What’s your New Year’s resolution? Eat less, move more? Or perhaps you’re a contrary cuss aiming to eat more and move less? Ever perverse, I plan a little exercise which will leave me both more streamlined yet more replete; by culling what I can only call ‘swivel-eyed Remainers’ from my friendship group, both online and IRL.
‘Swivel-eyed’ is thought to have originated in the early 1990s of a certain type of Conservative politician; Simon Hoggart wrote of those who had a ‘swivel-eyed belief in privatisation’. When John Redwood was first appointed to the Cabinet in the 1993 reshuffle, some clubbable Tory sneered ‘We want fewer swivel-eyed ideologues, not more’. The Conservative MP Tim Collins described the Tories who backed Redwood’s 1995 campaign for leadership as the ‘swivel-eyed barmy army from Ward Eight at Broadmoor’. It was reportedly the journalist Euan Ferguson who first used the complete phrase in a 1997 Observer column to describe the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who he pondered could run a candidate who might well be ‘a swivel-eyed loon who glories in pious deceit.’ With the rise of Ukip, the increasingly impotent liberal press began to apply it exclusively to Brexiteers.
Having diehard Remainer friends – even after all these years – still feels like losing loved ones to a cult
But now it’s many Remainers who are the swivel-eyed loons, spitting hatred for their fellow man through spittle-flecked lips – and I, for one, am done with humouring them. In 2023 it will be seven years since the referendum and I simply cannot face the thought of another season listening to this drivelling on. There are of course plenty of Remainers who have accepted the Brexit vote. Even Keir Starmer – the Remainer’s Remainer – understands that to keep banging on about Brexit is the quickest way to make oneself appear like a stuck old record. But there are some who just can’t move on.
How did I get here, not just ready but eager to sever ties with a good proportion of my friendship group? It’s been an interesting ‘journey’. I grew up in a Communist home in the constituency of Tony Benn, who was very much opposed to the EU, so I never saw being pro-Europe as the left-wing choice – it was seen as a gravy train for businessmen and bureaucrats where I come from. When I voted for Brexit, I reverted to my working-class roots; I was repelled by the casual arrogance and bad manners of many Remainers and their open loathing of the proletariat – Bob Geldof mocking fisherman on the Thames, Will Self snarling at the black working-class writer Dreda Say Mitchell during a debate.
I underwent some kind of spiritual revival. I understood the anger that fuelled the joyride of Brexit; at last, we really were truly equal, with no ‘uni’ connections or nepotism able to buy any citizen more than one vote.
I never dreamt we’d win. I’d already practised my good-loser shrug-and-smile, as I guessed my mostly Remainer friends might crow a bit. I can honestly swear that if we’d lost, I would never have behaved petulantly, because I am neither a ninny nor nine years old. But immediately, the nastiness from the other side started up.
I wrote here in 2016:
‘Reading between the lines regarding the contempt Remain had for the white working-class, I had a feeling that as soon as Brexit scented victory the C-word would not be long in coming. And sure enough in the Sunday Times account of Glastonbury, “The chavs have won, mate,” one cut-glass raver told his mate. “I’m already looking into dual citizenship.’” Elsewhere in the paper a Brighton Remnant commented, “If you give a vote to every man and his dog, you have to be prepared for the answer you get.” WELCOME TO CHAV BRITAIN was a friend of a friend’s FB status the morning of the result.’
But everything is copy to a writer. Within weeks a charming novelist, Jane Robins (a South London lorry driver’s daughter who had been a policy adviser at the BBC and editor of The Week in Westminster on Radio 4) contacted me after seeing the aforementioned piece; she’d liked it on Facebook and been ejected from her North London book group as a result. You couldn’t make it up – so we ran with it, making it into an amusing play called People Like Us.
We were very lucky to be taken up by a self-made mega-rich pro-Brexit patron of the arts, who assembled a crew and cast and laid on a small theatre. It got predictably bad reviews from the Remainer broadsheet herd, and when it didn’t move on after a sold-out run, I was philosophical – I’ve always been keen on the Churchill quote ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’. But then something happened which really made me think. An anti-Brexit friend asked me how the play had done and when I said it was closing with no move to a bigger theatre, he looked me in the eye and said ‘Good.’
What sort of derangement would make a friend wish a friend ill? Brexit Derangement Syndrome would be the answer. In the six years since the referendum, I’ve seen this mental affliction lead its followers into a realm of Magical Thinking only reached otherwise by the most extreme of the trans-brigade. For instance, followers will often identify as far younger than they are; think of the then 68-year-old Ian McEwan relishing the idea of ‘oldsters, Brexiteers, freshly in their graves.’ During a social media spat, a Remainer hack told me to move over and make way for the youth, of which he was one. He was three years older than me!
Having diehard Remainer friends – even after all these years – still feels like losing loved ones to a cult; a cult in which if you identify as a Good Person, you can behave as badly as you like, even towards those you claim to love. Even the recent revelations of Qatar-related corruption hasn’t shut them up. Well, I’ve had enough. People are dying for democracy from Ukraine to Iran – and some people are still whining about too much democracy six years ago. Shame on them.
It’s said by psychologists that marriage can survive hatred and indifference but not contempt, and that’s the emotion I now feel towards those of my Remainer friends who won’t accept it’s over. So as my sole New Year’s Resolution, I’m going to forgive every Remainer mate who has condescended to me since 2016 – Remainsplained – but I’m going to forget them too. Life’s too short to spend with people who believe that some people should have more votes than others.
So come, my swivel-eyed amigos, let us part – we have delighted each other long enough. More and more you remind me of the fabled Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungles of the Philippines, convinced that the war is still going on. That, or Veruca Salt who has grown up to be Miss Havisham. From now on, you’ll be enjoying The Big Sulk – or Le Bouder Grand, to speak a language you understand – without me.
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