Johnson should beware – forcing a crisis rarely ends well for aspiring strongmen | Andy Beckett

There are revolutionaries on the political right who crave this kind of upheaval. But their opportunism can end in disaster

Genuine national crises, where everyday life is disrupted and the status quo buckles or crumbles, don’t come along often in a usually stable, sometimes boring country like Britain. Over the last half century, there have arguably been less than half a dozen: the three-day week in 1974, the winter of discontent of 1978-9, the riots and recession of 1981, the financial crisis of 2007-8, and the current, accelerating meltdown – constitutional, economic, and cultural – around Brexit.

Such episodes are a nightmare for many people, but others yearn for them. Once, these catastrophists were mostly found on the revolutionary left. Now they increasingly come from the right.

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