It’s not Britain that is nostalgic for empire – it’s the rest of the world

The UK is constantly accused of wallowing in unhealthy nostalgia for the British Empire. Just look at the way the old duffers sing Rule Britannia! at the Proms, they say, not to mention their unconscionable defence of Winston Churchill!

There’s a peculiar narcissism to these denunciations. Look around at the real world and you will see that it is not Britain, but the menacing rulers of Eurasia who are the ones hell-bent on rebuilding their empires. There is Russia, obviously. Across the way, there is Viktor Orban of Hungary, who was accused by Kyiv of harbouring plans to take back a Western slice of Ukraine that once belonged to the Austro-hungarian Empire, if Mr Putin’s invasion in the east had gone to plan.

And then we have Mr Erdogan recently rebranding Turkey as Türkiye, apparently a reference to the old Ottoman Empire. The Russians’ partial withdrawal from Middle East, meanwhile, presents this tin-pot sultan with the perfect chance to expand his reach by re-invading Syria in order to whack the Kurds.

That’s before we even get to the Han Empire of China and its genocidal obliteration of “problematic” ethnic groups in its western reaches. We just need some Mongolian (or Mughal) revanchists and a band of Polishlithuanian Commonwealth nationalists to complete the picture. Still, all of these empires escape criticism under cover of the “salt water fallacy”, by which it is just fine to terrorise and invade other countries so long as you are not separated from them by a saline body of water.

Meanwhile, back in the devious, colonial metropolis of London, efforts are under way to depose our own ruthless tyrant because he went to a birthday party. If Britain is quietly plotting to recreate its imperial sway over the world under the banner of the Brexit Imperium, we are going about it in a rather odd way.

Ican’t help it. When I think of the Cossacks I think of that scene in Fiddler on the Roof, when the brutes raid Tzeitel and Motel’s joyous wedding party and, among other outrages, destroy the precious down-filled pillows their peasant families have saved up to buy them. Now, though, thanks to the people of Chernihiv in Ukraine, I have a new association: Boris Chuprina or “long lock”, a portrait of our gallant Prime Minister by local artists depicting him as the folk hero Cossack Mamay, playing a lute and wearing the sumptuous robes and cavalry boots of a high-status warrior.

It turns out that there is something of a mini-craze in Ukraine at present for such depictions of Boris. Another cartoon portrait by an artist with the Odesa “Centre of Special Operatives” represents the Prime Minister in armour, his hands resting on the hilt of a sword, his face enhanced by a Buzz Lightyear chin and a smouldering gaze. Yet another, by artist Volodymr Evkar, again places Mr Johnson in armour in a line-up of other heroic leaders including President Biden, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, Lithuania’s Ingrida Šimonyte and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. I would suggest that the Government Art Collection immediately splash out to buy these treasures as artefacts of a Renaissance in the Western alliance, if it weren’t for the fear that times will quickly change and the art will soon find itself cancelled for one reason or another. The real war has yet to dampen the culture war, alas.

Every nation has some sense of nostalgia for the heroes of its past. The legacy of the original Cossacks, who were Tatar, is a good example of a heritage adopted by a people who are not, for the most part, ethnically related to them. At any rate, before the Cossacks, there were the Mongols and before the Mongols, the Scythians and before the Scythians, the Yamnaya: all nomadic peoples who roamed the plains of eastern Ukraine by horse. They share geography, if not bloodlines.

That’s before we get to the Han Empire of China and its genocidal obliteration of ‘problematic’ ethnic groups in its western reaches