Why we should take Boris Johnson's abuse of history seriously

“Are we going back to a time when a king claimed absolute authority? Is it going to be King Boris I versus the parliamentarians meeting in the fields?” asked Margaret Atwood during a recent radio interview. Atwood is far from alone in linking recent political events to Charles I and the constitutional crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. With the powerplay between the executive and parliament, the purging of MPs, deep political divides regarding sovereignty, and rhetoric about respecting the “will of the people,” it is not hard to see why. But how useful are these historical analogies?

From a purely factual perspective, comparisons between Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament and Charles I’s personal rule are largely moot. Not least because the largest constituent parts of what we now call the UK were separate entities in 1629, only linked (despite Stuart attempts otherwise) through a shared monarch. Of course, both episodes have questions over the balance of executive power at their heart, but the political landscape in the mid-seventeenth century was entirely different: England was still several decades away from birthing the political factions that would grow into Whigs and Tories, there was no such thing as a Prime Minister and MPs were voted for by a limited, propertied few. Plus, despite being seen by many as an abuse of power, Charles I’s period of personal rule was in fact within the bounds of law.

Similarly, the repeated invocation of the phrase “Will of the People,” by Johnson and others is factually, historically, and politically dubious. Famously used by Rousseau and linked to the French Revolution, the phrase has since been connected to totalitarianism in all its manifestations. The term, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, creates an artificial link between a leader and “the people” whereby the leader assumes the guise of spokesperson for the masses and invents or shapes their perceived collective wants to further his or her agenda.

In using such phrase, the leader's base of supporters is encouraged to believe that “the people” are constitutionally sovereign and it is the job of the executive (and parliament) to listen to them at all costs. Yet this is not how parliamentary democracy works and history is littered with examples of large groups being ignored by the executive—from the civilians at Peterloo to the protestors at the Stop the War march. Indeed, Albert Weale has convincingly argued that the very idea of the Will of the People is an immeasurable fallacy. Worse, as we have seen, it runs the risk of being deployed to strengthen the executive rather than the populous at large and shut down criticism.

In the same vein, use of loaded terms such as “surrender,” “traitor,” “betray,” and even “saboteur,” serve to “other” those who are accused of being against the imagined collective cause and flood conversation with nostalgic and potentially violent existentialism. Just recently, we have seen from the official Leave UK social media account how this can mutate into highly xenophobic wartime rhetoric against Germany.  We’ve even had Brexit compared to the Battle of Hastings.

The use of historical analogy doesn’t even end there. With Johnson, it has also manifest in his own mythmaking. Despite having no discernible talent, oratorical skill, or vision for the country he has been governing for three months, Johnson has repeatedly and deliberately aligned himself with the UK’s most famous Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Similarly, his ally Jacob Rees-Mogg has also sought to bolster his own brand by drawing upon a rose-tinted view of the Victorian past. In Rees-Mogg’s case, this has seen him argue for a return to Victorian values and present himself as a kind of lounging, 19^thcentury version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s child catcher.

There is of course, frustratingly little we can do about history being used in such a way—especially when these archetypes are so deeply embedded within the public conscience. In fact, the use of historical shorthand to explain or justify the present has its own complex history. When uniting the crowns of Scotland and England, James VI & I likened himself to the mythical Brutus of Troy; when William III arrived in Britain, he did so on 5 November to deliberately align his opponent, James II, with the gunpowder plotters.

As a rare example of a female monarch, Queen Anne likened herself to Elizabeth I to make her ascension more acceptable; the pre-Raphaelites drew upon an imagined medieval past to justify their pining for simpler and more romantic times; dictators have frequently drawn upon nationalistic myth to galvanise support; and slot the word “gate” after a scandal, and it is immediately elevated into something much more newsworthy.

It is my feeling that the examples (however erroneous) we reach for to explain unfamiliar situations tell us a lot about how we view a situation, how we sense it might progress and, ultimately, how we see ourselves within it. When Johnson aligns himself with Churchill, he utilises the trope of a difficult, but brilliant leader defying the odds to single-handedly save the day. When critics liken Johnson to Charles I, they do so knowing his name is shorthand for absolutism gone rogue. When Rees-Mogg fetishizes the Victorians, he does so to invoke a mythical period when upper-class men were in charge and everyone knew their place. The use of “history” in this way has as much to do with posterity and propaganda as it does the past. How do we fit into the wider patterns of human endeavour? Are we the kind of people that our descendants will admire or abhor?

For Johnson, at least, I suspect the time of deluding himself about his abilities will probably soon be over. He might have to draw comfort from the knowledge that he too will one day become historical shorthand, if only for political ineptitude—or, to use the words of the Supreme Court judges, for overseeing a government that was “unlawful, void and to no effect.”