To the outside world, Boris Johnson has become a faithful representation of Britain’s current foreign policy. Chaotic, implausible, blustering and incompetent, he is an honest reflection of the government’s strategic vision of Britain’s place in the world at this moment. At home he is an exemplar of an altogether different dysfunction.
That he was made the nation’s chief diplomat – a fact greeted with a mixture of mirth and disbelief by allies and foes alike – and remains in the job, clearly illustrates how the privileges of gender, race and class consciously accrued, fiercely protected and gratefully inherited, can promote incompetence, elevate arrogance and exclude alternatives. His trajectory illustrates the way that wealth, connections and cultural complicity conspire, in ways both clear and concealed, to ensure that to those who are already born with a great deal even more will be given.
If there are any doubts on that score just imagine, for a moment, that Johnson had been born black and female.