Don’t gloat – this is Brexiteers’ one big chance

‘Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’

I think this is how quite a few of us are feeling right now, we Brexiteers. We’re over the initial giddy disbelief, the euphoric rush of ‘My God, we actually did it!’ and heading towards the Wednesday Blues stage of our trip. Why, after all that agonising and hard work, does victory taste so bitter?

Well I know that in my case it has nothing to do with buyer’s remorse. I’m still very proud of what we achieved; prouder yet of the overwhelming outbreak of common sense I witnessed last week in so many of my fellow countrymen and -women. What bothers me is the evident misery and upset it has caused those — lots of my friends among them — who didn’t get their way and now feel like strangers in their own land.

The hurt runs deep. In the hospitality area at Glastonbury on the day of the result, I ran into an old mate from my rock ’n’ roll years who could barely bring himself to speak. Our kids used to play together; he came to my wedding; but he just wasn’t interested in comparing notes — as old friends usually do — about all the weird shit, good and bad, that’s happened since. He curled his lips like I was something particularly foul that had got stuck on the bottom of his wellies.

This, I’m afraid, is how Remainers see us Brexiteers. They don’t remotely buy into this vision we have of ourselves as the plucky freedom fighters who saved British sovereignty. Rather, in their eyes, we’re a bunch of reckless, racist Little Englanders who threw away the UK economy and the right of their groovy, open-minded, cosmopolitan offspring to settle wherever they wanted on the Continent, all to prove a petty, spiteful point on behalf of that horrid, vulgar little man Nigel Farage — one which isn’t going to make the damnedest bit of difference anyway because we’re all globalists now.