Boris the Baptist

As you could tell from the London Olympic opening ceremony, we now have a post-modern public culture. We are ironical, eclectic, genre-subverting, fusion-cooking, mixing up Chelsea Pensioners and lesbian kisses. We are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. The only politician who ‘gets’ any of this is Boris. He can mix Virgil and James Bond, a posh accent and street cred, conservative politics and a liberal spirit. Mr Cameron is the moderniser, but Boris is the post-moderniser.

So sayeth Charles Moore in the Telegraph this weekend.

There are many people who understand post-modernism better than me; people who have written whole books about it. And to them I say “Big Mac and fries please”. HA HA.

Whatever it means, Moore is right. For example, the generation which includes the prime minister has its idea of the 1980s defined as much by Five Star as by Margaret Thatcher, and as much by Five Star being called “fucking crap” on Going Live as by System Addict.

And every generation younger than that is similarly drenched in post-modern irony.

We are barely able to take listen to someone making a political or moral argument without writing them off as a fanatic or a hypocrite because relativism has become such a thoroughly ingrained habit.

Can you take seriously someone who sets themselves up as infallible, motivated only by noble desires, dedicated to nothing but public service and bettering the lot of their fellow men?

No, me neither. I am too silly, too overwhelmed by schadenfreude, too lazy – too post-modern – to regard that kind of a template for a human being with anything other than contempt.

Celebrities, on the other hand, are human - all too human.

So along comes Boris, the celebrity politician, and he is literally able to have a crowd of thousands chanting his name, surrounded by flags and flames – like the 20^th Century NEVER HAPPENED!

If everyone didn’t think Boris wasn’t serious, that would have been terrifying. So what was is he?

Boris Johnson is not a “one-off” or someone to whom the political rulebook doesn’t apply - he is a mutated virus. Along with Louise Mensch, he is the prototype of the next generation of celebrity politicians - he's John the Baptist for whatever kind of Jesus is coming next. By approaching us as celebrities, they are penetrating the defences we have put up against “politicians”.

They are reframing the terms of political discourse. The political parties are surely watching their apparently unique charisma at work and attempting to work out how to bottle it and routinise it. The question is, when the medium changes, what messages will we suddenly become susceptible to all over again?