5 august 2019 http://www.openthemagazine.com 5F you read only certain kinds of opinion writers
in certain kinds of opinion pages, on both sides of the
atlantic, Boris Johnson is an ahistorical calamity—
laugh with the “rascal” only to be damned. It’s not a
people’s vote, the original referendum on Britain’s
continuance in the european union, that has made
him the new prime minister of the uK. This “man
without conviction for a country without direction”
has “lied, pandered and guffawed his dishevelled way to the
highest office in the land.” The new Conservative leader, “whose
laziness is proverbial and opportunism legendary, is a man well
practiced in deceit, a pander willing to tickle the prejudices of
his audiences for easy gain. His personal life is incontinent, his
public record inconsequential.” “This is the Johnsonian way.
The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they
accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin,
until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was.” These
are random quotes from the lofty pages of journalism. as you
read more of them, you realise: increasingly, the Boris-bashing
commentators in their word play look like poor parodies of
their subject, one of Britain’s highest paid columnists. Since
that vote three summers ago, Johnson, who along with Michael
Gove (the would-be Brutus) formed the vanguard of the Leave
campaign, has been ridiculed (by pundits from Left and right)
and admired (by the english who lived outside the London
bubble) in unequal measure.
I remember that summer in London, when the city,
a cosmopolitan oasis, was stunned by the worst kind of
english eccentricity. London was history-proof, immune
to the paranoia of the Little-england pastoralists, and
steeped in its multicultural self-
righteousness. elsewhere, beyond the
city that was appalled by the politics
of the countryside and the rusty
Brahminism of blue-blooded Tories,
a new sense of englishness prevailed
over enforced supra-nationalism.
Some, condescendingly, called it the
return of nativism; some saw it as the
imperial fantasy of the islander; and
some shrugged it off as the politics offear. on Liberation day, there was no national celebration. In
a divided Kingdom, the alarmists dismissed the preference of
the majority as manipulated emotionalism. It was, in a sense,
the death of politics itself—the politics of comfortable truisms.
The resentment from below would topple the establishment;
Who-we-are would defeat Just-be-what-you-are. Johnson
should have been the natural successor to david Cameron,
who then resembled Gorbachev in the final days of the Soviet
union—a man who presided over the freedom rite, and paved
the way for his own redundancy. In the end, Coronation day
became Funeral day. But Boris Johnson didn’t die. He has been
resurrected as a caricature. He was what others wrote about him.
He was not what he was: eton, oxford, editor, scholar, columnist,
author, two-time London mayor, foreign secretary, and Britain’s
most popular politician. He was reduced to a series of one-liners.
He was the idea on which his detractors—jealous journalists
and ignored grandees—tested their capacity for hatred.
The so-called anyone-but-Boris campaign was yet another
instance of straitjacketing a social upheaval. When Brexit was
followed by donald Trump, it was the appearance that jolted the
liberals and sober conservatives alike; the attitude of a people
who elected the man got little attention. a Trump could not
have played out his salvation theology without the backdrop
of the ruins of both the traditional Left and the right. It was the
revenge of the abandoned. Between a preachy, platitudinous
Left and a privileged, pompous right lay the vast constituency
of the resenting class, waiting for a redeemer, no matter if he was
a vulgarian or a buffoon. The new narrative of liberal dissent,
sprinkled with the acquired jargon of post-truth and fake news,
refused to engage with the raw, elemental rage of the abandoned
class. It doesn’t, still. It’s still lost in the ungainly aesthetics of
power, whether in Washington or London. aesthetics matters,
as this column has argued earlier in these pages. a political
royalty that disrespects popular sentiment matters more. The
Boris moment marks a widening rift between reimagined
englishness and insensitive globalism.
Can Boris Johnson be the unifier? as I went back to his
book-length appreciation of his hero, Winston Churchill, one
passage by the fan boy stood out:
“Like the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men,
says Homer. That seems about right to me: we are like leaves not
only in our mortality, but in our similarity.
“I have always thought that an alien looking cursorily at this
planet might conclude that we human beings are not strictly
speaking individuals, but all really part of
the same organism: like leaves connected
by invisible twigs and branches.”
These are not a buffoon’s words.
These are the words of a man who
believes in the shared humanity of
his world. Boris Johnson won’t be an
ephemeral prime minister but a worthy
inheritor of Churchill’s ideals if he can
turn that philosophical lyricism into
political pragmatism. nI
LOCOMOTIF
by S PRASANNARAJANBEING BORIS
Saurabh Singh