Political rituals in Britain often resemble scenes from a historical pageant. With every new government, a photograph is taken of the prime minister and his wife outside their country residence. The house is usually modest, and so is the wife’s attire. Traditionally, the next photograph is of the second most powerful man in government, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, holding aloft that battered leather briefcase, worn bare by the succession of ministers and the passage of years.
Everything in Britain is steeped in tradition: lords and Labour, liberals and socialists, titles and lineages, and one Crown above them all. A title denotes standing, not office. Mrs Thatcher becomes Lady Thatcher; the actor Roger Moore becomes Sir Roger; the Indian-born Sunak becomes prime minister; and a man of African heritage becomes foreign secretary. The Crown remains the unifying symbol of the imperial legacy: Long live the King, long live the Queen. And now, let the prime minister and his government come forward and tell us of their ideas, their plans—and what comes next.
There is little that is truly new in the land of the English. A woman in government is perfectly ordinary, as is a woman leading the opposition. So too are dark skin and Muslim names. The world is changing, my dear—from New York to London, from Mamdani to Sunak.
Yet among the English—or in the “British Isles,” to use the old family name—change tends to unfold at a measured pace. It is part of that tradition of patience that outsiders call “English coldness.” The English themselves call it reason, democracy, and ritual.
And when fear took hold, they tried to close their islands to the dreamers slipping across the seas. They elected Mr Boris Johnson to take up residence in Downing Street. When he went to sleep there on his first night, accompanied by a girlfriend rather than a wife, he may have imagined himself to be Winston Churchill.
But sleeping in Downing Street is not enough to make one Churchill. You must also win a world war—and defeat that loudmouthed corporal, Adolf Hitler.
I cannot remember when exactly I stopped bothering to memorize the name of Britain’s latest prime minister, having concluded that the matter was hardly worth the effort. Perhaps it began with Boris Johnson.
Vanity is a bad sign. Sometimes, it is also banal—as Hannah Arendt suggested in her reflections on the banality of evil.
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