A great gloom has fallen upon England. This pall of doom clouds and shrouds much of the public consciousness and public discourse, as if the nation were mourning its own future. It feels like the opposite of the feel-good factor.

The war in Europe hangs over all our heads. Its tragedies seem to speak to the entire nation in its proximity and in its familiarity. Indeed, there are those who have pointed out that white western audiences have perhaps felt rather more traumatized by this conflict on their doorsteps than when they have seen the suffering on the faces of Afghans or Iraqis. This conflict has brought war back home.

This has been reflected in much of the western and Anglophone media coverage. One Telegraph journalist, for example, lamented how Ukraine’s refugees "seem so like us." An Al Jazeera English anchor commented that Ukrainians "look like any European family that you would live next door to." A CBS reporter suggested that Ukraine was a rather more "civilized" country than most war zones we are used to seeing on television – precisely because it was a European nation. One ITV journalist echoed this thought when stressing that "this is not a developing, third-world nation" – that "this is Europe."

Wars in Europe tend to have this effect on those whose late-colonial mindsets have long presumed the prospect of armed conflict to be alien to their own continent. The First World War most famously enacted on a European stage those tensions that had been festering for a hundred years between imperial powers in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the planet. The compassion that Europeans continue to express – and to sincerely feel – in remembrance of that century-old slaughter underlines the variations in empathy experienced by the peoples across the world in the context of such factors as ethnicity, culture, and nationality.

This empathy gap is notoriously epitomized by the fact that news organizations in different countries will have different ways of ordering (that is, of prioritizing) how they report the casualties of major international disasters. For instance, a UK report of a plane crash will tend to start with the numbers of British deaths, followed by the nationals of predominantly white English-speaking nations, then European citizens – rounded off by those from the rest of the world.

This is not however to downplay the seriousness or the sincerity of the sympathy with which anyone reacts to the images on the news of the suffering of people with whose faces and lifestyles they can most easily identify.

There are also, of course, other factors currently in play that have been impacting the downbeat mood of the UK. The threat of this war escalating and spreading across the continent, and over the whole globe, inevitably preys upon the public mind, and in particular the fear of the conflict going nuclear. People are worried for their own lives and for their families’ lives. Here, these anxieties may seem rather less altruistic, but they are all the more real for that. There’s nothing at all trivial about Armageddon.

Intimations of environmental apocalypse also weigh heavily on the British psyche, thanks to the deficiencies of the current government’s unambitious energy strategy, announced last month, and to its failure to broker any meaningful deals when it hosted the crucial United Nations Climate Change Conference last November in Glasgow. We don’t just feel the threat of global warming; we feel the guilt for it too.

The UK is also immediately impacted by the ongoing experience of plummeting standards of living. Inflation is at a thirty-year high. Caps on domestic energy bills rose at the start of April. At the same time, a new form of taxation on wage incomes was introduced. Meanwhile, the price of petrol at the pumps has rocketed. Rates of pay in many sectors have failed to keep up with these rapid increases in the costs of living. Many ordinary working people can no longer afford to feed their families, heat their homes, and drive themselves to work and their children to school. 

The Daily Mirror newspaper last week claimed that more than five million people were now forced to choose between heating or eating and that within a few months more than half of British households will be unable to pay their bills.

This crisis only looks set to worsen in the months and years to come. In April, the International Monetary Fund reported economic projections which showed that the UK is set to enjoy the lowest level of post-pandemic recovery of all the nations in the G7. That same week, the World Bank warned of the onset of a global food supply crisis.

Britain is also having to endure the presence at the very top of government of a Prime Minister who has been forced to accept a penalty for law-breaking (the first in British history to have done so), who has lied to Parliament about his actions, who continues to offer shallow excuses for his dishonest and unlawful conduct, and who steadfastly refuses to resign. 

A motion in the House of Commons last month initiated a parliamentary inquiry into his apparent transgressions. Conservative Party chiefs tried to delay the debate and then did their best to ensure their backbenchers fell into line. As The Times newspaper had reported on April 20, "Tory whips ordered all MPs to be in Westminster to vote against a motion referring Johnson to a formal investigation by the Commons privileges committee for contempt." Yet the contempt that the Prime Minister continues to show for Parliament and for the people of his country seemed plain enough for all to see. This puffed-up, unseemly, temperamental, self-seeking, and self-promoting excuse for a leader has shown no regard for justice or truth, or for the obligations of his office; and even members of his own party have started to declare their discontent.

As one of his own MPs bravely admitted during that parliamentary debate, "it is utterly depressing to be asked to defend the indefensible." He seemed to sum up the weariness of the nation when he observed that "each time, part of us withers." Another Tory MP went on to describe a private meeting Mr. Johnson had held with his followers, in the immediate wake of his latest apology to parliament – in which the petulant Prime Minister had complained that the BBC and the Church of England were nicer about Vladimir Putin than they were about him – as "an orgy of adulation, a great festival of bombast." He added with some sadness that he could no longer "bear it". Yet another Conservative informed the Commons that he believed that dishonesty could not be tolerated "from anyone", while another argued that this was not a party-political matter and should therefore be referred to an independent parliamentary investigation.

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Although a couple of his supporters went so far as to invoke their own Christian beliefs in their attempts to explain their decisions to forgive their boss, the debate ended with the House of Commons resolved to refer Mr. Johnson to a formal inquiry as to whether he had lied to Parliament. He will the first Prime Minister ever to be subject to such a probe. 

This was a dismal day for British politics. As The Guardian newspaper’s lead headline announced the following morning, "MPs back 'lies' inquiry on day of humiliation for PM." This was the second time in a month that Boris Johnson had made history, although not in a way he might have wished. The following weekend The Observer newspaper quoted "top Tories" as saying the Prime Minister must go. The most that the Conservative Party chairman could say that day in defense of his boss was that Mr. Johnson’s removal would lead to instability. It was hardly a ringing endorsement.

However, despite the government’s woes, the opposition Labour Party continues to demonstrate its propensity for internal chaos and self-harm. It remains an utter shambles, with infighting between ideological factions continuing to tear it apart. Its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is an honest and intelligent lawyer and politician who has dedicated his life to the principles of justice, social justice, and integrity in public life. However, he has shown himself time and again unable to summon up the rhetorical passion or the policy commitments necessary to sway the long-suffering electorate to his side. It would be easier to be inspired by a dead sheep. The most interesting thing about him is his perfectly groomed hair. He looks like a Ken doll grown grey. He is dullness in a suit.

The choice between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson is not unlike the choice between, as Saint Paul might have said, a tinkling cymbal and a sounding brass: between a stuttering angel and a brazen liar. This is the basic choice that many voters in England – unable even to recall the name of the Liberal Democrat leader – will find themselves facing at local elections this week. Indeed, the growing success in recent years of nationalist movements in Scotland and Wales has been attributed, at least in part, to the failure of the UK’s main political parties to attract much interest from their electorates.

This dire situation has also led to an increasing distrust in democratic politics and in the structures of democracy itself. There is nothing particularly new in this: public trust in politics has been slipping away for decades. But the exponential acceleration of the decline of public trust in politics, precipitated by these shamelessly shady dealings at the heart of government, remains a profoundly troubling development.

The peak of the Covid crisis briefly united the nation. By contrast, the revelations in its aftermath as to the failings and hypocrisies of its leadership have proven extraordinarily alienating and divisive. 

The level of British political discourse descended to a new low when, towards the end of last month, one Sunday newspaper reported that several Conservative MPs had claimed that, because she could not match his parliamentary debating skills, the Labour Party’s deputy leader had been reduced to attempting to distract the Prime Minister with a view of her legs. Even Boris Johnson was obliged to condemn that degree of misogyny. One of his ministers supposed that parliament was "in a bad place right now." Allegations then emerged last week that a senior member of the Conservative frontbench had been seen by a female minister in the House of Commons viewing pornography on his mobile phone.

This culture of political malaise is not of course exclusive to the Palace of Westminster. While the threat of losing Scotland from the union continues to loom large, England’s nearest overseas neighbor last month edged closer than ever before to electing a far-right nationalist as its head of state. One Macron supporter told the BBC that he would not have been surprised if Marine Le Pen had won: "We've seen what happened with Brexit. We've seen what happened with Trump. Anything can happen in this crazy world." Emmanuel Macron’s victory saw his country’s lowest electoral turnout for more than half a century. This was not a vote in favor of democracy.

Meanwhile, this year’s platinum jubilee celebrations for Britain’s own head of state have been overshadowed by her own ailing health, a series of royal scandals – involving allegations of financial corruption, racial prejudice, and sexual assault – and general doubt as to the suitability of her eldest son to succeed her.

The news that Elon Musk – a caricature of a science fiction villain – has struck a deal to seize control of Twitter has done little to dissipate our sense of doom. The eccentric tech fiends' plans to dominate our planet and our universe have taken one step closer to fruition. He has just secured his channel of strategic comms.

How different things were twenty-five years ago when at the start of May 1997, a wave of positivity and celebration engulfed the nation and welcomed a new Prime Minister into Downing Street, following years of economic downturn, social inequality, and political sleaze. Yes, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, as the poet William Wordsworth once wrote of the French Revolution. (But we all know how that turned out.) That new Prime Minister was of course one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, known to his many friends as Tony. And we also all know how that turned out. 

Landslide victories – like those won by Blair in 1997 and by Johnson in 2019 – tend to corrupt leaders with a sense of their own incontrovertible authority. It is an authority that those leaders often come to abuse. 

Tony Blair’s moral crusades eventually led him toward the hubris and the horrors of his country’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq. That war, terrible in itself, has also come to justify subsequent military hostilities. Its visions of installing a new world order have been used to greenlight the tactics of regime change which have characterized the strategies of major players in global geopolitics ever since. Its legacy has undermined the integrity of sovereign states and the legitimacy of supranational institutions. It has changed the rules of war. It has destabilized everything.

By contrast, Boris Johnson’s lazy sins of omission are far less zealous in the scope of their ambitions. Yet they may prove just as damaging. The United Kingdom, under his premiership, has repeatedly failed to step up to its international responsibilities, whether in relation to Brexit, Covid-19, climate change, or the crises which have overtaken Afghanistan and Ukraine. His lack of any discernible moral compass has led his vanity, like his political soulmate Donald Trump, to make a mockery of the duties of his nation’s highest office and to transform that nation into an object of ridicule across the world. 

The mood of national optimism that once met Tony Blair’s election played its part in an over-confident Prime Minister’s metamorphosis from a pragmatic idealist into a dogmatic ideologue. It remains to be seen whether, conversely, the public pessimism prevalent in Britain today – if turned to anger rather than apathy – might have the momentum to uproot the cynical leadership which currently blights the outlook of the nation, and its faith in, and hopes for, a brighter future. 

Mr. Johnson is a capricious and puerile figure, a man who thinks, speaks, and acts like a child. It is well past time for his people and his party to reject such childish things.