The floor of Boris Johnson’s car – recently captured by an enterprising photographer – contains little of note: water bottles, empty coffee cups and receipts are strewn across the Toyota Previa. But among such banal paraphernalia lies a copy of Britannia Unchained, a free-market tract co-authored in 2012 by five recently-elected Conservative MPs: Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss.
The 152-page book excoriated the UK’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” and, most memorably, derided British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world” (“We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”) The UK, it declared, should “stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the north and the south, women and men”.
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