Our politicians love drawing comparisons to ancient Rome – and betraying their muddle, as Asa Bennett’s Romanifesto finds, reports Harry Sidebottom

Boris as a Roman general, Rees-Mogg the slave whispering in his ear, Corbyn the Druid, and Farage the legionary having a crafty fag – the cartoons on the cover of this book set the tone.

The text of Romanifesto is demotic, full of slang, reliably jocular. The Romans, we are assured, saw the ancient Britons as “brutish Neanderthals”, while their own political life was a “rhetorical bear pit”. But the book also claims serious intentions: to be a “trusty” guide to the Roman precedents behind modern politics, so that MPs can avoid “making fools of themselves with half-remembered references” and the rest of us can catch them out.

Leaving aside Boris Johnson, with his Upper Second in classics, today’s politicians seem to struggle with Roman history. John McDonnell has read Robert Harris’s Imperium, but the fact that he felt sorry for the “poor guy Cicero employs to write all this up” suggests he failed to understand it. Rees-Mogg betrayed his ignorance when he cited the Praetorian Guard as an exemplar of loyalty.

One MP tried to stir up his fellow Eurosceptics by quoting the speech on freedom that Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus the Caledonian, until another MP pointed out that the Caledonians “all got annihilated!” Even Johnson was pulled up by Ken Livingstone for confusing Pericles of Athens with Pericles of Tyre, although that is really more to do with Shakespeare. Other examples are adduced in this book, but the level does not improve. Unsurprisingly, our political masters emerge from Romanifesto as ill-educated, blithely unconcerned with the accuracy of their statements.