“Golden Age”
On 25 July 2019, Johnson set out his plans in his statement on priorities for the government. The conceit of his speech was to shuttle between the pragmatics of policy and governance, via panegyrics to optimism and a can-do attitude, to an image of Great Britain in 2050. This is the date when, according to current plans, the UK’s net carbon emissions will be reduced to zero. His speech closed,
There is every chance that in 2050, When I fully intend to be around, though not necessarily in this job we will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.
The irony is lost on Johnson: that the image of a “golden age” has always furnished societies that see themselves in decline. The golden age is an image projected back from the wreckage of a fallen, broken world. And so just as Johnson elevates his moment of election, he presages the catastrophe to come. Brecht knew this irony best: during the finale of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, as the city of cartels and rackets collapses, as crooks escape and the innocent are damned by a drunken God, there enters a crowd. The people stomp out a herald of a new authoritarian order, bearing placards: “FOR THE EXPROPRIATION OF OTHERS”; “FOR LOVE”; “FOR THE VENALITY OF LOVE”; “FOR PROPERTY”; “FOR THEFT”; FOR THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL”; “FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE RICH”; “FOR COURAGE IN THE FACE OF THE WEAK”; “FOR THE ENDURANCE OF THE GOLDEN AGE.”
Perhaps Johnson evokes something more everyday though. This is a golden age of a golden man: fair in complexion, with a signature head of blazing yellow hair. The Sun adopts the line: its front page headline reads “JOHNSUN” depicting the new prime minister as the face of the sun, like the baby from the Teletubbies, beaming across the sky on the hottest day of the year. The opportunity to reiterate the paper’s title, to prove that it is their prime minister, is not missed. It was the oldest image of a golden age, that given by Hesiod in the Works and Days, that described it as time of in which a race of golden people lived. But by the time of Plato such an anatomic image had become untenable. In the Cratylus dialogue, Socrates argued that those who lived in the golden age were not described as as a golden race because they were truly golden in visage, but because they were good and fine. Johnson, openly deceitful and ignoble, machiavellian and brutish, could never be described as good and fine, nor wise and knowing, as Socrates continues. So roll back Plato and Socrates, back to the older racial implication, where blond hair and a fair face are the guarantors of righteousness and a world of plenty.
“Talent”
“We will also ensure that we continue to attract the brightest and best talent from around the world”: To describe a person or a set of people as “talent” has a very specific set of meanings in British English. It is not the same as describing someone as talented, or saying that they have talent, or even that they have a particular talent. Calling someone “talent” is part of a grammatical formation peculiar to the dialects of the highest upper classes (perhaps the only other word that suffers this fate is “wit”, invoked only by one upper class person convivially describing another.) The grammar involves a ricochet, firstly from a human attribute to an abstract noun, and then back as a concretion, in which this “talent” describes the whole of a person. Perhaps this motion is why describing people as “talent” has a sexual aspect too, especially when uttered in the plummy accents of the ruling classes. “Talent” means people with prominent sexual features. But we know that it isn’t the protuberances that the ruling classes love; instead what excites their libidos is the abstraction. Not least when the very notion of “talent” is designed to discover such an abstraction as naturally embedded within the body of the person thus described.
“Recovery”
“to recover our natural and historic role as an enterprising, outward-looking and truly global Britain, generous in temper and engaged with the world”: It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. 35 years since its end, nearly half of the British population remains proud of British colonialism, from the slave trade to Bengal Famine, while less than a quarter regret this history. No wonder then that Boris could help but fantasise its restoration, with every brutality recast as generosity. Such is the British character.