Daragh Quinn is a former CCHQ aide and parliamentary staffer 

Style doesn’t hang well on the political frame.

Consider Theresa May’s leather trousers, the infamous Hague baseball cap, Rishi’s sambas. A little fashion can be a dangerous thing and yet visual presentation plays a core role in how politicians communicate and how activists signal allegiance.

The tartan staffers of the ‘SNP wave’ arrived in Parliament with bright yellow lanyards to make the point that they weren’t like the staid establishment they were here to break up. From 2016 onward you had to squint to see which lanyard was for Labour and which Vote Leave. And as Jenny Riddell-Carpenter didn’t quite say: nobody wearing a Schoffel is voting Labour.

In fact, the red MAGA hat has become the icon which sums up the past ten years of politics.

So, why is political merch often so crap? Is it because the designs themselves are bad or is politics inherently uncool?

That is the thinking behind Conservatives.shop, the independent political merchandise shop I’ve recently launched. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Party, because no party has a monopoly on either good jokes or bad taste.

It forms part of PoliMerch, which covers all the four main parties. Westminster is full of its own language, personalities, rivalries, traditions and extraordinarily niche jokes. The people who follow it closely have a shared set of references that would be completely unintelligible to most of the population.

But there is pleasure in being in on the joke and the phenomenon has been accelerated by the internet.

Ed Miliband’s Milifandom, by doubling down unembarrassedly on its own naffness, rehabilitated him as a cult figure rather than letting him slide from election loss into oblivion.

Theresa May is another example. Once dismissed as the Maybot, her particular combination of stiffness and improbable dance moves gave her a cult following. Others like Emily Thornberry and Penny Mordaunt have become gay icons with their combinations of sass and bouncy hair.

Neither a Theresa May as Frida Kahlo notebook nor a Jacob Rees-Mogg T-shirt would make much sense without that online afterlife.

There is also a cultural imbalance here. There is largely ambivalence toward a Che Guevara T-shirt, a keffiyeh, or even Zack Polanski’s friend’s T-shirt suggesting Farage will be guillotined. The American left-wing controversialist Hasan Piker happily goes around in jackets styled on mass-murderer Mao.

The Conservative, or even gently right wing examples meanwhile are seen as provocative: many an activist reading this will have a story of having abuse shouted unprompted at them for little more than a blue rosette while they were out campaigning.

The left has successfully made its political iconography part of everyday visual culture. The right, with the exception of MAGA, has largely left its own to party conferences and campaign literature.

Of course, not everything needs to be a declaration of political allegiance. In fact, I think the most interesting designs are often those that aren’t.

Our Sir John Hayes tarot card sweatshirt is not really a manifesto in wearable form, it is about design first, followed by meaning. It is a specific reference whose significance is not integral to wearing it.

Some designs, like the Alan Mak ‘gang sign’ hoodie are deliberately absurd. Others contain references that only someone unusually immersed in British politics would recognise: like our Gillian Keegan T-shirt. The aim is to produce things that people might actually want to wear.

The Heart of Lam baseball cap works on much the same principle: recognisable enough as a design in its own right, with a second meaning for anyone who follows the Conservative Party closely enough.

I don’t imagine political merchandise is about to displace vintage football shirts. Nor should anyone expect to walk down the King’s Road and encounter a sudden explosion of backbench parliamentary iconography.

But there is something enjoyable about the possibility that two people could pass one another in the street, one recognising a reference that means absolutely nothing to everyone around them.

That is how subcultures work. And politics, for all its seriousness, is a subculture too.

So, check out the collection at Conservatives.shop – and if there’s a design you’d love to see on a piece of merch, drop us a line at shopping@polimerch.com. You never, know, you might get to wear your own idea.