Victor or Banished?

I had no useful observations to offer about the Hungarian election result that weren’t better made by joyful Hungarians, although I was disappointed that nobody in the lead-up went with the headline I’ve used here. But one event in its aftermath had a curious British connection worth recording. That was a talk by failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin in Budapest the day after Viktor Orbán’s defeat, which Jon Worth reported from live on Bluesky. Among other oddities, this MCC-hosted talk was held in one of a chain of cafés in Budapest named after the late conservative British philosopher, hunting enthusiast and Big Tobacco shill Roger Scruton. It’s as if the UK had a string of private schools named after an intellectual Hungarian. Goodwin’s repertoire of parochial UK complaints must have gone over a treat with the Budapest crowd—all eighteen of them, including Worth. Goodwin observed that Boris Johnson was “supposedly a conservative”, six years after having written that Johnson had…