When future archaeologists dive beneath the risen sea level down to our current layer of UK civilisation, they will excavate a vast relic network of self-owns, and struggle to make sense of us. What could these mysterious, doomed ancients have been thinking, they will wonder? How can their impenetrably bizarre or ineffective decisions be explained, given that they have no obvious utility and cannot even conceivably be described as beautiful? But eventually, someone will discover a tablet – either stone or iPad – inscribed into which are the words THIS WILL ANNOY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE. “Aha!” the intrepid anthropologist will breathe. “The key to all mythologies! We meet at last!” THIS WILL ANNOY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE … With those seven words, things will at last become clear. Think of them as the Rosetta Stone of all our useless decisions. Which, increasingly, is most of them.
It’s not just politics where “annoying all the right people” has been apotheosised – though under a range of global populists, it inescapably has been. Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall between the US and Mexico was a prime instance of annoying all the right people, with those wondering why the structure was failing to materialise continually scoffed at by various of his elite supporters. Didn’t they know it was just a metaphor? The reality-bending forced an update on an old political adage. Where once you campaigned in poetry and governed in prose, now you campaigned in bombast and governed in metaphor. If only those Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol had understood their adorably naive semantic error.
