For nearly 20 years before his death in 1989, my father, who left school at 11 and drove a mailcar for a living, railed against the undemocratic evil of the European Thing. He brought me to understand that its operation depended on replacing intelligent politicians with stupid ones for the purpose of absolute control – the mechanism operating to lift from the shoulders of politicians all requirement for thought, vision, creativity or foresight, providing them with the wherewithal to enable their countries to function after a fashion for as long as they do what they are told. Once the transfer of sovereignty is achieved, he said, anyone can run a country. Hence, Enda Kenny. The world catches up – slowly. For sure: our former nations, even our former empires, have now become as dependent on the bureaucratic girdle of the EU as, in the years of the Iron Curtain, were the peoples of the former communist satellites in Czechoslovakia and Poland on the Soviet apparatus. We know no other way of being, never mind living. Both as an upshot and a driving factor, we are nowadays incapable of producing anything other than functionaries and middle-managers whose odd admixture of timidity and egomania allows them to become mini-dictators in their own countries, implementing the will of their foreign masters. Just don’t ask them to pronounce an original thought, a vision of independence or a promise of self-realisation. One thing that we have gleaned from Brexit is that, almost for certain, there are no grown-ups left in British politics. There are boys, and certainly one or two girls, but no adults. The daily tableau of happenings is like a series of scenes from a tale written by Frank Richards: a story with a constant tumble of intricate twists arising from the flaws of its cast of hapless and villainous anti-heroes: the toffy-nosed school captain done down by the incompetent scheming of the Fat Owl of the Remove; the Fat Owl in turn done down by the beasts and bounders of the lower fourth. But Theresa may. She may yet emerge as the only one capable of looking convincing in long trousers. We move ever closer to Alexander Mitscherlich’s prophecy of a mass society stripped of responsibility, where everyone’s a sibling, looking sideways, waiting to be fed, and there are no adults left to lead the people back on to the vertical path from history to the future. No one looks up to the top of the stairs, because there is no one there to see. In 1975, when the UK last held a referendum on membership of the European ‘Thing’, it was mainly left-wingers like Michael Foot and Tony Benn (labelled, interestingly, the ‘Minister for Fear’ by the Daily Mirror) who opposed it. The result was two-to-one in favour of remaining in what was then called the Common Market. There were many interesting similarities and contrasts between that contest and the recent one, but one thing that has to be said is that the calibre of leader available to Britain at that time – on both sides of the argument – was infinitely greater than it is now. It has gradually become clear that most of those advocating the Leave position did not want to win. Boris Johnson played a faux populist tune in which he didn’t actually believe. He may well have been the most dismayed of all, having hoped for a narrow defeat. The main purpose in his elbowing in was to deny Nigel Farage the mileage to be gained from winning or losing narrowly. As the polls closed, he was predicting a narrow win for Remain. In the immediate aftermath of the result, faced with having to step up to cope with all the fallout, you could see his chagrin and confusion. “It was just a lark”, he seemed to say, “why take things so seriously?”. It was no surprise when he jumped at the first excuse to cop out altogether. Farage duly followed shortly afterwards. Michael Gove is far worse, a man utterly without qualities, run by his appalling wife. He was the first politician I ever registered who believes, “We have to get over our obsession with biological parenthood”. He was sleeping, clearly anticipating defeat with an easy conscience, when they called him to say that his side had won. I had the feeling from the start about the Vote Leave campaign that they were a bunch randomly picked to make a case they didn’t believe in. Boris et al seemed simply to parrot off-the-peg populist arguments in a manner designed to sound convincing to the hoi polloi but without conviction, as though the Brexit campaign was intended as a controlled explosion of Euroscepticism – a managed letting off of the known negativity but in a manner as to ensure that, no matter how it went, the situation would be steered back on course and the Tories would be the victors. Nigel would be bypassed, Cameron would if necessary fall on his sword. But both sides of the argument would be controlled by essentially the same forces. This result was a long time coming. Avoidance by those whose duty it was to do otherwise pushed the UK’s demographic and cultural nightmare under the carpet, making the present moment all but inevitable. Nigel Farage erupted from the resulting silence, propelled into the public arena by virtue of media bullying and the cowardice of mainstream politicians, who emitted mixed and coded signals about immigration because they knew it concerned a lot of people but remained a dodgy topic under PC rules. Fifteen months ago, I wrote: “There’s something slightly too obvious about him – like a poorly drafted comic character in ‘EastEnders’, a likely lad with an over-developed patter and excessively large lapels. Farage says wholly predictable things in a wholly foreseeable way, but he represented something of the suppressed feelings of Britain’s uneasy gut, and the studied condescension he attracted from the media was the most reliable indicator of
