On 17 August 2017, a van driven by a young Moroccan immigrant killed 13 people in Barcelona. Quickly the Islamic State (IS) took responsibility, but the news didn’t reach Wales in time – or at least that’s what you thought. Because there, the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s leader Leanne Wood grabbed her Twitter (now X) account to commit another atrocity, asking of the attack: “Is this more far-right terrorism?”

But Leanne knew exactly what she was doing: there’d been too much talk about too many IS attacks in the United Kingdom and Europe in the past year, and in there, little demand – on the basis of perilously limited supply – for the threat of the white “far right”. The public needed to be reminded that this wasn’t, despite appearances, a one-way street.

The condemnation was ruthless. “Dozy cow” was one of the kinder reflections of Leanne’s mischief. She then got cross that everyone else was cross and stormed off until 2019, when she surfaced to criticise the referee’s performance in the Rugby World Cup semi-final between Wales and South Africa, demanding (after the match) that play should extend for another ten minutes a side.

There were traces of Leanne’s monkey business in Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Geordin Hill-Lewis’s attack on the Freedom Front Plus’s Pieter Groenewald last week, something that should qualify as one of the most stupid things a DA leader has done in recent years. Poor Gogo Zille, campaigning her backside off in Johannesburg, would have been forgiven for falling to her knees and bursting into tears. All that swimming in shit and being dismissed by men drinking quarts in the morning – for what?

Sadly: for the return to the DA management of Ryan Coetzee, the once reputable DA strategist, now marginal upward failure with a fondness for posting pictures of all the expensive wine he drinks on social media. Coetzee’s fingerprints are all over this unforced error.

Lib Dems

Coetzee cannot be held entirely responsible for the dashed fortunes of the UK’s Liberal Democrats in the 2010s as the party did much of the damage themselves. Rarely do smaller parties exit coalitions stronger than when they entered; this was the case for the UK’s 2015 general election, where, with Coetzee leading the campaign, the Lib Dems were defenestrated from their arrangement with the Conservatives, spending their final moments in Downing Street eating Walker’s crisps from packets and drinking tins of lager.

In the summer of 2015, after Coetzee had left the Lib Dems, he joined the progressive Britain Stronger in Europe (Remain) campaign as director of strategy. But “joined” is misleading: he was recruited by Peter Mandelson. Indeed, that Peter Mandelson.

But again, it would be unfair to blame the campaign’s failure on Coetzee. Their opposition were a slippery bunch, whose behaviour mostly distracted the compelling economic reasons for quitting the European Union – where shysters like Boris Johnson played fast and loose with unhinged claims unlikely to materialise.

Nevertheless, Coetzee’s exposure to progressive quarters of UK establishment politics over the past decade makes him dangerous. Hill-Lewis hasn’t exactly kept his admiration of New Labour profiles quiet, but parachuting Coetzee and his experiences back into the delicate Government of National Unity architecture comes with the risk of the DA going the way of 2015’s Lib Dems – or worse.

So the wisdom of attacking Pieter Groenewald, a man who commands the kind of assurance absent for decades from the Correctional Services portfolio, must therefore be scrutinised in the context of how UK parties perpetuate their interests and pursue their opponents in the modern era.

Even if the date the decline in UK politics accelerated is not clear, it's safe to assume Coetzee was adjacent to its turbulence during the years he worked for the Lib Dems and Remain. This was an era where ideas, mostly without foundation and previously located only in dormant fringes of academia, suddenly found themselves mainstreamed. They were angry, assertive – and increasingly seen as attractive by the lanyard management class. All involved the theme of “me”.

Getting Stuck In

Every single major political party got stuck in. Learning nothing from the Climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia, the Conservatives got all riled up for “climate justice”, the concept of the watermelon lost on them. It was gender that did it for Labour, and then, having positioned themselves as the reasonable political alternative for decades, the Lib Dems decided: we like both.

How did that one work out for Coetzee’s old employers? It's true they were beneficiaries of 2024’s strategic voting in disgust of the Conservatives, but their radical departure from sensibility was irreversible, characterised by leader Ed Davey’s emphatic affirmation when asked whether a woman can have a penis on radio in 2023 (“clearly”). In 2025, the Lib Dem CEO was forced to issue warnings against his own party activists for harassing gender critical profiles.

When the sneering ponce Edward Luce, the Financial Times’s Washington editor, attacked The Common Sense and called me a dog earlier in the year, Coetzee intervened, but not to stick up for his countryman, rather, to moan that Luce was judging white South Africans on me. Luxury beliefs, if you didn’t already know, are a fast bond for elites.

Hill-Lewis’s best defence relies on the theory that nobody is immune to crime – making every dimension of it, including correctional services, fair game. But that implies Groenewald is doing a bad job – which he most certainly isn’t – or failed to convince the public he’s capable, when the truth is that he’s fashioned a rare and enviable soft power, catching the eye of young black musicians (in the song Nangu Mlungu).

Hounding people who are natural allies (on the basis all opposition coalition partners subscribe to elementary meritocracy) is very progressive English. What has this stratagem accomplished in the land of its inception? Just hours prior to Hill-Lewis’s attack on Groenewald, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair – the man most claim as being responsible for the UK’s degenerative politics – composed a 5 000-word stinging rebuttal on a crisis he helped conceive. It would be wise for the current/future leadership of the DA to remember they don’t live in the UK, and immediately terminate the importation of failed, buffoonish, and infantile ploys aimed, if nothing else, at making themselves feel good.