On everything from Covid to ‘levelling up’, the prime minister’s lies and empty promises drag the country deeper into the mire
The word contempt, I learned last week, is derived from the Latin contemptus, meaning scorn. My 2008 edition of the Oxford English dictionary defines it as “the feeling that someone or something is worthless or beyond consideration”; a more recent article in the magazine Psychology Today says that “empathy and contempt are polar opposites”, and warned that the latter always has a catastrophic effect on human relationships.
I was researching the word because of its increasingly regular use in headlines relating to the prime minister. Last Thursday, a column in the Financial Times was titled “Carelessness and contempt are at the root of every Boris Johnson crisis”. Over the previous few weeks, a writer in the Daily Telegraph has scolded Johnson for his “contempt for business”, while the Economist has accused him of treating “checks and balances with contempt”. Johnson has also been accused of having contempt for NHS staff, former coalmining communities, his fellow MPs and the population of Wales: it is rare that a week goes past without some or other story about this element of his personality and politics, and the C-word being used.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
