Big Caesars and Little Caesars : How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson

Pass deep historical knowledge through the silkiest of minds and deliver the product onto the page with the most fluent of pens, and you find the combination of gifts which make Ferdie Mount pre-eminent among the political commentariat of our day. He has created a book that will endure in 50 years' time when students of British Politics will still struggle to understand how the supposedly most mature political system in the world could have placed Boris Johnson in Downing Street for three years. This is the volume they will have to read first. ― Peter Hennessy

Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times it's become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why they fall.

There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup.

In reality, every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be Caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was wrong. This Caesarism is not an absurd throwback, it is an ever-present danger.

There are Big Caesars who set out to achieve total social control and Little Caesars who merely want to run an agreeable kleptocracy without opposition: from Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell through Napoleon and Bolivar, to Mussolini, Salazar, De Gaulle and Trump. The saga of Boris Johnson and Brexit frequently crops up in this author's narrative as a vivid, if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon.

The final part of this book describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief, from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump's march on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs, and ends with a defence of the grubby glories of parliamentary politics and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.

Always absorbing and often bitterly funny, Ferdinand Mount's survey traces with characteristic panache an unedifying line of populist opportunists from classical times down to the shoddy and sinister figures of Johnson and Trump. His eloquent concluding call for the restoration and safeguarding of parliamentary authority has never been more urgently needed. ― Roy Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford