This Christmas, spare a thought for those less fortunate than you.
I’m thinking, especially, of all those losing losers who have been driven to apoplexy by the Conservatives’ massive victory in the UK general election.
They wanted a Marxist Prime Minister. They believed they were going to get one in the form of crusty has-been Jeremy Corbyn. Instead what they got is their worst nightmare: the birth of Britain’s very own Trumpian revolution, in the form of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Yes, I know some of you have reservations about how genuinely conservative Boris is going to be. But since it’s Christmas, let’s banish all unpleasantness and think only of happy things: the tears, wailing and abject misery of the left as it tries — and fails utterly — to come to terms with the scale of the crushing defeat it has just experienced.
Here is privately-educated cartoon communist and feminist Laurie Penny (who, before she moved to the U.S. to become a screenwriter, popped up fairly regularly as one of the BBC’s go-to lefties, operating under the handle ‘Penny Red’).
Boris Johnson is cut from the Trump mold, a shiftless spoilt aristocrat posing as a man of the people from his stagnant pool of privilege, the sleazy con-man, the blustering moral black hole on the political event horizon.
and
People are going to die. People are going to live shorter, meaner lives. Communities on the brink of collapse will implode. We’re going to have to try and hold it together through these years.
Here is eco evangelist George Monbiot, explaining that the reason the Conservatives won is that the proletariat were yet again duped into voting against their own interests by the evil, Russian-backed, far-right, capitalist hegemony:
Here’s an angry Nitin Sawhney — world-renowned composer of Indian lounge music — trying to get Katie Hopkins banned from Twitter (or imprisoned, in his dreams) for being rude about a Corbynista grime artiste:
Here is leftist commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, describing how she was reduced to tears in a supermarket by the Boris Johnson victory.
Here is a man who used to make his living in a tight t-shirt with his man-boobs showing, telling anyone who would listen that Brexit was bad m’kay:
We could, of course, go on and on this vein, gleefully listing all the lefty semi-celebrities who have been unhinged by Boris and who are now running round in circles like tigers chasing their tails till the point where they’ll eventually turn to butter.
But to dwell to excess on lefty misfortune would be greedy: like having too much cream and brandy butter with your third helping of Christmas pudding.
Suffice to say that one of the surest signs that Boris Johnson’s victory is a very good thing and not a bad thing is the effect it has had on the forces of the regressive left.
Politics, as Andrew Breitbart used to say, is downstream from culture. He was absolutely right and it’s why, I believe, it will be a mistake if we set too much store by what Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration does or doesn’t do over the next five or ten years.
Some of its policies — I’m liking the sound of its proposed free ports in the regions — will be effective; others — anything it does which has anything to do with ‘combating climate change’, for example — will be a complete waste of space.
But politics was ever thus. It is in the nature of governments — even ones wearing the conservative label; even Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s, for heaven’s sake — to waste money on an epic scale, doing things which would be much better left to the private sector.
What matters far more than politics, though, is the surrounding culture. It’s here, I believe, that we are going to experience the most important benefits of the Boris Johnson revolution.
Boris is an optimist, a patriot, a lover of the good things in life — wine, women, song, fast cars, Greek epic poetry… He has no time for the puritanism of the left, nor for the narrow reductivism of identity politics, nor for constraints on freedom of speech.
Whenever I speak to ordinary, non-political people about Boris, the reaction is always the same: they grin. He can be a bit naughty, they think, and maybe not every one of his promises is to be taken literally. But they’re prepared to go along with him because he’s a jaunty, charming cove they can relate to because they can imagine themselves having a drink with him and enjoying a bit of banter, just like we all used to be able to do when Britain was a free country.
Boris Johnson feels like the Restoration of Charles II after far, far too long under the grim, Christmas-banning Puritans.
We felt this, very much, at a Libertarian Drinks we had in Worcester before Christmas — at, where else?, the local branch of Wetherspoons. [* footnote for U.S. readers: chain of friendly pubs where they serve really, really cheap beer, run by a cheerfully pro-Brexit hero entrepreneur called Tim Martin, who deserves to get a knighthood in the New Year Honours.]
It was an extraordinary, varied crowd which included a vicar, a gas salesman, a soldier, a philosophy professor, a graphic designer, a retired nuts and bolts manufacturer, a council’s financial officer. What we all had in common was that for years we’ve lived in trepidation of the kind of bitter, aggressive, priggish, self-righteous, bullying Social Justice Warriors like the ones I mentioned at the beginning.
We don’t fear these people as individuals — why would you? They’re jumped up nobodies with delusions of adequacy — but we’re very much wary of the collective power they’ve accumulated in the last decade or so. They operate in a world where it is all too easy to destroy someone’s career, deprive them of their livelihood, ruin the reputation on the flimsiest of pretexts: you only have to consider, for example, how Nobel-prizewinner Tim Hunt was monstered and destroyed purely because a grievance-seeking, leftist activist had chosen to misunderstand a joke he made at a conference.
But at this years’ Libertarian Drinks there was a sense that the tide is turning, that we’re starting to get our country back from the small but highly influential minority of leftists who have held it hostage.
They called us ‘far-right’, ‘racist’, ‘alt-right’, ‘gammon’, and ‘Nazi’. They said that we’re stupid because we didn’t all read gender-studies and environmental sciences at university. They accused us of hating women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, gay people, transsexuals. They tried — and largely succeeded — to make us tread on eggshells every time we opened our mouths for fear that we might commit some microaggression that might get us cancelled.
And now it turns out that we needn’t have worried after all because we’re the normal people and they are the freaks. I’m sure I’m not describing anything here that American readers won’t already recognise from their own experiences with Donald Trump.
Never mind Trump’s policies, some of which are good, and some of which are not so good: what most matters about the Trump presidency is that it has freed that neglected constituency — people who are patriotic and hard-working and independent and who speak their mind — to feel happy in their skin and to realise that they are not, after all, deplorables but the silent majority.
Boris Johnson is going to have the same effect on Britain as Donald Trump has on the U.S.
They’re different people, with different styles, but they’re both going to make their countries great again.
That’s why I shall be toasting them both this Christmas and why you should too.
Merry Christmas, Bozza! Merry Christmas, the Donald!
Not only is it what they deserve but, even more importantly than that, it’s the kind of sentiment guaranteed to make a thousand thousand bitter leftists choke on their egg nog.