It's a bumper year for boors in Britain

LONDON — We Britons like to tell ourselves that Donald Trump is a uniquely American beast: loud as a big-rig truck; as hungry for esteem as any WWF trash-talker, or Jay Gatsby, or America itself.

He is the latest in a line of American politicians posturing as gunslingers, gum-chewers and pussy-grabbers, whose elevating of these poses to a shorthand for authenticity was always going to come to this. He is an archetype from the darkest recesses of the American mind: a primal ancestor in a suit, parading ignorance, parochialism, egotism and lack of refinement as the new virtues.

And yet, even as we scratch our heads at the great American self-deception that is President Trump, we Brits are sleepwalking into our own. For all the formalities that dominate Westminster, British politics has long had its own critical core of boorishness, clownishness and hucksterism.

Historically, British boors have shared little with their American cousins — ours has been a wilier boorishness, obscured by ironic detachment. But as Trump makes his long-delayed state visit this week — which will include a banquet at Buckingham Palace on Monday with the queen he dared walk in front of last summer — the lines have begun to blur. The president might just arrive in a political landscape increasingly fashioned in his own obnoxious image, but with posher accents.

Look no further than Trump's main British cheerleader, Brexit Party founder and newly re-elected member of the European Parliament he despises, Nigel Farage. In his previous stint in that body (he has yet to win election to his own Parliament), Farage spoke of the European Union president as having the "charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk."

This is cleverer than Trump's characterization of the former vice president as "Sleepy Joe" Biden, "a low IQ individual," but still the boor's blunt instrument.

Competing with Farage for chief clown is Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London who has his eye on No. 10 Downing Street. The Conservative lawmaker, Brexiteer and columnist has parlayed a crusty persona and flair for off-the-cuff remarks into a hugely successful political and media career. Like Trump before 2016, Johnson's cover was his image as a privileged buffoon — cartoonish but ultimately harmless. This has somehow afforded him the latitude to describe the queen's being greeted on a commonwealth visit by "flag-waving piccaninnies," and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's meeting "tribal warriors" with "watermelon smiles" on a trip to Congo.

Or is he?

This is a country where lines of decorum are so crucial, yet almost invisible to outsiders, that Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister, illustrated them with the telling difference between two almost — almost — interchangeable terms for badly behaved men: "In war a 'bounder' is a chap who goes to the Front, wins the Victoria Cross, then seduces his colonel's wife. But a 'cad' seduces his colonel's wife and never goes near the Front."

But Britain has a long history of indulging, even elevating, its political boors, though this is not always acknowledged.

They come with the swing of the pendulum. Margaret Thatcher's government of the 1980s pioneered proto-Trumpian levels of obnoxiousness precisely because so many of its supporters felt ecstatic liberation in overturning what they saw as a stuffy, Labour-dominated status quo. In a bonfire of values, appeals to things like decency and fairness seem quaint, absurd, outmoded.

Thatcher's attack dog, the Tory lawmaker Norman Tebbit, gained fame less for his work than for calling an opposition lawmaker a "flabby, fat, fornicating fool."

The Tories didn't have the field entirely to themselves, though. Blair's Labour government regarded boorishness as a feature, especially when dealing with the media. Alastair Campbell, the trash-talking former porn-writer head of Blair's strategic communications unit, was famous for his expletive-laced broadsides.

The cut and thrust of parliamentary debate is notorious for bringing out the boor even in normally mild-mannered members of Parliament. In 2017, Tory MP Nicholas Soames was forced to apologize for what he called a "friendly canine salute" after making barking noises at a female MP as she rose to speak in the chamber.

Now, with neoliberal economics in the firing line, cynicism about politicians rising across the board, Brexit and Scottish independence referendums whipping up partisan passions, and no shortage of chancers only too ready to surf that wave by parading their "anti-elitist" credentials, it's a bumper year for Trumpian boorishness in Britain.

But while both Atlantic political tribes wear obnoxiousness as a marker of regular-Joe authenticity, there remain differences. British politicians' boorishness frequently comes coded in an acute consciousness of class and of the latitude afforded by eccentricity. Traditional British boorishness was born of privilege and the drive to undermine others as not-quite members of an "in-group" whose entry qualifications are indefinable ("If you have to ask, then you're not one of us"). Thus the dominance of irony, snobbery, a vague code of manners.

Conversely, traditional American boorishness was rooted more in the need to create that in-group by declaring what it was that made its members better. America was written into existence — Declarations, Proclamations, Amendments, New Deals — reflecting a curious consciousness that "Who We Are" is still up for grabs.

Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," said in a scornful tone, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." This is the root of Johnson's linguistic shadowboxing. He wrote a limerick portraying Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as having sex with a goat, and likened Muslim women who wear face-covering veils to "bank robbers" and "letter boxes."

Yet still he rises. Time and again, he reacts to censure like a naughty boarding-school boy. As if those words were just ventriloquism, just a bit of stage campery. The play-actor takes the hit, the politician escapes unharmed.

Farage, meanwhile, has always sought to mask his boorishness with a conspiratorial wink — you half-expect him to lean through the privet hedge and warn you, sotto voce, about your new neighbors. But the mask has a habit of slipping. The pint of beer, easy grin and flags tell one story. The former school contemporaries who claim to recall him marching through English villages singing Hitler Youth songs (he has long denied this) tell another.

Farage has begun reading from the most nakedly confrontational sections of Trump's playbook. The last two months saw him holding rallies in deprived provincial towns and cities across Britain, where supporters shouted "Lock her up!" at the name of Prime Minister Theresa May, reporters were confronted and howled down for being part of the "fake news" media, and politicians and voters from other parties — along with those who oppose Brexit — were decried by ralliers as unpatriotic traitors.

Let's not forget Jacob Rees-Mogg: Eton-educated, of inherited fortune, and part MP, part Victorian period-costume sideshow. In Rees-Mogg's world, Boer War concentration camps were no worse than Glasgow, same-sex marriage is an affront to God, and E.U. membership is "vassalage" for Britain. Even admiring parliamentary sketch writers call him "the honourable Member for the Early 20th Century."

America's national myths about straight-talking mavericks found their nightmarish apotheosis in Trump, but Britain's comforting delusions are coming home to roost, too. In Farage and Johnson's combined wake, as in Trump's, there's a whole pack of sea lions — boors-to-order, vying to outdo one another. Katie Hopkins, Paul Joseph Watson and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon galumph across YouTube, an endless pileup of obnoxiousness, victim-posturing and conspiracy theories.

Convicted fraudster Yaxley-Lennon chose his character as carefully as any political brand strategist: Adopting the name "Tommy Robinson" was his attempt to harness working-class sympathies for the common conscripted "Tommy" soldiers of World War I trenches and to cast himself as a son of Robin Hood.

Trumpism both devours this and generates it. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has working dates with Johnson and engages in public courtship rituals with Yaxley-Lennon. Trump has presented Farage as a guest of honor at his rallies. Their surrogates have begun working together to counter anti-Trump protests in their own boorish way. Last summer, the Trump-as-baby blimp that greeted the president's low-key "working visit" to London was countered by British Trump fans with their own balloon, an apparently racist caricature of Sadiq Khan, London's liberal anti-Trump mayor.

Trump's upcoming state visit promises to be many things. Dignified is not one of them.