shouldn’t want, except the problem is, you sort of do... if that makes sense?"

Oh yes Tom, I said. It certainly does.

“So the No Tories thing is like saying, ‘I don’t want to get shagged by a wanker, so I’m just going to put it out there. Hah!’ Except the implicit subtext is: ‘Hmm maybe I do actually want to get shagged by a wanker..? Like maybe, just maybe, deep down that’s what really turns me on?’”

Anyway, my PornHub channel’s sure to be a hit.