Men of destiny, don’t you just love them?

A man of destiny, bearing the divine summons, to lead us to the uplands
And, lucky Brits, we can choose either Jezza or BoJo

Right now in Britain, the big question is what to do with the clear majority in parliament against a hard Brexit, almost certainly reflecting a similar majority in the country at large.

I say ‘almost certainly’ since no one knows for sure. That’s because there’s such resistance to the notion of asking the electorate again whether, after three years of this chaos, they really still want to go ahead with Brexit at all.

Funnily enough, the people most against asking that question are the Brexiters. It’s almost as though they feared they might get an answer they didn’t like. It has to be said that they’re the ones always saying we should respect the will of the people, so it’s a little curious that they don’t want to check what that will is.

For those of us who think it was a mistake to set out down this road in the first place, our last chance to do something about it is to stop our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, taking us directly to the no-deal Brexit he’s threatening. One of the imaginative ways to achieve that is to bring down the government – it has a majority of one in the House of Commons, so it could be done – and replace it with a government of national unity.

The problem is that the political opposition in Britain is split between a tiny minority that believes that the only person who could lead such a government is the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the vast majority who think that he’d be hopeless. Especially hopeless at stopping Brexit because most of us suspect that at heart he remains a Brexiter himself.

Unfortunately, the tiny minority that supports him currently runs the Labour Party, which is the major party of Opposition. That doesn’t do much for the prospects of building a unity government.

Corbyn won’t stand aside. He claims this is because he’s a genuine socialist, while everyone else is just a lackey of capitalism, so what Britain truly needs right now is a government led by him. Unfortunately, some of us, perhaps rather cynically, believe that what really motivates him is that after 32 years spent on the backbenches of parliament, with never any prospect of his holding anything like power, he’s suddenly seen that he might be able to take the highest office in the land. Before, the only future he could see was a few more years as a protest politician no one very much had heard of and then retirement with a few million pounds and a generous pension, but now he can see Downing Street. The bug has bitten him. He feels it’s his right, now. He feels entitled.

In that respect, he strongly resembles his opposite number, Johnson. Of course, Johnson has much more experience of feeling entitled, having attended England’s most prestigious private school, Eton, before going to Oxford where he was a leading light in the Bullingdon Club. That was a group of super-wealthy students that made a habit of trashing restaurants or other students’ rooms, safe in the knowledge that one or other of the ‘daddies’ would be around the next day to pay for the damage.

With a background like that, what else could he imagine than that he was entitled to the greatest consideration the country could give him, and had only to wait for it to fall into his lap? Since the premiership now has, he must feel entirely vindicated in that belief.

Corbyn has less reason than Johnson to feel such things are his birthright. I imagine that he feels he’s earned it. That only means that Johnson believes he has a right to Downing Street despite having been a less than impressive Mayor of London and a downright catastrophic Foreign Secretary, whereas Corbyn, who’s never been anything very much, thinks he’s earned the same right by dint of doing nothing of great significance for a very long time (he’s 70).

Talking to his supporters, it’s clear that they, and Corbyn himself, think that he’s a man of destiny. Were they not mostly atheists, they’d probably see him as a man chosen by God to lead the British – his (God’s) chosen people – to the sunlit uplands. Since these are people whose roots are in the forties, seen as the golden age of the Labour Party, the uplands are presumably those of that time, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in George Orwell’s novels.

It has to be said that Boris thinks exactly the same of himself. He too is the man of destiny who will lead the British to their sunlit uplands, although in his case, his nostalgia is for the days of Empire, back in Victorian times, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Both men of destiny. Both ready to lead us to those fabled uplands. Guided by an inspiration nothing short of divine.

Just not from the same God.