Jokerman

Un­like this sum­mer’s ex­treme weather, which came to Eu­rope then went, ex­treme con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ments have also re­cently come but un­for­tu­nately don’t seem to be going.

In the UK, the lat­est in­car­na­tion of this threat to the av­er­age per­son is the new prime min­is­ter, Boris John­son (or sim­ply ‘Boris,’ as plenty of his fel­low media per­son­al­i­ties call him).

But there is only one im­por­tant ques­tion to be asked about him. Who will he and his Con­ser­v­a­tive Party gov­ern for?

The an­swer is al­ready clear. If we ig­nore all his pop­ulist, na­tion­al­is­tic pub­lic lan­guage and ig­nore his long his­tory of in­com­pe­tence, his al­most con­tin­ual episodes of self-serv­ing im­moral­ity, and if we also ig­nore his con­tin­u­ing cat­a­logue of lies and vile racist and ho­mo­pho­bic in­sults, there is still some­thing much more im­por­tant than all that star­ing us in the face.

The fact is that Boris John­son has al­ways rep­re­sented no-one else other than the exact same kind of young males who he is pic­tured along­side on the ‘Wall of Fame’ at Eton, the pri­vate school where only Britain’s wealth­i­est fam­i­lies send their chil­dren.

In other words, Boris John­son will con­tinue to act only for the rich­est part of the so­cial spec­trum. His first pol­icy an­nounce­ment after he de­clared he would run for the party’s lead­er­ship was cal­cu­lated to let the rich know that he was still well and truly on their side.

He stated he would give tax cuts to three mil­lion higher in­come earn­ers. As well as ar­gu­ing for fur­ther cuts to busi­ness tax, even though UK cor­po­ra­tion tax rates are “one of the low­est...among de­vel­oped economies, with suc­ces­sive re­duc­tions tak­ing it from 28% in 2008 to 19% now”.

The great prob­lem with schools like Eton, where John­son (and 20 other for­mer UK prime min­is­ters) went, is that, ac­cord­ing to Ger­many’s Der Spiegel mag­a­zine, it is a major part of “an ar­chaic sys­tem that teaches those who be­long to it that they are des­tined for the kind of great­ness that oth­ers can­not reach”.

The idea of a per­sonal des­tiny is ap­peal­ing to peo­ple like John­son be­cause as adults it means they be­lieve that they never have to show abil­ity.

“Prepara­tory” board­ing schools such as Eton brain­wash their young pupils at a time in their lives when they are highly im­pres­sion­able, being away from their fam­i­lies for al­most the en­tire aca­d­e­mic year. In essence, they in­still the value of ul­ti­mate self-con­fi­dence as some­thing su­pe­rior to ex­per­tise.

This is ex­actly the root cause of Britain’s wider medi­oc­rity in much of it’s pol­i­tics and busi­ness; it comes from a so­cial class sys­tem that vir­tu­ally in­sists on tak­ing noth­ing at all too se­ri­ously.

John­son’s pub­lic image as a mum­bling, bum­bling, pa­tri­otic joke­ster is ini­tially easy to like. He has a light-hearted charm which works with Anglo peo­ple who don’t like any­one to be earnest for very long. Com­edy is good en­ter­tain­ment, they would say.

This tone of amuse­ment was also some­thing John­son used in his ear­lier ca­reer in jour­nal­ism and writ­ing. As­ton­ish­ingly, he wrote a sex­ist and of­fen­sive novel ti­tled Sev­enty-Two Vir­gins – A Com­edy of Er­rors (pub­lished in 2004), where the main char­ac­ter, ob­vi­ously en­tirely based on John­son, be­comes a hero dur­ing a ter­ror­ist at­tack. The hand of des­tiny again.

Ul­ti­mately, John­son is hell­bent on “de­liv­er­ing” Brexit at any cost to the mid­dle and work­ing class peo­ple of his coun­try. The irony here is that as re­cently as 2013 he wrote a news­pa­per ar­ti­cle that ad­vised his fel­low cab­i­net min­is­ters “to stop blam­ing Brus­sels for all our prob­lems”.

Now though, we have him and his Brexit to more ac­cu­rately blame. John­son’s jokes are all the more hol­low and the sad­dest joke is on us.