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Friday of the Oval Test 2018: Boris Johnson booed

In Uncategorized on September 6, 2024 by kmflett

Boris Johnson is out of Parliamentary politics and his memoir of the period from 2019 is due in October.

The Friday of the Oval Test marks the 6th anniversary when Johnson, ever unpopular, was booed by the crowd. Test Match cricket crowds are not noted for socialist leanings (myself and a few others aside) so that provides a benchmark as to exactly how unpopular.

Booing of figures of authority is 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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