The Telegraph, June 16, Robert Tombs
Seven years after we voted Leave, Remainers finally got rid of the man they and their EU allies blame personally for Brexit. There rises a great cry … Of what? Of triumph? No, more a vindictive gloat. Whatever Boris Johnson’s manifold faults – and I find it hard to forgive his waste of a historic political opportunity – the language of his opponents tells us much about what has been going on over those seven years and these last weeks.
The arguments some of them are coming up with are more revealing than they perhaps intend. Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times diagnosed “the psychological state of the UK” as “doublethink” (“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies”) – then, with a comical lack of self-awareness, blames a whole list of things on Brexit which he must know have no connection with it. Martin Kettle in The Guardian lets slip that the tarring and feathering of Johnson by the Committee on Privileges is “fundamentally about Brexit”. Oh, so it’s not just about whether he misled Parliament, then. It’s about reversing Brexit, says Kettle. Isn’t that what Johnson and his supporters claim?
To explain Brexit as all down to Boris Johnson (Syed thinks he “cast a spell” over the electorate) shows an amazingly superficial understanding of the politics of the last seven and more years. Do they comprehend nothing of the deep causes, both domestic and international, of the 2016 vote? Nothing about falling support for the EU right across Europe, which led to No votes in referendums in France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Greece?
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