Suzanne Harrington: Pedigree chums who’ve made a dog’s dinner of it

Holy shitshow, Batman. Think you’ve got problems? Imagine waking up in Conservative Britain every morning. It’s not that Boris Johnson and his fellow poshos are incompetent sociopaths who would unplug your granny’s life support to charge their phones — we all know that — it’s that Boris Johnson is now at the stage in his political career where he could eat a baby in Trafalgar Square, covered live by the BBC, and still be in power next week.

Dominic Cummings’ revelations gave us a frisson of schadenfreude – words now banned in Brexit Britain as foreign and unpatriotic – but unlike Cummings, Johnson is still here. 

There is no accountability. Numb after lockdown, people just want to get on with being alive. Pubs and gyms and hairdressers are open, the streets swirling; it’s an ideal time to push through a draconian policing bill that would ban the right to peaceful protest. 

You know, one of the things that make European countries different from China, Myanmar, North Korea. Everyone is too busy queuing for Primark to care. In Johnson’s Brexit Britain, all bets are off.

Obviously nobody likes politicians. Very few are ethical. Even fewer remain ethical when in power. 

But what is most awful about Johnson is not his inherent awfulness — see unplugging granny above — but the DNA-deep belief in entitlement to power. 

The false skills that fan divisive populism via soundbites and media wrangling, so that even when he is called out in public by his former advisor, there are no consequences. Tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, £900 gold wallpaper, £27,000 worth of takeaways in eight months, which works out at 108 times the cost of the 1% payrise he offered to the NHS nurses who recently saved his life. And still, the British public accept him.

In Emma Dabiri’s new book What White People Can Do Next, she argues that race, and therefore racism, was invented in 1661 by white colonialists to smash emerging solidarity between workers of varying skin colours. That racism remains a tool used to divide, so that white people in power stay in power by convincing other white people, with whom they have nothing in common beyond pigmentation, that they are all on the same team.

Poor white people, disenfranchised by the powerful for whom they have voted, repeatedly fall for this trick, believing that their poverty and lack of equity is the fault of immigrants, refugees, foreigners. Other poor people.

This is how Conservative Britain works. It’s how Boris Johnson remains in power. Because he and others in the chumocracy have pulled off the greatest blag of all — convincing Darren the unemployed white worker that his miserable standard of living is the fault of other unemployed workers who are brown or black or whatever, rather than the ruling elite who have sucked all the money upwards. So Darren joins the English Defence League or similar, and waves a flag for Boris.