Porter’s Pensées

The only practical repercussion that any of the present crises have had on me is the interruption of my mail from Britain. I’m still waiting for items that should have arrived here in Sweden before the end of last month. I’m not sure whom or what to blame: the Royal Mail? Postnord? The boat that delivers to our island? Covid? Brexit? And when – if – they do arrive, will I have to pay a post-Brexit duty on them? That’s what I’m gathering from our ‘Brits in Sweden’ Facebook sites. But I have no idea as yet…

I also seem to have lost a couple of emails, one from a student asking for advice on a PhD project. I usually like to help in these cases. S/he wrote that s/he follows this blog; so if s/he’s reading this post, perhaps s/he’ll get in touch again. (When are we going to introduce gender-neutral pronouns? Swedish has one. It’s ‘hen’.)

I’ve not replied to ‘hen’ sooner, or to other correspondents, because I’ve been busy at the tedious task of checking the copy-edit of my next book. Bloomsbury Press have now brought its publication forward to June 3; still not early enough, in my view, for its advice re Brexit to register. (But of course it won’t register anyway. No-one in power reads academic books. And this one – a collection of musty old essays – is unlikely to grab their attention.)

For those of us lucky enough not to live in the USA, the past week has been rather enjoyable. I know I’m atypical in being a bit of an American politics nerd: actually knowing about their Constitution and ‘impeachment’ and the 25^thAmendment and the rest, all learned as a History undergraduate, and having sat up all night and even longer to watch the past dozen or so Presidential elections; but this election, with its astonishing aftermath – however that might turn out eventually – is the most fascinating yet. If I was an American, and so directly affected by it all, I would probably be too worried to get much enjoyment from it. Maybe I should still be concerned, living as I do on a continent that is bound ultimately to be affected by the wash from these events . But for the moment, watching this great tragedy unfold before us instantaneously on our TVs and laptops, it’s nothing but huge fun. 

This is not a matter of schadenfreude, I insist; I have great affection for the USA and take no pleasure in seeing it in this state. It’s more an aesthetic pleasure, watching a drama with the same kind of excitement that one gets from watching a tragedy by Aeschylus or Shakespeare. Trump is perfectly cast as a modern-day King Lear. Hubris to nemesis: isn’t that it? Though I’d have to agree that his tweets don’t quite have the literary quality of Lear’s soliloquies: ‘Blow winds, and crack your cheeks…’ Trump’s ‘despite the constant negative press covfefe’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But we can forgive him that, as he rides into a state of seeming madness that even Shakespeare might not have been able to put into words.

Then there are all the indecisive Hamlet figures among his closest followers, and the treacherous Iagos, and his own insecure narcissism reminding us of Othello, and the very Shakespearean (Julius Caesar and the Henry plays) ‘mob’, peppered with eccentrics like the chap who came onstage wearing the Viking (or buffalo) horns. Here they are, all together in one glorious drama, the memory of which will thrill readers and (probably) film-goers for decades to come. This could well be the Donald’s greatest achievement: to present the world, albeit unintentionally, with one of its finest works of dramatic art, which we can all enjoy; so long as we have a line of footlights and a safety curtain between it and us.

For historians and political scientists it must raise questions about the essential nature of American democracy. Dozens of liberal commentators have emphasized that Wednesday’s raid on the Capitol building did not truly represent America or its history; but of course it did. Democracy – however that is defined – is only one element of the essence of America; usually taken to be the dominant one, but only because so many Americans want to present their country like this. Other elements are late-stage and often corrupt capitalism, exemplified perfectly by Trump himself, and historically by the Mafia; macho violence, with its roots in the ‘taming’ of the West; and racism, deriving of course from the ages of slavery and segregation. (A Swedish TV documentary last night about the Ku Klux Klan threw up scores of parallels with last week’s ‘Stop the Steal’ rioters.) These are as essential and intrinsic to the nature of present-day America as is the ‘democracy’ that the Capitol building is supposed to represent; which makes the rioters as essentially ‘American’ – ‘patriotic’? – as the legislators they so despise. None of us should be fooled into believing that our country as we would like it to be is the country that actually exists. That applies, in spades (trumps?), to us Brits too.

Now to watch the House debate on impeachment…

I’ve always resisted simple answers to historical questions, and indeed specifically warned readers against them in my books. History is complicated, muddled. Imperialism – for example – was not only a matter of capitalist exploitation, or racist arrogance, or misplaced humanitarianism; or even explicable in terms of motives like these. We need to broaden, sophisticate and contextualise our analysis of it, and of other great historical movements too. The effect of this may be to confuse our picture of all of them, making them more difficult to grasp, therefore; but – I’m sorry – that’s just how history is. Generalisation is the enemy of a true understanding of what has gone on around us in the past, and, by that same token, of what is going on around us today. 

Which is why I’ve been particularly disturbed by the dramatic events that have taken place in the world, and especially in Britain and the USA, over the past five years; not only by the events themselves, shocking as they have been – especially the storming of the American Capitol on Wednesday – but also by the inference I’m beginning to draw from them: that there is a simple and common explanation for them all. I’m by no means the first person, of course, to spot the similarities between Trumpism and Brexit, the connexion being made all the more plain by certain tangible connexions: Rupert Murdoch in particular, spreading his venom on both sides of the Atlantic; Brexiters like Farage, Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Gove cosying up to Trump; and the influence of Right-wing propagandists and their new election-distorting technologies on elections in both countries. Just as the Republican Party in the USA has fallen to the Trumpists, so has Britain’s Tory Party now become effectively UKIP rediviva; both parties having abandoned any pretence of being ‘conservative’ in the old, literal meaning of the word, but instead falling to the radical reactionary (and of course you can be both) revolutionism of their new leaders. Commonalty, in view of the differences between our two nations, implies that there’s something big and simple behind both of them; which is the conclusion I’m coming to now.

Just look at the two ‘movements’ (if we can call them that). Each can be divided into ‘Chiefs’ and ‘Indians’. (Yes, I know ‘Indians’ is wrong, but you know what I mean, and I don’t imagine that, in this context, Native Americans are likely to take umbrage.) In both cases the ‘Indians’, who included nearly all those who stormed the Capitol and most of those who voted for Brexit, were lower ‘class’, ill-educated, ‘stupid’ if you like (it has to be said), and with genuine material and emotional grievances, albeit in both cases blamed on the wrong people and institutions, and attracting them to the wrong allies. They were also – especially in America’s case – distrustful of ‘government’, or the ‘elite’ – the ones who called them ‘stupid’ – for the same reasons, and of the ‘liberal media’; de-anchoring them from the usual sources of public information, and making them particularly vulnerable to ‘conspiracy theories’ that seemed to them to make more sense. That’s the ‘mob’.

Mobs can be harnessed to virtually any cause. (I could give you a dozen historical examples, beginning with the ‘jingo’ crowds that cheered on a British imperial war at the turn of the 20^th century.) Which one stirs them into action depends partly on the circumstances of the time, but also on the skills and motivations of the ‘Chiefs’: that is, the relatively more educated, less stupid but also less honest and ethical part of society. Who these are depends on local conditions; in America’s case it was a great – or at least greatly-inflated – capitalist, which was apt for the leading commercial nation in the world; in Britain’s case the Chiefs wore Eton collars, which seems apposite there too. Both were notorious for their disregard for what for most people passed as ‘truth’ – this was hardly contested – and for their impatience with constitutional norms: Boris by illegally proroguing his Legislative branch, Donald’s people by trashing theirs. And – most important of all – both were supported (at least up to Wednesday) by the money power: other capitalists, who helped finance both. Their motives are not too hard to guess at. America’s capitalists appreciated Trump’s hand-outs; Britain’s (who included the powerful press ‘barons’) were anxious to prevent the EU getting its hands on their tax havens. Both of them put a principled gloss on it, usually anti-socialism (Biden a ‘socialist’?!); but greed was the bottom line.

So there we have it. A powerful and self-seeking elite of free-market anti-interventionist capitalists marshalling a simple-minded mob to demonstrate against their (the mob’s) own best interests, by playing to resentments that were understandable, but in no way the fault of the people and institutions their leaders blamed. That’s the ‘simple’ explanation, at one level. (It must have struck others, too.) The next level will require an analysis of what was really fuelling the mob’s resentments. If we can put the blame on the inevitable self-destructive end of late-stage capitalism it would make the explanation even tidier. But that will be too ‘Marxist’ for some; and maybe too simplistic for the historian who up to now has always warned his readers against this sort of thing.

*

Incidentally: proofs of my next book – Britain Before Brexit – will start arriving during this coming week, which means that I may be too busy for a while checking and indexing to be able to blog at length. The publication date is now set for 12 August, which seems to me to be unnecessarily late. I’d intended it to bear on the Brexit debate, which could be over by then; though I can see that going on and on. Ah well; I’m grateful to Bloomsbury for being willing to publish a book of old essays at all.

In Victorian times the propertied classes in Britain and across Europe had an inordinate fear of ‘the mob’. That’s why they denied the vote to anyone who didn’t have a material ‘stake’ in their countries, and so could be marshalled violently against those who did. ‘The mob’ were at the core of all the riots that took place in Britain and on the Continent, from the 18^thcentury through to the 20^th. They – the ‘great unwashed’ – could also be seen be seen to make up the majority of working-class Brexiteers recently, and of the Trumpists who are presently storming the Capitol in Washington.

It was usually assumed in 19^th-century Britain that the ‘mob’ would be of the Left, politically: socialists, communists or anarchists. It wasn’t always so; the ‘King and Country’ riots of the 18^thcentury, and the anti-Catholic and race riots of the 19^thand 20^th centuries, certainly couldn’t be categorised in this way. The same is true of our present-day Ukippers and Trumpists, who are much more amenable to propaganda from the (usually very well-washed) Right. Trump even objects to Biden as a ‘socialist’. Both movements are hostile to any kind of ‘progressive’ or radical thought, especially if it can be dismissed as ‘political correctness’.

This may make them more dangerous – or, by another way of looking at it – effective; more so, indeed, than their numbers should suggest. There can be little doubt that Brexiteers and Trumpists represent only minorities in their respective countries – albeit substantial ones. What they both have, however, are large reservoirs of public resentment, and tremendous anger. That’s how you pull down the doors of Congress, when you don’t have a majority. One angry man or woman is worth ten calm and rational ones.

Is this the start of a new Civil War, my American friends? Or a revival of the old one? As a student of American history – although rather rusty now – I can see parallels between Trump’s followers and the Confederates. (Actually you didn’t need to be a historian to see that. They were carrying Confederate flags, for pity’s sake.) – Or perhaps it’s a (failed) French revolutionary moment? Didn’t I see somewhere a photo of a Trumpist sitting in the Speaker’s chair yesterday? Like this: from 200+ years ago.

(Later.) This may be the one I was thinking of:

Thank goodness it wasn’t another ‘Stockholms Blodbad’ (below). So far.

There’s a super documentary series on Swedish TV just now about ‘Stockholms Blodbad’, when 80-odd prominent Swedish nobles and bishops were beheaded and hanged in Stortorget, in the old town, in November 1520, on the orders of the Danish king Christian II: known in Sweden as ‘Kristian Tyrann’, and in Denmark – allegedly – as ‘Christian den Gode’. It has been suggested that this 500-year old massacre lies at the root of the antipathy between Swedes and Danes which you can still detect today, perhaps surprisingly, bearing in mind that they’re all Scandinavians; but you mustn’t believe that the Nordics necessarily get along with one another. (You should just hear some of my Swedish friends on the Norwegians!)

My reason for bringing it up here is that it seemed to me that parallels might be drawn with present-day events; not the ‘bloodbath’, exactly – unless Brexit turns particularly nasty – but the dispute that gave rise to it. Sweden at the time was a member of the ‘Kalmar Union’ of the three Scandinavian countries (plus part of Finland) formed in 1397, which could be regarded as a kind of embryonic forerunner of the EU; but with the Swedish part of it wanting to break away. That was why Christian came down on it. Eventually – just two years after the Bloodbath, in fact – Sweden’s independence (Swexit) was achieved, with Gustav Vasa becoming its first real  Kung.

But… looking at the history of this event in detail, the cap doesn’t really fit. It was far more confusing than that. Religion – the Reformation – had much to do with it, for example, which I don’t think is the case with Brexit.  (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Bloodbath.) Brexit is complex enough in itself, of course, but not in any of the same ways. Boris Johnson is hardly a Gustav Vasa (below), for a start. And I can’t see M. Barnier ordering the beheading of him and the other the Brexiteer leaders, whatever the provocation. Historical parallels very rarely work like this. If they did, then history might be of more use to us.

How can old people remain so cheerful, when they know that death will be upon them soon? I used to wonder that when I was young. Now I think I know. For most of us – even if, like me, we’ve lived pretty charmed existences – life has been full of tensions, problems, failures and embarrassments which the approach of death means we can no longer do much about, even if we had the energy; which gives us – me, at any rate – a feeling of relaxation as I anticipate my 80^th birthday in just a few weeks’ time. I’ve got little serious to regret in my past life. I may have been rotten to some people, mainly my mother and my ex-wife (perhaps), but it’s too late to do anything about that now. My children, all of whom have turned out better in every way than I have, are up and running, and with wonderful children of their own. So I’ve helped keep the human race going: our primary duty as a species. I can’t do any more for them. I’ve written a fair number of books, a few of which have been influential in a small way, and among a small and insignificant group of people (other academic historians); and although there are a couple more I’d have liked to write – one on Britain and Europe, the other on ‘populism’, both of course arising from recent events – I’ve at last reconciled myself to the fact that I’m too chronically tired  to even start the research that would be necessary to write them. I’m also reconciled to the fact that I’ll never be an artist, the career that was predicted for me when I was a boy, because I’d never be able to lift a candle to Vermeer. Or to Graham Gooch, if I had pursued the other (even less plausible) dream of my youth. All that gives me the luxury of lazily lying on a bed of moderate achievement, which is the condition I aspire to after death, and to me would seem like Heaven. (My other vision of the after-life is that I’d have to go through this life again, from the beginning, without knowing that I’d done it before. That’s my Hell.) Hence my own ‘cheerfulness in the face of death’. Is it the same for all oldies?

I’m also cheered by the simple knowledge that I will indeed reach 80 – if nothing unexpected happens in the next month – which I wouldn’t have predicted just a few years ago. In fact my life has been punctuated with illnesses and disabilities which, if I’d been born fifty or even twenty years earlier, would probably have killed me. One of them killed my father at the early age of 53; which was one of the reasons why I was surprised to live longer. I was born backwards; had serious asthma as a young child; was thin and ill-nourished; and in adulthood had several crucial operations – too embarrassing to detail – which couldn’t have been done just a few years earlier, when I would have died. Thank God for the NHS – though it wasn’t yet there for my breech birth. Today I only have asthma, again (a doctor told me it comes back when the testosterone decreases); arthritis; deafness; bouts of depression; virtual blindness in one eye; and my ‘chronic fatigue’ – probably the result of a tick-bite in the Swedish countryside – to worry me. That and suspected hypochondria. Nothing, really. And the fatigue might even be a boon, if it prepares me for the hereafter. 

Against this I have the wonderful Kajsa to share my later years (or decades?) with, friends and family to share them with remotely, and a beautiful little wooden home on a covid-free (we hope) Swedish island. So all’s pretty well. If only it weren’t for the appalling politics back in Britain, I might even be happy.

Sorry for the personal. But the beginning of a new year – and one to be feared by those less fortunate than I – seemed to call for it. 

Gott nytt år! – Or maybe not if you’re a Remainer.  And perhaps if your eye caught this report in some of the British papers this morning:

https://www.universalpersonality.com/eu-faces-swexit-threat-after-sweden-warned-if-brexit-happens-we-want-to-leave/.

‘Swexit’ would be a tragedy, I believe, for Sweden, Europe and the world. And it would be more than slightly annoying for me personally, having gone to all the trouble of acquiring Swedish citizenship in order (in part) to retain my wider European identity and privileges. I was keen to become Swedish; but not narrowly  Swedish, in the same way that Farage, Johnson and Co. have forced me to be narrowly British since midnight (CET) last night. If that’s the way Sweden goes, where is there left for a friendly European to take refuge?

Most of the evidence presented in these reports for Sweden’s – and in particular the right-wing populist  Sverigedemokraterna’s  – anti-Europeanism is old hat; and indeed was picked up more than four years ago in a piece I wrote for the LRB blog, and republished here: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/. I thought then that Britain’s subsequent struggle to achieve her ‘independence’ from the EU would act as a warning rather than an encouragement for my Swedish compatriots; and the treatment that Johnson, Farage, Gove and the rest have received in the Swedish press over the past twelve months has rather confirmed that hope. (Remember that Swedes were brought up on Monty Python, so they’ve seen it before.) Brexit appears to have made us a laughing stock on the Continent. I still hope that this might hold Sweden back from the cliff edge.

But until we’ve seen much more recent opinion polls we can’t know for sure. I’ll be looking out for them, and will report back. In the meantime, again, gott nytt år!

Amazon.se is up and running, rather to my surprise – I hope its employment practices meet Swedish trade union standards – and is the only supplier I can find here that can provide me with a particular item I want: a 23 year-old book co-authored by Jacob Rees Mogg’s father, which Alastair Campbell claims explains the deep-laid strategy of today’s leading Brexiteers. 

Now that Johnson has ‘got Brexit done’, we can see whether the book’s prediction comes true. It’s called The Sovereign Individual, and broadly speaking appears to be a template for a ‘New’ anarcho-liberal non-State. That figures. Could it be called a ‘conspiracy’, too? Here’s Campbell’s summary: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/12/15/alastair-campbell-the-23-year-old-book-that-explains-brexit-and-beyond/.

If Amazon.se is to be trusted, the book should reach our island tomorrow. Interestingly, when I ordered it, Amazon.se already had all my details from my Amazon.uk account.

We’ve got the champagne in; so at midnight CET tomorrow we can celebrate both the New Year, and Britain’s liberation from the Beast of Brussels. It will be good to do it from 915 miles away.

I thought we could do with some cheerful thoughts, as we approach the end of this dreadful year. So here goes.

In about 7.5 billion years’ time our earth – or the shrivelled, scorched remnant of it – will fall into the sun, and disappear. Long before then, in just a few million years, life on it – ‘as we know it, Jim’ – will have become impossible. With present rates of climate change, it might get pretty unbearable far sooner. Fires and floods will sweep over the earth; the continents will shrink; and most living things will starve. – Feeling better now?

In fact that’s what comforts me at night when I contemplate the world today, and my own tiny contribution to it; all the opportunities I’ve missed – the books I haven’t written, good deeds I haven’t done – in my nearly eighty years of life. In the long, indeed the ultimate, term none of this matters. Everything will go black; just as it will for me personally. So there’ll be nothing to regret.

But it’s not my death or my reputation or my undelivered work that I’m concerned about, or even the future of the human race, per se. It’s Mozart. I can accept the prospect of the end of me, of the world, and even of the known universe; but I can’t bear the thought of a future – anybody’s future – in which Mozart’s music hasn’t survived, in one form or another, but instead has been swallowed up by the same blackness that will consume me. By Mozart I don’t mean only him, of course; I’m using his name as a shorthand term for all the great cultural creations of humanity during its brief existence on this earth: Shakespeare, French cathedrals, Italian Renaissance painters, German music, English romantic poetry, the game of cricket… and those are only some of the European ones. Our creativity is the thing that justifies us as a species, makes us part of the Godhead (however you want to conceive of that), and so cannot – please! – just disappear. But it will do, if it’s dependent on the continued existence of our planet to survive.

Which is why it’s essential (a) to keep the earth going as long as we can: here I’m at one with Greta and the environmentalists; and (b) in the meantime to redouble our efforts to search for an alternative home for our species if all that comes to nought. If just a few of us managed to escape to Alpha Centauri, bringing Mozart’s Requiem with them, I’d feel more relaxed about our ‘end’. Which is why I’m also very supportive of Elon Musk and those others who are spending their ill-gotten capitalist gains trying, at any rate, to reach for the stars. Mozart’s immortality may depend on it. 

This should be all our governments’ top priority. Every other issue – even Brexit – is trivial. (Which makes me feel better about Brexit too.)

So, Boris has outwitted Johnny Foreigner to bring us – just in time for Christmas – a terrific new ‘deal’ with the EU.  Just as I predicted: https://bernardjporter.com/2020/12/06/a-prediction/; and with the Tory press puffing it up in the way I predicted, too.  What a man!  What a glorious prospect lies ahead of us, reclaiming our ‘sovereignty’, unfettered by the chains of Brussels and free to pursue – or resume – our great national and historical destiny in the wider world!

I’ve not, of course, read the ?2,000-page agreement, and wouldn’t be able to understand all its details and nuances if I had. And it’s probably too early to pronounce on their practical ramifications in any case. In common with most ‘Remainers’ – and even some Brexiteers, who believe that relative poverty is an acceptable price to pay for ‘sovereignty’ – I doubt whether Britain’s new situation in the world will be as comfortable and profitable as her old one within the EU, and can’t think of many material advantages to her ‘splendid isolation’: just as there weren’t, incidentally, when that phrase was coined. But I don’t know; and so prefer to leave that aspect of the recent negotiation – the economic one – aside. In any case, even if we do come an economic cropper after Brexit, the Brexiters will still be able to blame someone or something else for it. The coronavirus is the obvious scapegoat. Failing that, it will be the ‘Remoaners’, still, not wanting us to succeed, and so holding us back; or Boris for not protecting our fishermen; or the perfidious French for wanting their revenge. So, it will never be universally accepted that we sceptics were right. Brexit was always a creature mainly of prejudice rather than reason: as are most other popular movements, admittedly, but not to quite the same degree. And I have to admit that it’s my own prejudices – pro-European rather than narrowly nationalist – that put me on the other side; together, I like to think, with my historical studies. (Look out for my essay collection, Britain Before Brexit, to be published by Bloomsbury early next year.)

It’s those prejudices that will make me regret one particular effect of Brexit, which is the drastic curtailing of our ‘freedom of movement’ it will involve. (Brexiters only seemed to think about freedom of movement into Britain – ‘all those Poles, mending stuff’. But of course it’s about our movement out too.) For me personally it won’t matter so much, having acquired a second citizenship which allows me to wander unfettered all over the EU; but what of those who don’t have Continental partners, or Irish grandmothers, and so will have to stand for hours in the ‘foreign’ queues at airports? And won’t be able to claim free health treatment in France or Italy if they fall ill? And whose knowledge of our wonderful neighbours, and consequently their xenophilia, will suffer as a result? In particular, as an ex-university teacher, I feel sorry for those students who will no longer be able to profit from the Erasmus foreign study programme that has been such a success over the past 33 years. All these are obvious losses arising out of Brexit. No new cheap markets in Patagonia or Wallachia – or even Australia and the USA – can possibly compensate for them. We can see this straightaway.

We can also see, pretty plainly, the damage that the controversy over Brexit has done to our national life over the past four miserable years, and which is likely to continue for years to come. Others have chronicled this at length: the anger and literal violence that it has provoked; the underlying racism it has revealed; the near-destruction of what had once been fondly thought to be some of the bed-rocks of our ‘national identity’, like tolerance and liberalism; exile for some – applications for citizenship of even freezing Sweden rocketed after the Brexit vote; and, last but maybe not least, the near-universal scorn and obloquy it has drawn from kind foreigners who used to admire us so much; or else their patronising sympathy for ‘Brexit refugees’ like me, which is almost as hard to take. Will this ever end? Will Britain ever recover the national esteem that politicians like Johnson, Farage and Rees-Mogg – as well-known and ridiculed on the Continent as they are in Britain – have divested the whole country of so cavalierly? Or is this the reputational end for us, as a supposedly ‘once-proud’ nation?

What may not be so plain is the deeper damage that may come in Brexit’s train. This derives from the way it was forced through originally, by means that were highly destructive of democracy (‘populism’ is not the same), and likely to inflict further harm on our politics – and hence on us – over the next few years. We’ve already seen the beginnings of it: with Johnson’s illegal prorogation of Parliament last year, misleading the Crown along the way; his brutal culling of moderates and elder statesmen from his Conservative party; his attacks on a neutral Speaker; the Right-wing press’s labelling of judges and Lords as ‘Traitors’ and ‘Enemies of the People’ (and remember how close the ties are between the Government front bench and the most rabid of the newspapers: Mr and Mrs Gove are perhaps the prime examples; plus of course the hold that Rupert Murdoch has over all of them); the culture of straight lying that now seems endemic in public life, at least on the Right, and sheer corruption – Covid contracts for friends and backers; new freedoms – even to murder – for the secret services; and behind all this – despite his departure from No. 10 a few months ago – the ominous shadow of Dominic Cummings, working to make government more ‘efficient’, which to my mind in this case equates with ‘authoritarian’ or even ‘Fascist’….. all producing a ruling class which, with all its ‘popular’ pretensions, doesn’t reflect the ‘people’, or the ‘democracy’ at all, but rather a cabal of interests that have been cleverer than the true democrats at playing ‘the political game’ in confusing times. As I’ve argued before, and argue again in the concluding chapter of my Britain Before Brexit, it’s clear that these people have no real interest in British ‘sovereignty’, except insofar as it will enable them to keep their ill-gotten gains away from the Europeans who would like to tax them. Other leading Brexiters might still retain ‘imperial’ illusions sown in their Public Schools. All the rest – certainly so far as ordinary voters are concerned – is propaganda.

So, whatever Boris’s achievement, or otherwise, in last week’s negotiations, the whole process of this extraordinary and in many ways accidental moment in British politics is clearly changing the country. We’re no longer what we were. We may turn out better, or worse. I rather liked what I take to be our old ‘national identity’, or identities. (Again, see my new book.) But then I’m a European, a traitor: a ‘snowflake’ in the modern terminology. And, of course, I’m also an ‘elitist’, one of those derided ‘experts’ (on Britain’s earlier history), and old.

I can’t tell whether we’ll ever return to the EU – even if it wanted us back in. (I wouldn’t.) More urgent for us Brits, however, is to overhaul our democratic system – voting, political education, the power of the ‘Fourth Estate’ – so that nothing as undemocratic – a Right-wing coup under the cover of xenophobia – can afflict us again.