Boris Johnson & booing. It’s a great British tradition
Boris Johnson has been booed again
As Johnson endeavours to return to British politics after another holiday (he remains an MP at the moment) reports suggest he was booed while getting on the plane. It’s a great British tradition
One name for this is Rough Music, a community custom, where transgressors against a generally held moral code were singled out for ridicule. It was by no means a universally progressive tradition, as E P Thompson study into it (Customs in Common) made clear.
A tradition of effigies and sometimes the burning of them fed into the wider area of charivari or rough music a wider form of protest, involving discordant music and general uproar.
According to the social historian Robert Storch in reaction to the 1872 Licensing Act it was almost decided in Exeter to burn an effigy of the Home Secretary but instead there was a chorus of groans. From the 1870s Storch notes shopworkers burnt effigies of employers who refused to join in with early closing times
As late as 1887 an inmate of Chelsea Workhouse was charged with making an effigy of the master as a protest about poor food. The judge in the Police Court, aquitting the inmate, told the master ‘public characters like you don’t mind a little ridicule. It’s the penalty of greatness.
Perhaps Boris Johnson, great or not, will grasp the point. But probably not.
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