There is one thing that the British do better than any other nation, or at least used to, and that is satire. A dictionary definition is “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” Taking the mickey was not just a cultural trait; it was an instinct.

From Hogarth’s paintings, the cartoons of Punch, to the sitcom in the age of television, the tradition peaked with Yes Minister, Spitting Image, Dad’s Army (and many more in fact) and showed that while humour may be universal, we were distinguished by the ability to laugh at ourselves most of all. Most cultures happily lampoon others, but none can surpass the ability of the British to laugh at themselves.

What Salmon Rushdie called “the new human right to take offence” is bringing to an end the expression of that characteristically British trait. There will be no “Monty Python’s Life of Mohammed” nor will they be rolling in the aisles in Bradford if someone was brave enough to make such a film. Yet, a certain Boris Johnson, in his former incarnation as a Telegraph columnist, said that Islam would not be integrated in Britain until they were rolling in the aisles in Bradford. Years later he returned to his theme in a way, based I submit on the British instinct to take the mickey, with his now famous quip likening wearers of the burka to “letter boxes”. 

I am no fan of Johnson – or jellyfish Johnson as my wife calls him – but I believe his quips are genuine expressions of a deep British trait. I suspect he really would like to see “Monty Python’s Life of Mohammed” made and for everyone to roll in the aisles. But, like the rest of us, he does not know how to rescue Britain. Commentators speculate that covid has changed him and accounts for the lack of boosterism that once made him popular.

I suspect that he has found that he cannot return Britain to its character, that the task is too Herculean, and his haunted look is the look of defeat on getting his hands on the levers of power and starkly seeing their limitations which have become his limitations now. Instead, weak and cowardly as he is, he simply appeases his hippie wife to pass the time until he works out what to do after leaving number 10.

At Monday’s press conference he looked conflicted. His liberal optimistic instincts were there but with so much caution and embedded in mixed messaging, not because he was unsure of “the science” – there is no doubt it is now or never to open up –  but, I suggest, because he now knows the power of the forces against him, that nexus of intellectuals, journalists, news editors and civil servants that shape the nation’s narratives. He felt he could only express himself equivocally. No quips anymore, no bon mots. In short, he has instincts still, but, unlike Margaret Thatcher for example, he has no deep, driving convictions to give him strength of purpose.

So, my country is gone. I can no longer take the mickey out of whomever I like. That defining trait of individual liberty has ended. Even in 2016, when there was just enough of us left to tip the referendum result, the writing was on the wall with the narrowness of the result. We looked across the channel at the technocratic elite, at their disdain for the constraints of democracy, and said no.

What I did not see at the time, or did not see clearly, was that our home-grown technocratic elite, the Blairite Mandarin class of Sir Humphreys, was potentially worse than the continental variety, or, more accurately perhaps, how forlorn was the hope that once we got back control our political class could and would sort them out. The failure of multiculturalism, the unconstrained population growth through immigration, and the economics of globalism, may appear to have provoked Brexit, but they are secondary phenomena, a consequence of something more fundamentally wrong: the British establishment.

It is the mandarins. They retire to become masters of Oxbridge colleges, alongside newspaper editors they used to dine with, that feed the next generation of mandarins and continue to sit on this and that quango, influencing the selection of the chairman of this and that, and who while in the civil service controlled their ministers. We could debate the contours of the establishment and quibble about the exact extent of their influence, but there is no space for that. What I will do is give you two quotes, two very telling quotes.

The first is by David Goodhart. We all read his 2017 book ‘The Road to Somewhere’, but he had previously written a book on immigration back in 2013. He mentioned a dinner in 2011 at an Oxford college:

“When I said to my neighbour, one of the country’s most senior civil servants, that I wanted to write a book about why liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration, he frowned and said, ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration … I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.

I was surprised to hear this from such a senior figure in a very national institution and asked the man sitting next to the civil servant, one of the most powerful television executives in the country, whether he believed global welfare should be put before national welfare, if the two should conflict. He said he believed global welfare was paramount and that therefore he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham”

A more revealing and damning passage is hard to find. 

My second quote is ten years later (last May in fact). Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, told his civil servants (on a Zoom call) that 

“civil servants should accept government policy on some issues but on others …it’s for us … to be stewards….” and that while they should take account of ministerial views they do not “have to follow them slavishly on every particular issue”.

The mandarins are like Japanese knotweed, strangling native species and almost impossible to eradicate. We can still laugh at old episodes of Yes Minister, but the comedy is Jim Hacker.

Sir Humphrey Appleby is no laughing matter at all.

 

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[Ed: Frederica’s latest essay: “A Grumpy Old Woman Writes … ” will be published tomorrow!]

 

 

Photo by twm1340

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