Not to diminish the capacity of the British for public disorder, but there is something darkly comic about watching, split-screen style, the contrast between the UK and US in the run-up to their general elections. While in the US, the former president and frontrunner becomes a convicted felon who shares videos referring to the possibility of establishing a “unified reich”, the UK’s prime minister enjoys a drink in a cafe by the river as a boatload of Lib Dems, holding placards and waving vaguely sardonically, gently bobs down the river behind him.
In the US, the threat of political violence becomes ever more present, with a movie imagining civil war in the republic topping the box office and Trump facing further charges of election interference. In Britain, a news alert at the top of the week announces: “Drink thrown at Nigel Farage during campaign visit to Clacton.” (It was a banana milkshake, and of course it was Clacton. Where else could it have been?) Britain has experienced sustained political violence more recently than the US, as British people love to point out to Irish Americans fondly valorising ye olde IRA. But held up against what’s happening in in the US, and for all the Tory party’s awfulness of the past 14 years, Rishi Sunak’s appeal to the British electorate on Tuesday night made him look about as threatening as a Beatrix Potter villain.
