It is, it seems, a good time for nostalgia. It is received wisdom that this is what support for Donald Trump in the United States has meant, just as the victory of Euroscepticism on the other side of the Atlantic sets off trains of thought involving cricket, country pubs and warm beer, toasted crumpets and ruddy Morris men.
The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology.
Barthes famously uncovered complex and interlinked strains of masculinism, pro-imperialism and French nationalism behind the images of the tricolour and a plate of steak frites. Farage too is a floating signifier who would be of interest to Barthes one suspects – a protean figure whose continual reanimating presence evokes both the hearty City trader culture of the 1980s, the sitcom hinterlands of the 1960s and ‘70s (a pre-EU Britain of Carry On films and heavy public smoking) and a blurrier and much older vision of Merrie England. Both the slogans of Trumpism and the Leave camp – ‘Make America Great Again’ ‘Take Back Control’ – involve the idea of return. We are going back somewhere in this vision, even if we’re not sure exactly where that is.
