The Guardian - 24.07.2019

Section:GDN 1J PaGe:1 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 19:03 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

M

e, me, me. That’s always been the

bottom line for Boris Johnson,

hasn’t it? And it’s what we’re

all going to get now. A whole

summer season devoted to

just one man. His debut speech

outside his new home on

Downing Street! His fi rst set of

ministers to play with! His very own poll bounce!

Morsel after marvellous morsel shall be served

up in the papers and on TV by Conservative MPs and

commentators. For his boosters, there will be the

fi rst 100 days of speeches and photo ops, and endless

bloviating optimism. For his critics, there will be his vast

yellowing back catalogue of falsehoods and fl ubs. For

Johnson, all of them wind around to the same fabulous

end: him, him, him.

But for the rest of us, such slavish focus on Johnson

misses precisely what is most dangerous about this

moment. It is not that our new prime minister is evil, or

even that he has a devilish strategy to remake the nation.

It is that he is reckless, thoughtless, and couldn’t care

less. The old Bullingdon boy has never outgrown the

habit of trashing a place and leaving the skivvies to clear

up and the bills to someone else. And just when the UK

is at its most combustible in generations, a mere 92,000

people – 0.1% of the population – have chosen a man who

enjoys playing with matches.

Yes, I do mean combustible. Look at a report last week

from Hope Not Hate , a charity that monitors political

extremism. It asked more than 6, 000 Britons if they

would join a campaign to defend Brexit from being

reversed. Almost two-thirds of leave voters said they

would. Then they were asked: what if that campaign

turns violent? Again, almost two-thirds said it wouldn’t

put them off. They would happily sit through ugly

threats, bloodied faces, broken bones. Some might even

join in, because the means can self-justify the ends.

My point is not that leave voters are a bunch of vicious

brutes while remainers are all cut from the same cloth

as Gandhi; it is that this is where extreme polari sation

of politics and economics , rolled up in the gift-wrap of

identity, is taking the country. The fury that some of us

spotted while reporting on the 2016 referendum has

moved from the saloon bar into the party hustings.

“Bit by bit, Brexit is ripping down the fi rewalls to

political violence,” says Cormac Hollingsworth, a

Hope Not Hate director. At the hate crime

monitoring unit, Tell Mama, Fiyaz Mughal

talks of a “market for bigoted ideas that has

Why many of us will never trust the Lib Dems again Frances Ryan, page 4

In believing Carl Beech, the Met put the public at risk Ceri Thomas, page 4

There’s hope for democracy in Turkey Europe Now, page 10

The Guardian

Boris Johnson

celebrates after

being elected

Tory leader

PHOTOGRAPH: TOBY

MELVILLE

Wednesday 24 July 2019



A combustible

nation – led by a

man who plays

with matches

Opinion

and ideas

G2

Daily

pullout

life &

arts

section

Inside

Aditya

Chakrabortty

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