England will have no-one left to bully

PERHAPS the best guide to another person’s soul is how they use language. The words others use allow us a glimpse of their true selves. To assess the soul of the Tory Party right now, through the language its leaders use, is to catch sight of something ugly and cruel, stupid and mean, vindictive and dangerous.

It’s a damned soul, a damaged soul, a soul in torment. These metaphors are fitting. The mad, cursed agonies of the Tory Party are a reflection of the death spiral that English nationalism now finds itself in as the Brexit psychodrama enters the final moments of its final act.

For, if there’s one thing the Tory Party still stands for, it’s English nationalism and English exceptionalism. The party Johnson leads is a bitter little husk, burning with fury and hard at the centre like a dying star ready to implode.

I care nothing for the Tory Party and its agonies – but I do care for the English people, locked in the Conservatives’ deadly embrace. They don’t deserve this.

Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales can escape – and probably will sooner rather than later – but English voters are hostage to this madness forever.

Even if Johnson is defenestrated or the Tories lose the next Westminster election, England is forever Brexitland, with all the dark psychological flaws that now entails.

Over the weekend, the language the

Tories employed showed us just how dark and clouded its soul has become.

Gunboats, we were told. Gunboats in the channel to threaten French fishing trawlers. Dear God, who would have ever thought it would come to this?

What joy there must be in the Kremlin as the United Kingdom is so shamefully reduced – screaming at its nearest friends and allies.

Agincourt happened in 1415. Napoleon is dead. Get over it. Of course, it was all just a grotesque distraction from the utter failure of Johnson to negotiate a sensible departure deal with the European Union.

Only the worst kind of charlatan – the dangerous kind – deploys the language of war and phoney patriotism to shore up their own failures. History is littered with such people and they all end in ruin.

The Tory use of language – and in particular Boris Johnson’s use of language – has become increasingly strange of late.

If this were a relative, by now you’d be frightened for their safety – expecting to find them talking to themselves in the bathroom mirror.

Speaking at a climate summit the other day, Johnson made some relatively anodyne promises about carbon emissions and green policies from

Britain. But then he went on: “We are doing this not because we are hair shirtwearing, tree-hugging, mung beanmunching eco freaks – although I’ve got nothing against any of those categories and mung beans are probably delicious.”

A year or so ago – certainly before he took office as PM – this might have been slightly amusing, for some. Now, it’s just odd – and not odd in an interesting way, odd in a disturbing way. It’s the mark of a distracted mind. He was there to talk about saving the planet, after all, not perform second-rate stand-up.

It’s also dog whistle politics of the worst kind. Look, he’s saying to the hard right, I’m not some environmental softie with a poster of Greta Thunberg on my wall. The green promises were a positive act, but Johnson – the destructive avatar of a destructive party – couldn’t help but fatally undermine what little good he’d just done.

Then we had briefings from his government – splattered across the front pages of right-wing hyperventilating newspapers – screaming about the German chancellor Angela Merkel wanting “Britain to crawl across broken glass” when it came to Brexit negotiations. First of all, that’s nonsense – but the language used is worse.

In Germany, the words “broken glass” have one inescapable resonance: the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis smashed

Jewish property in an orgy of violence in 1938. The use of that loaded term would be the equivalent of sneering about “clearances” to a Scot, or “famines” to the Irish. It was base. Disgusting.

On and on, this strange use of language goes. When England should have been talking about lockdowns, the UK Government led it into a wonderland where the only topic of debate was

Scotch eggs.

Back at the beginning of the Johnson circus, deals with the EU were said to be “oven-ready”. Everything comes wrapped in fevered language, childish language, hyped language – nothing is as it is, truth gets perverted and distorted. Perhaps it all began with lies on the side of a campaign bus.

This is what happens when a personality begins to disintegrate. The personality in question is that of English nationalism. The disintegrating personality is often sentimental too. We’ve suffered plenty of flag-wrapped nostalgia and evocations of wartime during the pandemic, but some Tory sentimentality brings to mind a lonely drunk. Matt Hancock’s phoney tears over the Covid vaccine seemed to sum up all these curdled and dark emotions.

Of course, Johnson has a long history of cruelty and hysteria in his language as well. “F**k business” – remember that? He likes to toy with racism and homophobia: “piccaninnies” and “watermelon smiles”, Muslim “letterboxes”, “tank-topped bum boys”.

Johnson is English nationalism – the two are indivisible. His staggering, flailing failure reflects English nationalism’s death shudders – it’s killing itself in front of our eyes.

This is all an English problem, we must remember that. This is nothing to do with the people of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. This drama, this madness – the miserable end that’s coming is down to England’s unresolved problems regarding its own sense of self and place in the world.

Put bluntly, England – unlike the rest of Britain – never got over the loss of empire and cannot face the truth that it’s just another middling nation. It’s a country, still hot for empire, looking to shove someone around – but it’s pitifully powerless. Bullies are often lonely.

These death shudders will have one last great ripple effect beyond Brexit – the break-up of the UK. It’s coming. The three other nations of these islands cannot stay attached to an England hellbent on such self-destruction.

All this is all an English problem, we must remember that. This is nothing to do with the people of Scotland