In a speech delivered to the United Nations in New York on September 24, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson entered into unprecedentedly bizarre territory. While he has always calculatedly courted the absurd, this screed involved imagery that belonged more in a fever dream than in political discourse. It featured mattresses that could read your nightmares, futuristic “pink eyed terminators” set on the destruction of the human race, and genetically mutated and “terrifying limbless chickens” running amok.
Johnson, who read classics at the University of Oxford, bloviated in this vein throughout his remarks, comparing his own political struggles to that of the Titan Prometheus. He claimed that this gargantuan rebel, who brought fire to humanity and freed them from the yoke of the old gods, provided a mythic equivalent to the situation in contemporary Britain. As he battled against the Zeus of the European Union to bring about a new age for the UK, the vultures of parliament were pecking out his liver for eternity.
While the allusion is facile, the analogy only partially functional and the imagery in his talk strange to the point of opacity, all this does seem to indicate a fundamental shift in British, and indeed Anglophone, conservatism: after years of promising order, the Conservatives have shifted the terrain to chaos. They are turning politics into a horror movie in which they are the monsters, casting off the shackles of social restraint and governing by shock and fear.
