Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

For Remainers, Brexit is really about power

At the New Yorker Festival party in mid-October, my astute colleague hardly needed the caution. But you know how at a discombobulating bash you seize gratefully on something to talk about. So as Matthew Goodwin and I rubbed elbows with the East Coast elite at the Old Town Bar in Manhattan (‘Look! It’s Ronan Farrow!’), I warned him about the following afternoon’s audience for our panel on Brexit.

They’ll be Democrats, I explained, and they’re hardwired to associate both the referendum and Boris personally with Trump. They’ve all been brainwashed by the New York Times, which portrays Brexiteers as a cross between the extras on The Walking Dead and the pitchfork-waving villagers in Frankenstein. The only thing that would motivate these folks to opt for a panel on Brexit is indignation. They’ll be 99.9 per cent Remain. They may have visited the UK, and in a comical reverse-colonialism they have a strangely proprietary relationship to Britain, which has gone whacko without permission. They don’t necessarily know much about the UK or the EU, but they think they do. We won’t get anywhere with these people.

Such certainties in hand, I had to ask myself why I’d accepted this invitation in the first place. Maybe, like any American fiction writer, I was eager to suck up to the New Yorker, a high-prestige publication that pays more than bus fare for short stories. Maybe this gig was worth it for the swag alone; what other goodie bag would include Bose Bluetooth headphones? Maybe I was simply flattered to be asked, though I knew better: the organisers couldn’t think of anybody else. I’m one of the only loons in the New Yorker’s orbit who supports Brexit, and you could have counted its alternative candidates for this sacrificial-lamb appearance on the fingers of one hand with digits to spare.

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