You look at Britain and think: how can it be that the country’s three most powerful politicians are Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage, while Jacob Rees-Mogg is chief spokesman for a hard Brexit? It’s straight out of a satire of old England, set in 1950.
In fact, these men rose precisely because each incarnates a timeless English (not British) archetype. Many English voters, when offered globalisation and modernity, prefer old-time boarding-school bounders, comedy toffs and cycling socialists.
Polls show that most English people long for yesterday. In a YouGov survey of 20,081 people for the BBC last year, half said England was better in the past; only one in six thought its best days were still to come. By contrast, most Welsh and Scots preferred the future.
Nostalgics have a weakness for politicians who embody the imagined, unchanging, national past and who, in the words of the think-tank Demos, promise “‘control’ . . . over time itself”. This offer has a visceral appeal to older people, who yearn to rewind the ageing process, and to the English, who have an almost uniquely happy relationship with their history.
Every country has its own timeless national archetypes. Donald Trump incarnates the American tycoon. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the stern Turkish father, says his exiled compatriot, the writer Ece Temelkuran. But England’s stock of archetypes is unusually large.
Many of them derive from the boarding-school story, a genre that runs from Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) through the Greyfriars stories to Harry Potter. The genre has even spawned its own parodies (think of the Molesworth books).
As George Orwell noted in his essay “Boys’ Weeklies” in 1940, boarding-school stories are mostly consumed by the 99 per cent of Britons who didn’t attend boarding school. Even clichéd stories read in childhood, he wrote, shape one’s imagination for ever, and so ordinary Britons grow up primed to recognise public-school archetypes.
Johnson combines two such archetypes: he’s the Bertie Wooster version of the harmless comedy toff, merged with the boarding-school bounder. The bounder is the school’s naughty boy, who doesn’t do his homework, romances girls, smokes behind the rugger field and is always getting into “scrapes”.
In adulthood, he typically ends up hiding from his creditors in Australia, while the school’s head boy becomes prime minister. But populism changes everything: next month Johnson is expected to beat Jeremy Hunt, former head boy of Charterhouse, to Downing Street.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s fellow Etonian Rees-Mogg is the comic lord in outdated dress, heir to Lord Mauleverer of Greyfriars and the Beano’s Lord Snooty. “English people are extremely fond of the titled ass,” writes Orwell, “the seeming idiot who drawls and wears a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of danger.”
Farage is another adult bounder (specifically, PG Wodehouse’s optimistic chancer Ukridge), but he can also play the country squire, or Suburban Man. Everything about him screams pre-globalised England: he smokes, drinks pints, can’t abide this newfangled PC nonsense, and is always teaching humourless, meddling foreigners a lesson.
The list of today’s archetypes is completed by a passage in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which examines the widespread British disdain for “socialists”. “The typical socialist,” he writes, is “a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings.”
Even before you reach the line about “sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers”, you realise he is describing Corbyn. It’s precisely because this type is unloved in Britain that many Corbynistas love Corbyn: they think he’s authentic.
And mostly, he is. Similarly, Johnson genuinely is scatty, and Farage undoubtedly likes smoking. These people aren’t faking it. However, they did discover early on that other Britons recognise and cherish these archetypes in them. So they play up their natural characteristics.
Because most Britons carry these archetypes around in their heads, the archetypal figure stands out brightly painted amid his grey modern rivals. The moment you see him, you feel you know him, as if he has been teleported from the national past.
Only male politicians can comfortably incarnate archetypes. A female politician has, by definition, abandoned her archetypal role for something new — and nostalgic voters dislike novelty.
The conventional response to all this is, “Every country gets the leaders it deserves.” That’s inaccurate. Rather, in today’s UK, every party membership gets the leader it deserves. Labour’s members chose Corbyn, just as Tory members will most likely choose Johnson.
Farage does have a genuine, broad following among older English voters. However, there’s probably an equal-sized base of Remainers yearning for a futurist à la Emmanuel Macron or Tony Blair (who often talked about the past as something to be swept away, dismissing even his own party as Old Labour).
Eventually, the British pendulum will swing back to modernity, possibly quite forcefully. Once the return to a mythical past proves unexpectedly tricky, Bertie Wooster’s successor in Number 10 could be a tattooed, 23-year-old, mixed-race lesbian hacker who didn’t even go to boarding school.
Simon Kuper will be speaking at the FTWeekend Festival on Saturday September 7 at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London NW3; ftweekendfestival.com/
Follow Simon on @KuperSimon or email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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