Will Downing Fall in Love Again

When allegations arose some years ago that old prime minister David Cameron had behaved obscenely with a hog'south head during a Bullingdon Guild event while at the Academy of Oxford, he distanced himself from the controversial group, proverb:

These were the years afterwards the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, when quite a few of u.s.a. were carried abroad by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence.

Cameron has denied the accusation and appears to have successfully moved on from that specific scandal. Merely that "Oxford existence" fantasy lingers in the air now that Boris Johnson, Cameron's swain Bullingdon alumnus, is in accuse.

Waugh's novels come to listen virtually daily nether the current administration, particularly in the fallout from Partygate. Johnson'south pandemic Downing Street sounds very much like the kind of place a character from Waugh's universe would spend time – where, merely like Brideshead's Charles Ryder, i is "constantly seen drunkard in the middle of the afternoon," property along on obscure Classical references amid inordinately expensive room furnishings.

With every passing day, listening to Johnson talk about the Partygate scandal – and, more to the point, listening to him avoid talking about it – feels more and more like reading a Waugh novel. All the narrative hallmarks of high-Tory literature are in prove in today's Westminster.

High-Tory Literature

Waugh was part of the interwar "Vivid Young Things" – a literary social prepare including Nancy Mitford and several of the Churchills. The amuse of the Bright Young Things' literary language comes from its whimsical ephemerality. It sparkles with wit simply doesn't necessarily convey anything serious. Take this, from Nancy Mitford: "I take just e'er read ane book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's then frightfully good I've never bothered to read some other." The six Mitford sisters created and conversed in their ain language, "Boudledidge". Rather than defer to modernist or realist literary conventions, Mitford refused, as Waugh once wrote, "to recognise a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language".

In his early on novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, Waugh draws inspiration from this globe. Traces of the Bright Immature Things are everywhere, from Waugh's semi-fantastical characters to depictions of the hedonistic backlog of the roaring 20s. Waugh's characters inhabit a "globe of superlatives," to quote Mitford's novel, The Pursuit of Love.

A cartoon of Evelyn Waugh on the inside cover of one of his novels. Alamy

Waugh's most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, charts the relationship between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder from the moment the pair meet at Oxford in the 1920s until the second world war. Sebastian occupies the space in the Venn diagram where the day-to-day existence of the British upper form overlaps with surrealism. He has the much-satirised attachment to his nanny and to a teddy bear called Aloysius, which accompanies him to university and which Sebastian treats as a person.

Much of Sebastian's eccentricity is conveyed in his language. At one bespeak, Anthony Blanche, another character in the novel and a fellow Oxford pupil, asks Charles:

Tell me candidly, have y'all ever heard Sebastian say anything you take remembered for five minutes? […] when honey Sebastian speaks information technology is like a niggling sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipage, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and and so – phut! vanished, with null left at all.

Information technology is hard non to compare this to Johnson, whose style of public speaking is identical to the "bluster and zest" and "soapsuds" of Waugh'due south characters. While Anthony affects a stammer to appear posher and more than interesting, Johnson recently made car noises in a baroque spoken communication, before going on a tangent well-nigh Peppa Hog, whom he described equally a "Picasso-like hairdryer". He was, at the time, supposed to be delivering a serious accost to the nation's concern leaders.

While, in Brideshead, characters use insults like "cretinous porcine sons", Johnson in one case called the London Associates "bully supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies". He uses supposedly comical Etonian slang – "spaffing" – to describe the serious thing of coin spent investigating child abuse.

Decline and Fall

Both Waugh's fiction and Johnson'due south premiership are underpinned by semi-fantastical narratives where the reader/observer tin can never quite believe what is being said – whether it'due south on the page or in parliament.

In Brideshead, when asked how much of what Anthony says can be trusted, Sebastian replies: "I shouldn't call back a word. That'southward his great charm." Similarly, we should inquire how nosotros can trust a prime number government minister for whom political language is manifestly unserious. While, depending on your point of view, Johnson's whimsical linguistic communication may be agreeable or ostentatious, information technology is also slippery and intentional.

When we expect nothing but comedically exaggerated rhetoric from Johnson, the line between artistic licence and downright lying is eroded.

Protesters take aim at the Partygate scandal. Alamy

This was articulate during the Brexit argue – from alleging that the quintessential British breakfast-stuff, kippers, was nether threat due to EU regulations to arguing that the EU wanted to ban bendy bananas, Johnson used whimsy and humour to serve his political goal. Now, by request the public to accept that he does not know the difference between a party and a "work upshot" Johnson one time again makes the obvious seem insubstantial.

But Johnson's semantic sleight of hand and ability to brand us doubt the obvious – when is a party not a political party? – is unpleasing. When asked by the BBC whether he will resign if it is plant that he broke the police, Johnson said: "As soon as I have something meaningful to say about this … I will make sure I do it."

If Partygate has taught the states anything, it is that the British public has had enough of Johnson's Waugh-esque ramblings. The question is whether he is even capable of uttering "something meaningful".

Will Downing Fall in Love Again

Source: https://theconversation.com/partygate-revisited-why-boris-johnsons-downing-street-is-starting-to-sound-like-an-evelyn-waugh-novel-177274

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