Andrew Sullivan: belief

Transcript context

…On purpose, hilarious. Yes. He was an Etonian who showed up — and all of the Etonians (people who came from Eton, the highest fancy school in Britain) — Unlike the other Etonians who came to Oxford and decided, “Well, we’ve got to downplay this, we’ve got to be — got to wear regular clothes and alter our accent” — no, Boris came and said, “Instead of fighting it, I’m going to just turn into a caricature of an upper-class twit.” Have you ever seen the Monty Python sketch of the — ? One of those, but did so with such a knowing irony that we all kind of got the joke. It’s the same act that he’s doing now, and I, for one, at the time at Oxford, because we were both in the Oxford Union together, which was the debating society where you got elected or whatever. I was elected president in my second year and he had a hard time, but I was very much on his side because I just thought he was a talent, and I found him funny and I could forgive him for anything, really. I think that’s why, maybe, having known that side of Boris and not being intimately aware — as my peers in England were — of all his shenanigans, of all his lies, of all his corners cut, of all the betrayals that he committed, I didn’t see any of that and experience it. When I went back to England and talked to all my peers about him, they were so full of bitterness that they have begun, I think, to forget his basic charm and that power. I saw that at Oxford. It’s the same thing now, and it’s why he’s a very successful politician. More generally, what is it that intelligent, educated Americans get wrong about British politics?…

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