Since then an extraordinary thing has happened. It seems that all along there have been two Johnsons living under the same blond mop. There is Johnson the loyal servant of Little England and then there is Johnson the lover of England’s global hegemony. He told his party’s annual conference, to great applause:
“When I go into the Map Room of Palmerston I cannot help remembering that this country over the last two centuries has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries.” [...]
It may be that Johnson’s apparent schizophrenia does actually embody the real tragedy underlying the Little Englander mentality. They dream of the power that subjugated the peoples of 178 countries but they also accept that it can now only ever be a dream. Simultaneously they accept the diminishment of their country’s world role. It is a price worth paying if it preserves the values they believe to be uniquely English—the values that enabled and underpinned the glory of empire. [...]
The London School of Economics is much more than its name implies. For generations it has been an incubator of progressive political and social ideas as well as educating 34 future heads of state and 18 Nobel laureates. Some of its graduates even went on to lead revolutionary movements that ended British rule in the colonies. It was, and is, a symbol of British academic open-mindedness.
Imagine, then, the outrage when May’s government announced that the group of experts who would be advising officials in Johnson’s Foreign Office on the technical details of negotiating British exit from Europe would be purged of anyone who did not have a British passport—even though LSE academics who were not British citizens had already been recruited. [...]
The surge of bigotry in the streets has been evident for some time. What is new is the way it has been made almost respectable by the recent actions of the government. A powerful editorial The Observer newspaper spelt it out. The paper said that ideas are emanating from senior ministers that are “as alarming as they are unpleasant. They carry a gross whiff of xenophobia. They convey an inescapable undertone of racism and intolerance. They are a return to the narrow, delusional world of Little England.”
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