Symbols

Robert Jenrick apparently had a large Union flag and a drawing of the queen in his office, the former of which came in for some laughter, but for some reason that laughter triggered a lot of people, especially those who look at the pictures in the Daily Mail, Express and Sun while chewing their crayons.

Then there's Boris with his humungous, industrial-sized flags, the draping of which seem somewhat scarily redolent of the flags used in certain rallies in the 30s.

We Brits generally don't seem to have the same, intense relationship with our national flag that the likes of the Americans have. They treat it with a deep reverence and salute it in the morning in schools. American presidents don't make a speech without some absolutely massive stars and stripes in the background. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not a criminal offence in America to burn the flag in protest at something, as long as it's your own flag.

We Brits, however, seem to have a penchant for much smaller, understated flags of maybe under 9 inches long on a small wooden flagpole sitting on a desk. We don't seem to need to push the flag into people's faces. Most Brits wouldn't even recognise if it were flown upside down and even more insist on calling it a Union jack, which is the term only used when it's flown from a ship's jack staff.

Yes, of course, there are those who plaster their Facebook pages with Union flags, present themselves with bulldog or crusader avatars, worship Churchill and Enoch and belong to highly suspect political parties far out on the fringe of the fringe of the right, but they're an anomaly. 

Of late though, Boris' marketing department seems intent on aligning the Conservative brand with the Union flag - and the bigger the better. Could this be part of the ongoing Culture War the government and right wing media seems intent on waging against someone? They seem to be equating themselves with patriotism, which Samuel Johnson described as the last refuge of the scoundrel. He was referring to the false patriotism of the ultra-nationalist.

I'm almost certain that thinking is as follows - knocking the flag is knocking the country is knocking the government is knocking the party of unthinking and rabid patriotism - the Conservatives. If you knock the flag you're a traitor; if you knock the Conservative party you're also a traitor, by association. 

It probably won't belong before the Conservative party emblem is simply a Union flag without the tree. The Conservatives are the only party to co-opt the iconography of the flag for its logo - other than the BNP and the DUP, which aren't major parties, but on the same end of the spectrum. That alone tells one why there was laughter at Jenrick's office.

The problem is that the Conservatives are are actually more aligned with the Jolly Roger or the flag of a South American banana republic. I'm fully expecting Boris to appear on a press conference in his £2.6m press room dressed in the gaudy uniform of a Generalissimo.