36 Time June 17, 2019given ThaT mOre Than 70% OF The BriTish peOple
dislike President Donald Trump, his outsize state visit to the U.K.
was a rare uniting force in the midst of the civil war over how to
say F.U. to the E.U. His presence offered some ironic consola-
tion that the past three years of furious argument in Britain are
linked to more global nationalist fevers of which Trumpism is
only the biggest, blimp-size expression.
Yet the nervous breakdown in Britain has had its own unique
loony flavor of a country trying to remember what it stands
for. For decades the loss of em-
pire was compensated for by
the victory of World War II, cel-
ebrated with such pageantry in
Portsmouth this week. The post-
war generation was consumed
by the earnest task of building a
better world. That’s long ago. The
last hard patriotic triumph most
Brits recall was Thatcher’s 1982 invasion of an obscure dot in
the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands, to wrest it back from
another place no one wants to read about, Argentina. Now all
that’s left of Hope and Glory is Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s
Union Jack socks and the certainty that the Queen is the last
person who still knows how to behave in public.
The irony is that before David Cameron, Theresa May’s pre-
decessor as Prime Minister, fecklessly called in 2016 for a ref-
erendum on Europe to pacify a rabid arm of his own party,
few people in the country at large gave a toss about it. But the
very word Remain on the ballot called up the smugness that
was anathema to the boiling white working class. Who wants
to Remain in a place where Tory austerity cuts have stalled
your income, Polish immigrants are ahead of you for a Na-
tional Health Service appointment, and the Guardian- reading
media elites tell you you’re racist if you say so? Vote OUT of
that, mate! Stuff it to Jonny Foreigner! Brexit devolved into
a civil war of identity: an English counterrevolution between
nationalists and internationalists, country geezers vs. young
metropolitans, Little England vs. Great Britain with the Scots
and Irish Celts such staunch Remainers that the Scots could
be driven to independence and Northern Ireland pushed to
unite with the Republic. U.K. RIP.
From the moment a flotilla of pro- and anti- Brexit boats
dueled on the Thames the week of the Brexit vote, the tone
was set for successive national absurdities. Unlikely heroes
and antiheroes emerged. A viral favorite was John Bercow, the
barrel-chested Speaker of the House of Commons, whose callsfor “Order, order, order” over the brawling M.P.s have sound-
tracked the opposite of his exhortation. May’s doomed attempt
to play the straight man was torpedoed by her stunningly awk-
ward dance-on to Abba at a conference that Allison Pearson
of the Telegraph likened to a “stork being struck by lightning.”
Many of the leading characters in the national meltdown
don’t even take themselves seriously, let alone require us to.
The thatched charlatan Boris Johnson, with his faux- Falstaffian
ways, depends on everyone’s being in on the joke that he has no
principles. Now that he’s the front runner in the Tory leadership
contest, he has proved there is no lie you can’t recover from if
you have mastered the sly vernacular of British irony and gone
to Eton. The gangly country squire and Brexiteer Jacob Rees-
Mogg often answers interview questions in Latin.
On the other side, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is an unre-
constructed ’70s socialist who presents as a refugee from the pre-
Thatcher Winter of Discontent when undertakers went on strike.
His limp endorsement of Remain and anti- Semitism within
his party have shorn him of support. All good news for Brexit’s
Mr. Toad, Farage, who is capitalizing on the boredom most Brits
feel with the one-story news cycle to form his own party to lead
the nation off the cliff.
The problem with this long-
running farce is that it obscures
Brexit’s dire likely outcome—the im-
poverishment of a shrinking nation
in the cause of a mirage of sausage-
and-mash “sovereignty.” Fittingly
for a brain-dead nation, British pol-
itics now lives in a cartoon strip.
Churchill characterized Britain’s appeasement government in
1936 as “undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” People like Farage
regard Britain’s Remainers as today’s appeasers. The Brexiteers
are at war not to safeguard Great Britain but to end it.Brown is the author of The Vanity Fair DiariesViewpoint
The Brits lost the plot since the vote
to leave the E.U. By Tina BrownAll that’s left of Hope
and Glory is Brexit
champion Nigel Farage’s
Union Jack socks