Dear Reader,
I started writing notes for this blog about a year ago, craving the point at which I could complete and post it for the world to behold and commend. Since then there have been all manner of twists and turns, in hindsight more ridiculous rather than breathlessly dramatic as they sometimes seemed at the time, as the war moved into the arcane world of parliamentary procedure. I must have been highly optimistic to have written this provisional title, as the right-wing coup that is Brexit most definitely hasn’t flopped. It has triumphed, and until recent weeks was still boisterously thriving. So I could have just binned this, but instead I’m submitting this blog as a monument to my pompous delusion.
For those of us who are used to putting great store in evidence and reason guiding public policy (which might be making a comeback, now that our situation is very much in extremis), the last couple of years have been highly disorienting. That has especially been the case when it’s come to appraising the competence and credibility of candidates in established democracies. But we still imagined voters would either come to their senses, or else a deus ex machina would put a halt to the nonsense and stop these cartoonish bad guys from winning. I have to admit that those of us hoping to see the nativist populists thwarted weren’t adverse to the establishment, the deep state, the dark subterranean forces, intervening to avert a bad outcome. Maybe we were guilty of willing an anti-Brexit counter coup.
I am struggling to think on what date I thought the dark forces of Brexit were on the cusp of receding, or what hallucinogen I might have taken to imagine they could have been seen off. Maybe it was just my outmoded thinking, that in more reliable times, when faulty bravado was a terminal condition, the Leavers would have been consigned to one of history’s smellier dustbins. Yet no matter how often they’ve been hoisted by their own petard, they’ve continued winning.
Still baffled and confused by this largely one way pummelling of my side, I’m not exactly sure how to write this blog. Should I write it as I once intended to, from a safe vantage point in a happier parallel universe? Or instead, should I be self-reproachful at every turn, sneering at the wishful thinking that had at some point overcome me? I was going to affectionately dissect the right-wing Brexit coup, and discuss how there is occasionally a romance about plotters, even a quixotic charm. Some of them are quite noble in their intent. I was going to talk about the Pazzi conspiracy, the Gunpowder plot, the July 20 plot. Though naturally I was going to say these Brexit plotters were of the bad variety, after which I was going to muse on the fatal mistakes the conspirators made. That they didn’t really have the courage of their convictions – otherwise, they wouldn’t have held on to an arch-dithering Prime Minister for so long after she was a beaten docket.
For a long time the zealots appeared to view her as an asset, a figurehead desperate to appease them. Someone who would help them steer the ship of state to the most extreme Brexit outcome, one that obviously wasn’t paraded during the referendum campaign. At times the Tory Leavers gave the impression they lacked seriousness and courage, as they made pathetic demands that the EU change, so that Britain could minimise the adjustments involved in leaving. At other times they gave the impression of being relaxed about the disruption of a no deal exit. A point arrived where this writer began to draw false comfort that these people were perhaps happier railing against the world as it is, rather than really being motivated to change it. Maybe they were too capricious, too dilettantish, just too lazy. Utterly delusional, right? They might be those things, but I should have reminded myself they have plenty of skin in this game. Still, May was being thwarted, a prisoner of her own unimaginative stubbornness, and parliamentary arithmetic. It also seemed she was defeated by increasingly evident ludicrousness of the whole Brexit enterprise, which is what most of us were ultimately clinging to, and which was energising the People’s Vote movement.
But then came “Boris” Johnson … and his obsessive consigliere, Dominic Cummings …
I have written previously about how uncharming and unfunny and generally unpleasant I find the Prime Minister. This glorious writer captures him better than just about anybody. I wish that were unanimous, but alas, it isn’t. I can accept card carrying Tory members being humoured by his cheap sub-vaudeville act. I find journalists, especially the lobby journos who are excessively pleased with their insider status, somewhat less forgivable for the way they’ve enabled him. In particular for the way they’ve normalised his premiership, as he and his unelected special adviser have gone around subverting public life, busting norms and attempting unlawful manoeuvres. The establishment sometimes provides a useful function in keeping dangerous frauds from seizing power. But they have retreated and collapsed in the face of the mendacious chutzpah that finally seized the crown in December’s general election.
This writer has observed how English right is clever not to announce itself as such. The Johnson/Cummings playbook of a people vs politicians narrative, accompanied by a brazen weaponisation of language and rigorously road tested slogans, may be utterly fraudulent but does find a wide resonance with voters receptive to that kind of messaging. I have written previously about my bewilderment at the perverse brand of Leaver “nostalgia”, however familiar and depressingly popular their paeans to English exceptionalism are. The time machine the Leavers want isn’t about to be invented, and in any case, they would find that whatever date they entered, it wouldn’t tally with the fantasy in their minds. The overall effect is a volatile politics and a public that doesn’t appear realise how extreme their overlords are.
This tribe of elitists posing as anti-elitists, people who are insulated from the economic impacts of whatever Brexit eventually transpires, was dissected masterfully by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times last year. The article contains a lot of vignettes and other nuggets that are of utmost relevance in understanding what has happened in Britain – “a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another”. Their hostility to the European Union seems to be founded in a determination to have dominion over Britain all to themselves, and they’ve dedicated their entire time in politics (and journalism prior to that) trying to whip the public into an irrational hatred of Brussels, increasingly resorting to foul means to achieve a plurality in the country. In this, they’ve been helped by the nation’s anti-intellectual streak, and its tendency to fall back on naff humour to deflect from serious or technical issues. Such are the conditions that produce a Johnson.
After the resounding result of December’s general election, the coup appeared essentially complete. But are they really still going to get away with it? Sir Ivan Rogers, the civil servant hounded from his post for the crime of being an expert, has repeatedly described in a series of erudite speeches how the Brexit headbangers are peddling flawed, deluded thinking that provide no pathway to the sunlit uplands. In the days when I harboured notions that the coup would falter, I clung to the hope that this would click with enough people, and that parliament had the numbers to frustrate a crash out. Some fool I was. The technical discussions with the EU will be a predictable disaster, whenever they eventually happen, but that was never of primary concern. They aren’t intended to go well, and besides, it’s a disaster that will hurt others. The little people.
However, while Brexit is a done deal bar the thrashing out of details, the coup might yet flop. The coronavirus, to which this writer will very soon return, might expose these conspirators in a way facts and rational arguments about the folly of Brexit never did. The people who have been sold fictions about the “nanny state” might yet acquire an awareness that their pied pipers don’t want them to have. Johnson, Cummings, Gove et al might discover before long that deliberately and gleefully eroding the capacity of the state comes with consequences in times of crisis. They may yet fail to reach their sunlit uplands, the ones they’ve longed dreamed of, where they can be free from regulations, troublesome redistributive burdens, and any responsibility to their fellow man.
Coda
I’ve wanted for some time to comment on the recent passing of Clive James. His funeral took place literally a stone’s throw (with a good arm) from where I used to live, though that is not why I wish to discuss him here. I’ve allowed time to pass, mostly because I’ve wondered what I could write about him that would pay some proper tribute. But I had to swing into action after recently watching some episodes of his Postcard from … travel documentary series, as they reminded me of why he is the person in the media I’ve most admired. The singular brilliance of his writing could possibly even be improved upon when spoken out loud. By him, that is. To see James flit from cultural events to tourist attractions to night spots, effortlessly dispensing wry allusions and cultured humour along the way, is to appreciate his own self-description as “a natural inhabiter of the limelight”. I had first seen him on his television programmes that dissected the lowbrow from around the world’s popular culture. Over time I became acquainted with the deep erudition that not only made his jokes work, but which permitted him to roam and excel as a poet, a literary critic, really in whatever literary pursuit he turned his attention to. Reflecting on that range of subject matter earlier today, I realised that he was the greatest exemplar of what this blog originally aspired to do, as declared that two line first entry. I’ll never emulate the master, but he will always remain my reference point.
thecrimsonfeather 