The Brexit misadventure

Over on the Channel crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe, I got talking to a British couple, early retirees from the IT and hospitality industries. They were in a small Citroen, stuffed to bursting with luggage — bags, bedding, and a large wire cage for their pet dog. Were they going to France on a camping holiday? “Yes and no,” said the man cautiously, but his wife, more forthcoming and plainspoken, explained that it was going to be a long trip, perhaps for a year or more. They had rented out their home in Yorkshire and were going to try living in France, Spain, and perhaps Portugal. “Business has been very bad,” she said, “I had to give up the pubs I managed. Frankly, we’re getting away from this Brexit mess.”

In a tumultuous year and a half — first the referendum of June 2016 followed by a mid-term election this summer, when Prime Minister Theresa May lost her majority — Brexit is the word that haunts television discussions, newspaper headlines, and nearly every conversation in Britain today. Mrs May has not only lost her majority but such popularity as she ever had; her prime ministership hangs by a slender thread. Former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, now editor of the Evening Standard, who had earlier described her as “dead woman walking” now gruesomely adds that he won’t rest till “she’s chopped up in bags in my freezer”. A former editor of my acquaintance is equally vituperative: “She should be taken to the outside toilet and shot.”

As Conservative Party MPs relentlessly chew the cud over the exact terms of a break from the European Union — a “hard” versus a “soft” Brexit, that is, over trade tariffs, immigration, and a host of EU regulations — the party is limping towards a possible split. One problem is who might succeed Mrs May — and the choice isn’t inspiring.

One unlikely candidate is 48-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg, a lanky Eton- and Oxford-educated former banker, the son of a distinguished past editor of The Times. He is considered a joke figure by many, the sort of “posh” politician that put David Cameron and his well-heeled, upper class colleagues out of odour with the British public. A fervent Catholic, he is described by a fellow MP as “the Honourable Member for the early 20th century”. He is said to have once campaigned in a Mercedes with his Nanny in tow. Many of his constituents can’t get his accent. Mr Rees-Mogg himself admitted to this truth, saying, “I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth.”

Another possible contender is the wily, ambitious and controversial foreign secretary Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson, 53, emerged as a leading votary of Brexit during the referendum, claiming, among other benefits, that up to GBP 350 million would be added to the cash-strapped health service if Britain left the EU. This week he was loudly reiterating the claim, and again being trashed by the country’s leading statisticians. He is routinely condemned as a filibustering liar and falsifier of facts though others regard him as an ongoing comedy act, comparing him to P G Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle or a kind of British all-in-one version of the Marx brothers. However, Mr Johnson swears he will not undermine Mrs May’s position. “I’m all behind Theresa for a glorious Brexit,” he remonstrated the other day.

The drumbeat of Brexit and a wayward leadership don’t necessarily appear dangerous if you’re in the bubble called London — in the long sunlit days of an Indian summer the theatres are full, the restaurants and pubs bustling, rich Arabs and Russians speeding on Park Lane in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis. But in smaller country towns and villages where I have been, the mood is despondent. A friend in Wales, one of the few I know who voted to leave, said: “I got sick at the idea of our politicians and bureaucrats blowing up millions of taxpayers’ money on the Byzantine lives they led in Brussels. That’s why I wanted out. But I now believe we’ve got ourselves into a worse pickle than we imagined.”

Like many people caught between a rock and a hard place the British have devised their own escape route. The top film hits of the season hark back to the heroic age of a Greater Britain: Thus Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk, Stephen Frears’ Victoria and Abdul, based on journalist Sharbani Basu’s eponymous book, and, coming up, Churchill, a drama on how a wondrous prime minister led the country to triumph. 

It’s one way of dealing with the misadventure of Brexit.