Boris Johnson divides Britons in a way few other politicians manage. To his dwindling group of supporters, he is the hero who Got Brexit Done; to his detractors, he is a villain, edging the country towards a dark place. He is, according to Alastair Campbell, Britain’s ‘accidental fascist’. But if you stand back from the Westminster hurly-burly you can see Boris for what he is: a carefully constructed empty space onto which Britons have, over the years, been invited to project their hopes and fears; one whose purpose has been to further the personal ambition for power of the very real but (so far as the public are concerned) largely unknown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Several years ago, TV presenter Lorraine Kelly won a tax case after a judge ruled she was not employed by ITV, but performs as her ‘chatty’ TV persona. Who is the real Lorraine Kelly, people asked. The answer was not clear. A similar question can be asked of politicians who have long accepted, some more reluctantly than others, the need to sell versions of themselves to the people, emphasising real aspects of their characters at best, and, at times, simply making things up. Ancient rulers did this through statues and coins. Today’s leaders have a plethora of means to project concocted versions of themselves. Boris is an extreme and distinct example of this process because politicians usually create such personas to advance policies or projects bigger than themselves: but Johnson has none to speak of beyond achieving and holding on to power for its own sake.
Boris’s public image has its origins in Johnson’s troubled childhood, although it was completed during the turn of the twenty-first century as Labour and the Conservatives fought for the middle ground. Under Tony Blair, Labour adopted parts of Thatcherism; when David Cameron became Tory leader, the Conservatives reciprocated.
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