You’ll say this is virtue signalling, but it’s time to start acting on our moral proclamations

If Greta Thunberg had taken a Boeing 747 to New York, she would have been a hypocrite; by taking a sailboat, she was virtue signalling

Teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addresses climate protesters outside the White House in September (Getty)

Here’s a Christmas game to unite the family – a little conversational bread sauce to lubricate the most desiccated dinner table. What is your the word (or phrase) of the 2010s, and why? No pudding for anyone who mentions the B-word.

But there are so many other tempting candidates, so many new states of mind, so many concepts that didn’t seem real or relevant a decade ago. Selfie? Single-use? Sadfishing? Austerity? #MeToo? Cancelled? Fake news? Clickbait? Face-with-tears-of-joy emoji? Lol? Terf?

But if we confine ourselves to politics – and this was the decade when everything was political – I don’t think you could do better than virtue signalling.

There is a toxic alchemy in that phrase. Here are two words – an abstract noun connoting grace and honour, and a gerund more commonly used in evolutionary biology – welded together to describe something that everyone recognises, everyone finds annoying, but which no one had found so acutely annoying until they had a term for it.

A Spectator blogger named James Bartholomew claims credit for introducing the term in 2015. He accused the supermarket chain Whole Foods of virtue signalling for declaring: “We are part of a growing consciousness that is bigger than food.” Corporations are really into virtue signalling and it is really annoying. Virtue signalling is rife on social media and this too is extremely trying.

But Bartholomew also accused the BBC journalist Mishal Husain of virtue signalling for “interrupting [Nigel Farage]… mid-sentence”. I mean, how dare she?

So doing what any BBC journalist does when they interview any politician, or perhaps simply being Mishal Husain (female, Muslim, extremely good at her job) now counts as virtue signalling too? Ah but look at me virtue signalling.

Bartholomew felt that Husain interrupted to signal that she had “the right, approved, liberal media elite opinion”. She was not holding Farage to account on behalf of those listeners who might reasonably be worried that Farage is racist; she was simply “advertising that she was not racist”.

Virtue signalling communicates virtue without requiring you to do anything virtuous. David Cameron’s commitment to foreign aid? Virtue signalling, according to Bartholomew. Any straight man who disapproved of The Sun’s page three? Virtue signaller! Dying in police custody while black? Well, it’s debatable – but raising awareness of that issue would certainly lay you open to the charge.

Everyone virtue signals in their own way – Bartholomew himself has stood as a Brexit Party candidate, virtue signalling to Farage – but the term is mostly used by right-wing commentators. It captures in one handy, dismissive phrase everything that annoys them about progressives, activists, anyone with the temerity to kill their vibe. As MPs moved to counter Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament this autumn, one Telegraph commentator moaned that they had reduced British politics to a “weeping kumbaya of grief-stricken virtue signalling”. When the Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope was criticised by his colleagues for blocking a female genital mutilation bill earlier this year, how did he respond? By accusing them of virtue signalling of course.

Such a handy weapon. Especially when used in conjunction with “hypocrite” – a useful way of cutting down someone who, say, criticises capitalism and yet also uses money; who deplores climate change and yet also breathes.

If Greta Thunberg had taken a Boeing 747 to New York, she would have been a hypocrite; by taking a sailboat, she was virtue signalling.

One of the not-very-amusing ironies about virtue signalling is that the surest way of advancing a career as a commentator in the present climate isn’t by parroting some “right, approved, liberal media elite opinion”. It’s by doing the precise opposite of virtue signalling. I guarantee you, if I decided to devote myself to bringing down the BBC or writing articles about “virtue signalling hypocrites” on the left I could double my salary.

But what is really noxious about the charge of virtue signalling is that it reduces everything to a Darwinian battle of each against each, all against all. It assumes that any expression of solidarity, or concern, or even just despair is made from self-seeking motives.

And it works. It really works.

It wouldn’t stick if it weren’t a real tendency of the left, now amplified in the digital age. Clearly, many voters saw the Labour Party as doing little more than virtue signalling on issues such as tuition fees and income tax. Robert Colvile, understood to be one of the authors of the Conservative manifesto, argued in The Times that the Tories won because they listened to people; Labour preferred to lecture people.

Whether or not you agree with that analysis, it captures a truth. People prefer to be listened to than lectured at. No one likes being guilt-tripped.

It also points to how the argument can be turned around in the coming decade. The best way to neutralise the accusation of virtue signalling is surely by virtue doing. Imagine if all the activist power that Labour had accrued had been spent doing active good works as opposed to simply telling people to vote Labour?

At the risk of being a bit mushy – it is Christmas – I think we need to start to appeal to other people’s virtue as opposed to trumpeting our own.