Provincial Mussolini on a Ladder

Robert Jenrick stands on a ladder attached to a lamppost, giving a thumbs-up while raising a Union Jack flag. The background shows a cloudy sky, rooftops, road signs, and a quiet road stretching into the distance.
Robert Jenrick’s Union Jack pantomime isn’t patriotism; it’s a confession of weakness. A dying political class turns to flags and ladders because it has nothing left to offer but theatre.

Robert Jenrick is now reduced to climbing ladders in Newark to prove his patriotism. He thinks that stringing Union Jacks along the A46 somehow redeems a party that presided over a decade of decay: collapsing councils, sinking living standards, water companies poisoning the rivers. Nothing says “one nation” like a man in a hi-vis vest zip-tying nylon flags to lampposts while child poverty climbs and the NHS falls apart.

The whole stunt reeks of provincial Mussolini cosplay: the ladder, the helpers, the stiff salute to a Britain that exists only in Mail headlines. He bellows about “two-tier Britain” as if councils removing unlicensed flags are the real architects of inequality, not the governments he cheered on while they gutted local services and handed everything else to Serco and Capita.

The line about Palestinian flags gives the game away. This isn’t about “pride” or “unity”. It’s the same tired culture-war script: Britain under siege, the enemy within, the bulldog spirit betrayed by cosmopolitan elites. Councils worrying about road safety or planning permission become “Britain-hating” while Jenrick postures as the last man standing between Newark and national collapse.

But the pantomime patriotism is a confession, not a call to arms. If the Union itself were in rude health, nobody would need to climb lampposts to prove it exists. A confident dominant class doesn’t have to hang its flag to every lamppost; it assumes its power. Jenrick’s little performance tells us what they fear: that the old symbols no longer work, that the centre cannot hold, and that the only thing left is shouting about flags while everything else burns.



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