Boris Johnson’s
“roaring lion” speech at this years’ Conservative Party conference was a bit like an early Christmas present. Not like a Christmas present you’d actually want to get, but more like a gift from somebody inspired by one of the madder verses of
The Twelve Days of Christmas. Not that the whole song's bonkers - you could imagine somebody being happy to receive, say, five gold rings, or even three French hens (either dead, if the recipient was a non-vegetarian, or alive, if gifted to somebody with enough land to keep them on, who enjoyed fresh eggs and the sound of contented chickens scratching about in the dirt). But Johnson's offering was more like “You’ll never guess what he went and got me. Ten bloody lords a-leaping. What was he thinking?”
In this spirit, Johnson gave us all one lion a-roaring. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it’s not exactly the most practical gift. After a couple of days’ roaring, the neighbours will be wanting to kill me and, anyway, exactly where am I supposed to keep a ruddy great lion? And even if I can afford to keep it in bloody hunks of red meat, how, exactly, am I supposed to feed it and clear up all the lion poo without getting my head bitten off?
OK, I know it’s not a real lion, just a figure of speech, but a metaphorical lion’s still not much of a gift to me, or to anybody else.
The intention was presumably to make the audience feel good, but the metaphor’s getting pretty tired. When it comes to the personification of the nation, I reckon we hit peak lion in the high noon of Empire, somewhere between the mid Nineteenth Century and the outbreak of the First World War. When I was a lad of seventeen or so, our history text books frequently illustrated the history of Empire and great power rivalry with unfunny
Punch cartoons from that period, depicting the mighty British lion, usually lording it over the inferior symbolic beasts of lesser nations (the Gallic cockerel, the Russian bear, or – after 1871 - the German eagle). In the cartoons, colonised, or non-European people generally didn’t warrant a heraldic national symbol of their own, in which case the British lion was shown menacing a racist caricature of a villainous Fu Manchu-style Chinaman, or a wide-eyed, cringing African.
You can see how this sort of stuff might appeal to a man at the centre of the British establishment who still thinks it’s fine to dismiss black people as
"piccaninnies" with an
"ancestral dislike of the British Empire" and fancies himself in the role of tousle-maned British lion in a “l'état, c'est moi” sort of way. But you’d have to be a century or so behind the zeitgeist* for this sort of dusty rhetoric to really set your pulse racing and your spirit soaring.
Which brings me to the intended audience – presumably elderly, reactionary nationalists, more interested in the vague symbolism of roaring lions and taking back poorly-defined forms of control than in the boring nitty-gritty of actual policy. Compare and contrast with the sort of stuff coming from
the hapless Team May since the election. At least there was a belated decision to promise to do something about stuff like house building, council housing and student debt, because it’s just occurred to them that young people loaded down with debt, but without a hope in hell of buying, or even affordably renting a place of their own won’t be the next generation of Tory voters. It might not have been well delivered, colourful, or convincing, but in terms of content, May's conference speech was still streets ahead of Johnson's empty bluster.
What we’re looking at here is triangulation – nicking some of your political opponents’ most popular policies for tactical advantage, or, in crusty old Tory huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ language, “Shooting the other chap’s fox.” It’s a tactic which has worked in the past, but now it’s running into trouble. This is the problem. Since the glory days when Cameron and Osborne controlled the political narrative, the Tories have triangulated not once, but twice. First, they tried to outflank Ukip by stealing their nationalist clothes, as Boris the Lion King is still trying to do. Then, after Labour turned from unelectable no-hopers into a clear and present electoral danger, they decided to triangulate against Labour with a new offer for the youth.
The trouble is, when you triangulate not with one, but with two, opposing groups, with mutually incompatible outlooks and interests, what you end up with isn’t triangulation, but a love triangle. Just like
that old serial love rat, Boris, the Tory party is wooing two partners at once. One is Eurosceptic and old, often with a property-owning stake in the baby boomer settlement and a lingering suspicion of diversity and free movement. The other is young, cosmopolitan and socially liberal, but insecure, debt-ridden and with no experience of the housing ladder, except when they’re being ripped off by private landlords. Neither partner is going to take kindly to the Tories running off with the other, but there’s no way the Tories can keep them both happy at once. These people are playing a zero sum game that can only end in tears.
Of course, this isn’t just a Conservative problem. The Labour party, too, is trying to hold together a coalition of youthful Europhiles and older Europhobes, but for now, they seem to be making a better job of it, the two other sides of the love triangle each apparently loving Jeremy to bits and believing, against all reason, that he’ll exclusively love only their side back in return. It must be making Boris, that floppy-haired old Don Juan, green with envy to see how a man who looks like a mild-mannered geography teacher can apparently keep the other two parties in his own love triangle in adoring thrall, rather than being involved in the bitter psychodrama the Tories are going through as they try to sweet-talk both Ukippers and da yoof. Of course,
it can’t last – eventually, even dream-boat Jeremy will have to do something disappoint one or other of his two sets of admirers. But he’s not in power yet, so he doesn’t actually have to do anything which would really upset either one of his two constituencies at the moment.
The Tories, who are (sort of) in power, don’t have any such luxury. They actually have to do stuff, whilst trying to placate each suspicious group by telling it what it thinks it wants to hear. Unfortunately both messages, reactionary nationalism and a re-discovery of the pre-Thatcherite social democratic consensus, are quite different from the globalist free-marketing There Is No Alternative swagger the Tories were rocking just a couple of years back, so both messages sound desperate and insincere, as well as inconsistent, to their intended audiences.
I don’t know how this will all end, although “badly” seems to cover most of the possibilities.
*Even
if the Labour Party really were stuck in the 1970s, as the Tories love to claim, that would still put them a comfortable hundred years or so ahead of Empire Boy, the Conservatives' current Great White Hope.
