UK’s nostalgia should follow Johnson out

Supporters of outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have turned on him after his downfall, accusing him of a breezy disregard for truth and integrity in public life. But no one can pretend that this fatal trait was previously unknown.
If Johnson’s journalistic career was distinguished by fake news and fabricated quotes, as well as racist jibes, his personal life has been dogged by allegations of official favours. A political career boosted by the falsehoods of Brexit and tainted further by almost every kind of scandal has confirmed that Johnson is little more than a posh rascal.
For people around the world who were consistently perplexed by his success, the questions always were: How did he manage to receive the biggest electoral mandate in decades in the world’s oldest democracy? How did the country’s once-respectable newspapers as well as its notorious tabloids
become cheerleaders of a near-perfect embodiment of upper-class roguery? The answer lies in part in the elite culture of empire — a social pathology that has uniquely stultified Britain, committing its political and media class, in the absence of empire, to empty, repetitive performances of the power and authority that leaked away long ago.
To gain a quick impression of it, you only have to glance at the image of Johnson preening, together with former Prime Minister David Cameron (a fellow alumnus of Eton), in tailcoats and bow ties at the Bullingdon Club, a riotous drinking club of privately schooled undergraduates at Oxford. This is a snapshot of Britain’s imperial style in its late and most decadent phase. Parodic and exaggerated, it is the source of such devastating acts of national self-harm as Brexit; Johnson represents its apotheosis.
The original embodiment of the over-promoted public-school boy — famously described by the writer Cyril Connolly as a case of permanent adolescence — was of course the imperial proconsul. Forged on the playing fields of Eton, this representative of the British empire often possessed no other quality than confidence in his ability to rule much of the world.
The numerous victims of his arrogance and incompetence in the colonies could clearly see his main vice: emotional aridity, an inability to empathize with or understand people other than his peers. Accordingly, Mohandas K “Mahatma” Gandhi designed a method of anti-colonial resistance that aimed to reconnect India’s British overlords to their ethical and emotional lives, and to help them heal the damage caused by long years of isolation and abuse at boarding schools.
In Britain’s class-damaged society, however, the persona of imperial patrician turned into an ideal for the rest — a prerequisite for membership of the ruling elite.

—Bloomberg