A Trickster in Downing Street

This paper attempts to explore aspects of the apparently eccentric and bizarre performance of a recent right-wing populist British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. It suggests that to understand such a figure it is necessary to supplement more traditional approaches from historical and structural sociology with the interpretative tools of political anthropology around the conception of the trickster/clown figure as they have been developed by Horvath (1997, 2019) and Szakolczai (2017, 2022), This suggests that a sociology of power needs to recognise the theatricalised and performative aspects of the social processes of modernity and acknowledge the benefits of drawing on the resources of the humanities for their exploration.