“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.”

Those words were written by the Labour hero Aneurin Bevan, seven years after the end of the second world war and a decade before the arrival of the Beatles, but their power endures. Indeed, the imminence of Brexit and the entry into Downing Street of yet another moneyed Old Etonian prompts much the same question, though Britain’s current circumstances demand that it should be slightly rephrased. So, let us turn to the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole’s book Heroic Failure, which updates Bevan’s point.

“The great mystery of Brexit is the bond it created between working-class revolt on the one side and upper-class self-indulgence on the other,” writes O’Toole. What, he wonders, could have possibly glued together “stockbroker superciliousness” and “the raw two-fingered defiance of working-class patriotism”?

The answer is the spirit of punk, or something like it. “One great binding agent was Anarchy in the UK, the sheer joy of being able to fuck everything up,” he writes. As Boris Johnson proves, the Brexit instinct is at least partly about outrage for outrage’s sake – the kind of sensibility whose most vivid cultural manifestation was in the brazen provocations of punk rock (appropriately enough John Lydon – AKA Johnny Rotten – supports our exit from the EU). Led by a serial smasher-upper and self-publicist, we are on our way out of the EU because of a collective set of desires akin to the punk-era urge to break things, along with a connected inability to channel resentment into anything more than gestures of self-harm.

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To go much further back into English history, it could be argued that Johnson is also channelling a kind of cavalier spirit. Popular history recalls those 17th-century defenders of monarchy and privilege as – to quote the Encyclopedia Britannica – “swashbuckling” and “overbearing”. Like them, Johnson wants us to think of him as an opponent of dour Puritanism and the bringer of the kind of joy that one supportive newspaper groaningly calls “Johnsun”. Many of the new prime minister’s past stunts and outbursts have served the cause of contrasting himself with supposedly grey, technocratic, orthodox politicians, and thereby feeding his own romantic myth (a myth is all it is, of course: there is no more dull and conventional path to power in this country than one that begins at Eton, passes through Oxford, and then ends at Westminster).

Myth-making and politics as performance are now delivering the keys to high office across western democracies. If politics has long intersected with the world of showbusiness, the 21st century has so blurred the two that they often seem to be one and the same. The president of the United States of America, as you may have noticed, does not derive his popularity from any conventional notion of substantive achievement, but instead from a daily pantomime of boasting and nastiness that keeps his supporters in the required state of excitement. Italy and now Ukraine have seen the rise of politicians who actually used to be comedians; in the latter, the latest development is the launch of a new anti-establishment party led by a rock star.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘John Lydon – AKA Johnny Rotten – supports our exit from the EU.’ Photograph: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

These developments seem to me to be rooted in two things: the fact that post-1979 neoliberalism has stripped traditional politicians of much of their power, often threatening to reduce politics and statecraft to mere gesture; and that governments have largely failed to tackle most of the issues of our age, from the climate emergency to the drastic challenges of automation.

An opening has thus appeared for people who at least affect – and with Johnson, affectation is all – to reject the basic norms of politics as usual. As the Trump experience has proved, even questions of deceit can bounce off them: if lying is part of a nihilistic, provocative persona, then having a distant relationship with the truth is all part of the act. This, perhaps, is how you end up with a prime minister who will not confirm how many children he has, who serially makes things up about the EU, and who does not just have a reputation for barely being able to tie his own shoelaces, but actively trades on it.

When the Labour party attacks him because he “has no plan” to deal with Britain’s fundamental problems, it speaks a self-evident truth. But a lack of prudence, coherence and basic seriousness seems to be the basis of Johnson’s personal brand. Besides, is his apparent policy platform – money splurged here and there and free-market business as usual – any less credible that the programmes offered by just about every UK government this century?

Then there is his taste for ugly rhetoric designed to ensure that “the plaster comes off the ceiling”.

This is an increasingly familiar populist trick: encouraging a set of voters to relish taboo-busting as a kind of surrogate for a lost sense of economic agency and power. This version of taking back control is not to do with jobs, wages or houses, but the licence to say anything you want, whatever the consequences. Anyone who is offended is dismissed as a puritanical defender of joyless political correctness.

Punk spirit, cavalier style and wilful provocation will all inform the manner in which Johnson and his allies frame their greatest challenge of all: how on earth to deal with the very real crisis of Brexit and honour the Halloween deadline that the Tory party has so stupidly fetishised. And they look set to play a crucial role in gaining consent from those who have most to lose from crashing out of the EU. Faced with a set of impossible challenges, Johnson will present himself as the flamboyant, verbose, rule-breaking Englishman, positioned against the washed-out logicians of the EU machine, who were never going to help in the first place.

Whether this approach could survive the sudden appearance of expensive food, empty shelves and queues of lorries is an interesting question. It would take an amazingly mould-breaking politician to ride this out, and Johnson is a lot less mould-breaking than he would like us to think. But in the midst of all that talk about a quickfire election and given deep-rooted English cultural traits and the strange, hallucinatory times in which we live, I would not underestimate his appeal. Nor the enduring romantic power of a philosophy mewled out by Johnny Rotten 42 years ago, which is now seemingly being taken to Brussels by our new leader: “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.”

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist