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| Financial Times |
In the age of post-truth, to be a congenital bullshit artist – was to define yourself as a person of “the people” and their “instincts”, unrestrained by pettifogging niceties, heedless of the boring naysayers and their tedious facts, ready instead to take a stand against the know-all elites, establishment and experts.
It might have worked for a while, at any rate. But then came coronavirus. Populists have no answer to a pandemic, for it requires the very things they and their ilk lack and despise: hard work, a forensic grasp of detail, the wisdom of experts, human empathy, a spirit of self-sacrifice and, above all, rules. Of course, populists would not follow them. Populists never had to. It had once been part of their appeal.
They turn the ________ away from the values it once held dear, so that it cheerfully jeopardised the _________, tramped on parliamentary sovereignty and even insulted the _________. They purged it of some of its best people and debased several of the great offices of state by filling them with obvious incompetents. Above all, they drained what remained of the public reservoir of trust.
(borrowed from His toxic spell is broken: Boris Johnson trips over his own lies)
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