Ed West

On New Year’s Day, 2014, during those sunny, innocent times of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, Labour MP Keith Vaz headed down to Luton Airport to greet new arrivals coming off the planes. There he met a rather bemused young Romanian man, Victor Spirescu, who had no idea he was going to become the face of migration on the day that citizens of Romania and Bulgaria were allowed free movement within the EU. It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be ‘flooded’ by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

‘The candidates fighting to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and Britain’s prime minister reflect the country’s rich diversity,’ the England-hating New York Times put it earlier this week, through gritted teeth, ‘with six having recent ancestors hailing from outside Europe.’  It might seem initially curious that it’s the Conservatives who are so ethnically diverse. In British politics the realignment over Brexit caused identity to replace economics as the crunch issue, so that the gap between Labour and Tory voters on the issues of immigration and diversity has significantly grown, even if immigration’s salience has declined and remains low.

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career. Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to ‘how to behave morally and politically’.

However badly Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far. There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris Johnson, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?).

We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that rare distinction of inspiring a whole discipline in the form of evolutionary psychology. The great sense of loss did not seem to be shared by Scientific American, however, which soon afterwards put out a piece reflecting on the ‘complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas’. Among the ‘problematic’ aspects of Wilson’s work, the author argued, was the ‘descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies’. This was ‘a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued’ because ‘context matters’.

During the grimmest days of the First Crusade in 1098, the western Christians found themselves besieged by the Turks in Antioch. They had travelled more than a thousand miles from France, and countless fellow believers had died in the almost impossible trek across the known world; now running out of food and water, they were tired, hungry and desperate. At their lowest point, and ready to give into despair, Christian spirits were raised by the arrival of one Peter Bartholomew, a poor man from Provence who claimed he had been visited by the Virgin, promising them victory. The noblemen in charge were suspicious, as Peter was not only an illiterate farmhand type but also quite shifty, yet soon momentum built around his cause. He had an audience.

A Russian man convicted of spying for Britain has mysteriously been taken ill due to an ‘unknown substance’ – I wonder who could be responsible? Of course one can’t assume at this point, and the Russians will express bafflement as to why they’re being accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. No doubt the London Embassy’s perky Twitter feed will make light of western paranoia in that surreal way international politics is conducted these days.

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics. Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division.

At one point during Boris Johnson’s speech today he asked the audience: ‘We all want to make Britain less insular, don’t we?’ Silence. Media-training experts use an initialism to try to get journalists and other talking-heads to come across well on television – BLT. Does the audience believe you? Do they like you? Do they trust you? The Foreign Secretary has never had a problem with the middle one, perhaps the most important of the three, but during the EU referendum there was certainly an issue with belief, since some of the more nationalistic rhetoric of the campaign clearly sat ill at ease with this ‘esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation’, as Rod Liddle once described him.

One of the most influential and popular ideas of the post-war era was that of the Authoritarian Personality, which linked fascism with a number of personality traits, including conventionalism, anti-intellectualism and prudery. Conservatism, in other words. It has become popular to believe that being right-wing is synonymous with being authoritarian. Society may have no common culture or religion or body of literature, but everyone knows who the Nazis are. So as Nazism has pushed out everything else in the collective memory, it has become an attractive weapon against conservative ideas. And yet authoritarianism is probably found both equally on the left and right; it just manifests itself in different forms.