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| The colonial past is another country. Let’s leave Boris Johnson there | |
| (2 days later) | |
| You can get away with an awful lot in British politics if you have “the right kind of background”. I’m not talking about anything so tawdry as qualifications – a single police numbers flub has haunted Diane Abbott for over a year, despite her years of frontbench experience and host of career achievements. I’m talking about pedigree: the sense of one’s descent from the venerable institutions of the British class system. And no one has embodied this tendency more than Boris Johnson. | You can get away with an awful lot in British politics if you have “the right kind of background”. I’m not talking about anything so tawdry as qualifications – a single police numbers flub has haunted Diane Abbott for over a year, despite her years of frontbench experience and host of career achievements. I’m talking about pedigree: the sense of one’s descent from the venerable institutions of the British class system. And no one has embodied this tendency more than Boris Johnson. |
| The MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip has always been something of a revenant. With his cultivated air of toffish buffoonery, he was a man out of time; in his grotesque incompetence in the role of foreign secretary, a man out of place. And, despite his flagrant disregard for cabinet collective responsibility and the constituency he was elected to serve, his frontbench career has had the ghoulish and unkillable quality of the undead. | The MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip has always been something of a revenant. With his cultivated air of toffish buffoonery, he was a man out of time; in his grotesque incompetence in the role of foreign secretary, a man out of place. And, despite his flagrant disregard for cabinet collective responsibility and the constituency he was elected to serve, his frontbench career has had the ghoulish and unkillable quality of the undead. |
| But before Johnson’s return to the backbenches, he had one last set piece of rhetorical bombast for the British public. Johnson’s resignation letter – and accompanying photoshoot – was a masterclass in political evasion. From blaming the spate of cyclists’ deaths during his time as mayor of London on the EU, to his bizarre reassurance that the United Kingdom will not, in fact, be leaving the continent of Europe, the letter was bewildering, baroque and devoid of substantive content. Tucked among the convolutions and contortions was a particularly revealing line: “We are now in the ludicrous position of asserting that we must accept huge amounts of … EU law, without changing an iota, because it is essential for our economic health – and when we no longer have any ability to influence these laws as they are made. In that respect we are truly headed for the status of colony.” | But before Johnson’s return to the backbenches, he had one last set piece of rhetorical bombast for the British public. Johnson’s resignation letter – and accompanying photoshoot – was a masterclass in political evasion. From blaming the spate of cyclists’ deaths during his time as mayor of London on the EU, to his bizarre reassurance that the United Kingdom will not, in fact, be leaving the continent of Europe, the letter was bewildering, baroque and devoid of substantive content. Tucked among the convolutions and contortions was a particularly revealing line: “We are now in the ludicrous position of asserting that we must accept huge amounts of … EU law, without changing an iota, because it is essential for our economic health – and when we no longer have any ability to influence these laws as they are made. In that respect we are truly headed for the status of colony.” |
| Hypocrisy is nothing new for the former foreign secretary. However this sentiment – that the status of a colony is, perhaps, undesirable – represents a stunning volte-face in Johnson’s postcolonial politics. | Hypocrisy is nothing new for the former foreign secretary. However this sentiment – that the status of a colony is, perhaps, undesirable – represents a stunning volte-face in Johnson’s postcolonial politics. |
| In 2002 Johnson wrote in the Spectator: “[Africa] may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” In the same year, he wrote in the Telegraph that “the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”; that when Tony Blair visits Congo “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird”. | In 2002 Johnson wrote in the Spectator: “[Africa] may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” In the same year, he wrote in the Telegraph that “the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”; that when Tony Blair visits Congo “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird”. |
| While Johnson apologised for the latter article in 2008, his resurrection of insulting colonial rhetoric continued long into his time on the frontbench. From referring to the continent of Africa as “that country” in 2016 to having to be stopped from reciting Rudyard Kipling’s imperial panegyric The Road to Mandalay at a Buddhist temple in Myanmar. Whether out of kindness, obliviousness, or a peculiar kind of British deference to poshos who can remember a stanza or two of poetry, the UK media has tended to characterise such outbursts as gaffes. Britain’s most senior overseas representative praising our nation’s bloody conquest of the world through gunpowder, germs and uneven trade agreements? A bit of harmless bumbling, a social faux pas. | While Johnson apologised for the latter article in 2008, his resurrection of insulting colonial rhetoric continued long into his time on the frontbench. From referring to the continent of Africa as “that country” in 2016 to having to be stopped from reciting Rudyard Kipling’s imperial panegyric The Road to Mandalay at a Buddhist temple in Myanmar. Whether out of kindness, obliviousness, or a peculiar kind of British deference to poshos who can remember a stanza or two of poetry, the UK media has tended to characterise such outbursts as gaffes. Britain’s most senior overseas representative praising our nation’s bloody conquest of the world through gunpowder, germs and uneven trade agreements? A bit of harmless bumbling, a social faux pas. |
| This is a grave misapprehension of Johnson’s strategy. Both his PR approach and hardline Brexit politics have been a characterised by a calculated appeal to nostalgia and nationalist expansionism. Johnson’s 2016 Conservative party conference speech extolled the virtues of the Foreign Office’s imperial origins, bragging that “178 nations of the world we either conquered or invaded” to loud cheers from the hall. His fellow Brexiteers similarly drew connections between their vision of a post-article 50 Britain and its former status as an empire upon which the sun never set. Johnson may have opted for The Road to Mandalay while in Myanmar, but evidently his favourite Kipling work is The White Man’s Burden. | This is a grave misapprehension of Johnson’s strategy. Both his PR approach and hardline Brexit politics have been a characterised by a calculated appeal to nostalgia and nationalist expansionism. Johnson’s 2016 Conservative party conference speech extolled the virtues of the Foreign Office’s imperial origins, bragging that “178 nations of the world we either conquered or invaded” to loud cheers from the hall. His fellow Brexiteers similarly drew connections between their vision of a post-article 50 Britain and its former status as an empire upon which the sun never set. Johnson may have opted for The Road to Mandalay while in Myanmar, but evidently his favourite Kipling work is The White Man’s Burden. |
| As it transpires, imperial nostalgia is not a Brexit negotiating position. Fantasies of Empire 2.0, understandably, were met with markedly less enthusiasm by Britain’s former colonies. | As it transpires, imperial nostalgia is not a Brexit negotiating position. Fantasies of Empire 2.0, understandably, were met with markedly less enthusiasm by Britain’s former colonies. |
| And so he leaves the government frontbenches as nothing more than an emblem of empty bombast – the man who made promises on the side of a bus that he had no intention of keeping. He could not deliver the fantasy of empire; instead he departs attempting to nurture an irrational paranoia that Britain may be treated in the same manner that it saw fit to dole out for centuries. His vision of national decline is a mirror image of the dynamics that produced British dominance. | And so he leaves the government frontbenches as nothing more than an emblem of empty bombast – the man who made promises on the side of a bus that he had no intention of keeping. He could not deliver the fantasy of empire; instead he departs attempting to nurture an irrational paranoia that Britain may be treated in the same manner that it saw fit to dole out for centuries. His vision of national decline is a mirror image of the dynamics that produced British dominance. |
| Johnson’s pith helmets and pipe dream politics isn’t just an insult to the nations that Britain formerly colonised. It’s offensive to the voting public of this country too. Neither fantasies nor fear-mongering are capable of addressing the material crises – housing, real terms falling wages, an under-resourced NHS – immediately facing the UK. As a society, we must strip ourselves of any lingering attachment to the representatives of elite interests. The past is a haven for charlatans and frauds; and politics is about claiming the terrain of the future. | Johnson’s pith helmets and pipe dream politics isn’t just an insult to the nations that Britain formerly colonised. It’s offensive to the voting public of this country too. Neither fantasies nor fear-mongering are capable of addressing the material crises – housing, real terms falling wages, an under-resourced NHS – immediately facing the UK. As a society, we must strip ourselves of any lingering attachment to the representatives of elite interests. The past is a haven for charlatans and frauds; and politics is about claiming the terrain of the future. |
| • Ash Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media, and lectures in political theory at Anglia Ruskin and the Sandberg Instituut | • Ash Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media, and lectures in political theory at Anglia Ruskin and the Sandberg Instituut |
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