Exceptional

A massive defence budget increase. Dodgy PPE contracts costing billions. £29m on a Brexit Festival (the equivalent of 12m free school meals). Brexit itself. But we're cutting the Foreign Aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP to help pay for the Covid pandemic, you might say - that's a meagre £4bn saving; 3 times what fishing contributes to the national income. Meanwhile Boris surrounds himself with Groupthink, Brexit loyalists who, by definition, are incompetent ('yes men' generally have no brains, but huge, personal ambitions). 

Proud and nostalgic nations that are losing their grip on world markets tend to start wars. If they have a leader facing multiple domestic crises, that leader will be even more likely to use the diversion of war (Thatcher) or, in the absence of a defined military enemy, military build-up to regain popularity through the illusion of regained power. 

Whether Boris believes what he says, no one, including I suspect Boris himself, can be sure. It’s difficult to decide which is the more grievous - whether he truly believes what he says, or whether he lives with his own mendacity without a blush. He has crossed the Rubicon, from old-school, Burkean Tory to militant, Jacobin populist who claims to speak for the people, but is not of the people, being firmly ensconced within the ranks of the wealthy, Old Etonian, bourgeoisie cadres who are on the make, utilising the very people they professes to represent as their milch cows. 

"Populism”, in the British context, usually means either waving the flag, bashing criminals, laying into immigrants or invoking the mythical Churchill (not the real one) - preferably all four. These are the easiest, proven ways for a politician to identify with “the people of this country,” and point to an enemy - and of course they are all hobbyhorses of the Right. The problem is they repeatedly fail to deliver on two of the above, as they require public funding to make them happen and, as we all know, the Right wants to keep taxes down for their friends and donors. One thing is certain however - Boris is incapable of delivering bad news, in whatever form - he simply wants to be loved, which is a very un-Churchillian trait. 

Boris is enormously fond of the mythical Churchill - the one comprising a false image of a plucky Britain facing Jerry alone, while simultaneously being in command of the wealth and manpower of an Empire comprising 23% of the world's population. Its conveniently forgotten within the myth that, while Britain lost under half a million in WWII, Russia lost 16 million. The Churchill of myth is, however, like King Arthur, potent in the mind of a decaying Britain desperate to regain international standing while being laughed off the stage by the rest of the world.

One day, in the light of reality over Brexit, we will say (like when we look back at the undoubted evils of Empire, colonialism and slavery, that the 10 Commandments showed Britons at the time were morally wrong, but nonetheless financially expedient); "What do we know now that we didn't know then?" to which the answer will be; "Nothing." We will have colluded in fooling ourselves in the myth of British, or, rather, English, exceptionalism.