My fellow Remainers should not aim for a ‘soft Brexit’

‘I like to write when I’m feeling spiteful,’ remarked D.H. Lawrence. ‘It’s like having a good sneeze.’ A perennial challenge for a Fleet Street columnist is how to walk the fine line between writing as though your opinion mattered, and writing as though it were just an entertaining sneeze. My fellow Spectator columnist, Rod Liddle, has developed a very marketable pitch in the columnar sneeze.

I perhaps err on the other side: writing with the implicit suggestion that the nation waits upon my verdict. I know, of course, that nobody does, but have to pretend to myself (and inhabit the pretence) that I’m a kind of prime minister-in-waiting, and my opinions (which in fact have often been inconsistent or even whimsical over the years) were being chiselled in granite. I can’t write except as though the column were important. Taking oneself too seriously can verge on the preposterous, and it’s irritating (I know) to readers. But I’m too old to change.

Being so, I’m literally kept awake at night as the new year starts, with wondering what line to take now, on Brexit. ‘Who cares!’ I realise. But there we are.

A friend remarked to me that ‘the fightback against Boris and Brexit begins now’, but I cannot feel that. My side of the argument has been comprehensively defeated, in votes if not in logic; Mr Johnson seems to have made a reasonable start; and while (as I argued here before Christmas) one must remain very wary indeed, barking at the wheels of the Brexit bus strikes me as — for the time being — not only pointless but rather annoying. Brexit is going to happen. But what kind of Brexit? That will be the big controversy in the year ahead.