Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’ Liddle agreed. ‘Betcha we don’t leave,’ he said. And that is the book’s principal argument: we’ll never leave the EU.
The Great Betrayal was published in July and, so far, Liddle is right. But what about on 1 November: will this book be massively outdated and will Britain be out of the European Union? It’s anyone’s guess.
Even now, quite a few of the references in the book are dated. It was published before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. And already Theresa May’s doomed premiership, which features prominently here, seems light years away.
Still the book is very engaging. Liddle is, just as in his Spectator column, a lovely, easy-going writer. So many experts write about Brexit in Mogadon-Latinate prose; Liddle has the light touch and is fantastically rude in an ad hominem — and ad mulierem — way.
He talks about the heavyset David Aaronovitch being ‘trapped in his bubble. His very big bubble.’ Will Straw, executive director of the Remain campaign, is called ‘reliably useless’. We come across the ‘over-remunerated, crisp-flogging dimbo, Lineker’. Jeremy Corbyn is ‘an appealing hybrid of Catweazle, Chauncey Gardiner and Vladimir Lenin’. Liddle compares the Guardian columnist Owen Jones to Squealer, the fat pig who is minister for propaganda in Animal Farm. As for Diane Abbott, he simply calls her stupid, stupid, stupid…
If you’re a fan of the Liddle school of political invective, you’ll love this book.
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