“Populism Is the British Disease”: The Political Metamorphosis in Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach

In The Cockroach, Ian McEwan represents Brexit as a grotesque “political metamorphosis” orchestrated by cockroaches infiltrating the British government, allegorising ruling elites and the pathological dynamics of contemporary populism. By tracing the cockroach's successive metamorphic stages, this article shows how each phase corresponds to a distinct configuration of power, revealing populism as a strategic instrument through which elites manufacture consent, fabricate “enemies of the nation”, and consolidate authority. The novella's culminating second metamorphosis, in which the cockroach abandons its human host once national ruin has been secured, exposes Brexit as a form of elite-driven self-sabotage. Situated within McEwan's broader creative paradigm of attributing historical crises to concentrated and identifiable agency, The Cockroach not only serves as a pointed warning about the rise of populist movements marked by irrationality and xenophobia in contemporary politics but re-centers political accountability and critical scrutiny of elites, thereby distinguishing it from other BrexLit works.