Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How it all went right: The great Brexit wound has almost healed

It didn’t take a generation – it took about two weeks

They are getting themselves terribly worked up about that new 50 pence coin commemorating our departure from the European Union. By ‘they’ I mean those people in the Brexit Derangement Syndrome intensive care ward, wired up to saline drips, attended to day and night, occasionally afforded a few thousand volts of ECT when things get really bad, but still foaming, still beside themselves with apoplexy. Alastair Campbell has announced that he will not accept the coin if given it in change. Lord Adonis, who was perhaps already in the antechamber of derangement even before June 2016, said: ‘I am never using or accepting this coin.’ The writer for middle-class kiddies, Philip Pullman, our own pound shop C.S. Lewis, urged ‘literate’ people to boycott the coin because the inscription was missing an Oxford comma. A nod, there, to the central tenet of the Remoaner fringe these past four years that those who wanted Brexit were all thick. The thing about an Oxford comma, Phil, is that it is not needed. It is optional — go on, look it up.

All this over a 50p piece. Hell, I wasn’t wholly delighted when Jane Austen suddenly appeared on our £10 notes, given the misery I endured in school reading Pride and Prejudice. But I have managed to survive, and use those notes, without throwing the toys out of my pram, or weeping, or tearing my hair out.

Such epic petulance, such surly bigotry and spite. The repeated stamping of a tiny foot in a vast and empty auditorium. The little tranche of Remoaners — now morphing imperceptibly into Rejoiners — insisting that they will acquire Irish passports or saying they might leave the country altogether. This last little coterie may or may not include the journalist Yasmin  Alibhai-Brown, who seemed to say she would leave the country if Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.

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