How not to understand the Brexit referendum

Simon Kuper’s Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK is a wonderful compendium of anecdotes about Oxford in the 1980s, one of the best of which concerns a lecture he attended by the Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eagleton dismisses the collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe as a minor source of annoyance that has no bearing on the validity of his beliefs. A student on Kuper’s right takes notes throughout and at the conclusion of the lecture reads his summary: ‘Presumably ironic.’

Eagleton wasn’t being ironic, and neither is Kuper in this blistering attack on Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings, among others, for masterminding our exit from the EU. Indeed, Kuper’s theory about what motivated these scoundrels is straight out of a Marxist textbook: it was a cynical attempt by Britain’s desiccated ruling class to repatriate power to Westminster so they could assume their rightful place as masters of the political universe.

‘Brexit was above all their generational grand project designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster,’ he writes. ‘The rest was just detail – boring issues of governance best left to swotty civil servants.’ But just as Eagleton’s Marxism survives a brutal reality bath, so too does Kuper’s. According to his dialectical materialism, the ‘Tory toffs’ who campaigned for Brexit were intoxicated by a nostalgic idea of Britain’s past – a heady cocktail of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and the Beano – which they were determined to restore in all its glory. So what if Brexit would have dire economic consequences? They didn’t care because they were protected by the high–paying jobs they’d walked into, thanks to some string-pulling from their parents. ‘If you make £200,000 a year, the threat of recession is just an irritation,’ he writes.