Consider a single word: piccaninnies. When Boris Johnson wrote in 2008 of the Queen, on her visits to Commonwealth countries, being greeted by ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’3 he was (surely consciously) echoing Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ diatribe, delivered forty years previously, which used the same curiously coy Christy Minstrels term of racist abuse. Powell had spoken of the plight of another elderly English lady: ‘When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.
