If Brexit is dying, what about democracy?

Never meet your enemies — you might like them, and that ruins stuff. I had dinner with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, about a year ago. During his time in office, Rowan came out with what I considered to be some of the most cringing, effete, left-liberal, self-abnegating rot I have ever heard. But then, at this dinner, I met the most kindly, charming, humble and witty human being. If a man could be said to actually radiate goodness, that was Rowan. I left the dinner utterly dismayed. Never meet your enemies.

So it is with Matthew Parris. I bump into Matthew every so often and am always reminded what a delightful chap he is: drily humorous, ineffably good-natured and a pleasure to talk to. Luckily, most of his fellow travellers are not similarly equipped — his friend David Aaaaaaronovitch, for example, is in person a smug dirigible inflated by gusts of self-delusion and self-righteousness. But there’s something even worse with Parris — he writes beautifully, too. It is an awful thing to see your opponent’s case put forward with elegance and erudition. Luckily again, most of his fellow travellers are not similarly equipped. Read a sentence by Polly Toynbee and fairly quickly a thin wisp of smoke will exit your temples, wraith-like — that is the will to live escaping your cranium. And yet it is still the case that I disagree with almost everything Matthew writes, on almost every issue. Sometimes, when I finish reading one of his articles, I am so irked at its sumptuous, chiming wrongness that, irrationally, I take a visceral dislike to his bloody llamas as well as his viewpoint. I don’t think ‘I hope your llamas all die’ or anything like that. I just think if one hove into view, spitting like a transgressed Remainer, I might kick it, spitefully, on the fetlocks.