To his fans, Boris Johnson is an icon of easy-going, even permissive, bouncy bounteousness. He is seen that way in part because of a strategy he has adopted since his time as a journalist reporting on the European Union. During that time, among numerous other pieces mocking EU bureaucracy and interference in national affairs, he highlighted a sinister EU plot to ban prawn cocktail crisps.
There was no such plot; in reality, British civil servants had mis-read the EU document in question. But that didn’t matter. It enabled Johnson to stand up for freedom of choice — consumer choice — and to make that unbridled consumer choice look English, as opposed to silly bureaucratic rules, which came to look European, stuffy, and uptight. He probably also knew that prawn cocktail crisps were a slap in the face for the metropolitan elite who would — and did, reliably — sneer at prawn cocktails, let alone their reincarnation as a snack food.
By championing them, and looking very like a man who enjoyed them, Boris Johnson made himself a member of a class — indeed, he almost created the class he came to exemplify. The class in question has acquired an abusive name, and it’s not coincidental that it is the name of a food.
For his foes, Boris Johnson is a gammon, and gammon is a contentious word for the visible class of people characterised not only by being members of the white Anglo-Saxon race, but also by their entitlement, sentimental self-pity, xenophobia, English (not British) patriotism, and, above all, by their constant tendency to fly into a rage that leaves them scarlet in the face. Johnson, apoplectic at the thought of losing prawn crisps, made himself gammon-in-chief. Gammon is the antithesis of a health food, strong in flavour and salt and fat. Gammon is also, relatively, a cheap food. It’s the kind of food that used to leaven a diet mostly composed of tasteless carbohydrates like potato or boiled grains.
Prawn cocktail crisps, unlike gammon, are an ersatz imitation of something you might order in a restaurant. Admittedly, public schoolboys have always eaten more than their fair share of junk food, and there may actually be a natural bond between the working classes and the upper classes: both dislike the interfering, puritanical middle-class who are always trying to curtail other people’s pleasures “for their own good”.
Johnson’s prawn cocktail crisps campaign was also the beginning of the campaign of restorative nostalgia that has brought him to Downing Street. In her new book, Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum pinpoints restorative nostalgia as central to the appeal of the new nationalist right in Poland, Spain and Hungary, and also in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work of Svetlana Boym, Appelbaum explains that restorative nostalgics do not want to contemplate or learn from the past; they want “the cartoon version of history, and they want to live in it, right now”.
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