Wondering vaguely where we’ll be in six months’ time, I find myself imagining a scene. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is doing a live piece to camera from Downing Street, when an upper window of No 10 opens behind her. As she speaks, bin bags full of Boris Johnson’s clothes begin to be thrown from it, punctuated by various high-pitched reflections on his character. Like I say, it’s just a fictional vignette, set 10 minutes into a dystopian future. But would you honestly rule it out? Just over a fortnight before the money shot of the Tory leadership contest, very little seems impossible in our increasingly trashy country.
After all, this is a week in which England – and it is always England – has once again been embarrassed by the behaviour of travelling fans. Fans of Nigel Farage, in this case, with the spectacle of his Brexit party MEPs turning their backs on a live performance of the European anthem at the opening of the new European parliament session in Strasbourg. We have seen it so many times before, of course – this pack mentality, this unprovoked loutishness, this excruciatingly entitled sense that it is acceptable, even imperative, to colonise a public space and behave absurdly rudely in it.
However, we have hitherto tended to see it outside a designated bar in, say, the old port in Marseille, one day before a football international, rather than in the debating chamber of a 28-state parliament. In terms of intellect, deliberate offence and filthy manners, there really is nothing to choose between a shirtless England fan singing 10 German Bombers while threatening to chuck some cafeteria furniture, and Ann Widdecombe ranting at MEPs that Brexit was comparable to slaves rising up against their owners.
Back home, thanks to this necrotic country’s absolute commitment to providing its own metaphors, we learn that there is an acute burial crisis in the UK. We need new ideas for how to dispose of our rising count of corpses, says a leading public health expert, who recommends burying them alongside motorways. Still, at least one tomb has surely been vacated by Widders, that hard-right Havisham, whose desiccated bigotry and cobwebbed inhumanity has been exhumed with her election as a Brexit party MEP, as well as reminding us that the border between Celebrity Big Brother and public service is basically nonexistent. There really is something of the shite about her.
Widdecombe is naturally regarded as a huge asset by her party leader, who has long been the red item in the UK’s white wash. Farage loves to perpetuate a certain image of himself, deliberately wearing tweed suits even in Washington DC and so on. He repetitively harks back to some bygone era, when the stereotypical Englishman abroad was the model of urbanity. Alas, as anyone who’s been on a late-night Ryanair flight will agree, this is no longer the stereotype. Farage might imagine he’s cosplaying as David Niven, but stunts such as the one in Strasbourg should remind us he is in fact just another big-drinking Brit who might as well be pissing in a European street on a stag weekend.
Bad manners, unprovoked aggression, going through the non-EU passport queue even though you don’t yet have to – all these are clear elements of the emerging Brexit style. For former newspaper the Daily Telegraph, Johnson is its most exquisite embodiment. “Mr Johnson IS Mr Brexit,” declared its leader column today. “He is also a triumph of a very British kind of style as well as substance – and what is wrong with that?” Guys, I know you’ve only had 30 years of warning, but you’re going to kick yourself when you find out.
It won’t be during this contest, clearly. Owing to his army of good soldiers and his insistence on keeping his own hands clean, Johnson’s leadership bid resembles a typically grim male prison drama, where he is the jail kingpin and everyone else is just doing what they have to do to survive. What has happened to Matt Hancock, for instance? Not four weeks ago, the health secretary launched his leadership bid with lots of forward-pointing arrows and a declaration that any attempt to prorogue parliament would “betray the memory of D-day veterans”; now he goes on the Today programme to gibber a defence of Johnson doing just that. Has Matt been “turned out”, to use a piece of prison slang I’m afraid you’ll have to look up? Is he known as Matilda in the Johnson-run supermax?
Then again, you don’t even have to be in frontline politics to feel that Johnson’s your route to a job. The Times story about George Osborne’s bid to become IMF president features the following crystallisation of British public life: “Mr Osborne will need the nomination of Britain’s next prime minister to succeed. The Evening Standard, which he edits, recently endorsed Boris Johnson in the leadership race.”
The Financial Times unearthed further horror in its report that Johnson could call a snap general election. Or as one of his backers chose to put it: “He could say ‘I’m the daddy’.” I can picture at least three discrete settings in which Johnson might indeed say those words, each of them more grotesque than the last. But it’s unclear quite what else they expect, when Johnson currently exists in the shadows, like a late-era Brando playing Struwwelpeter.
That said, the one thing we do know is that Johnson is less unkempt than he was. It’s genuinely remarkable how many of the wanky articles on “The New Johnson” a) can only be responded to with the exhortation “wake the fuck up”, and b) contain extensive extrapolative reference to the fact he’s had a haircut. I mean, well done to the manscaped Dulux dog and everything. But could the bar honestly be any lower? I fully expect to read he’s been housebroken in recent weeks.
For now, the prime-minister-in-waiting is still having little irony-related accidents. Or as his sign-off to today’s Darlington hustings ran: “If only we could see ourselves as others see us.” If only indeed.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
