Brexit Britain fills me with calm. Six weeks on, there’s no point pretending otherwise. Losing is far better than winning. I am filled with enormous serenity at the thought of this terrible, terrible idea being not my fault at all.
I didn’t expect to feel this way. Although there were signs, now I think back, on the night of the vote. I was at Glastonbury, obviously. (‘Of course you were!’ cried Rod Liddle, when I saw him a few weeks later.) Of course I was. There, with the rest of the metropolitan, liberal, bien-pensant yadda yadda. I found out at about 2 a.m., after a pleasant evening doing pleasant Glastonbury things. I’d wandered backstage, to meet a journalist friend who had secured access to Wi-Fi and a television.
‘It’s all fucked,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely happening.’
‘Jeez,’ I said, or words to that effect. And then we spoke of the miserable future. Of a nation shamed, and racists vindicated, and countrymen which, in hindsight, it turned out we didn’t understand at all. All that fun Remain stuff.
After a while, though, my friend fixed me with a look. ‘You do not,’ she said, quite accusingly, ‘seem very sad.’ And I thought about this, and I realised she was right. ‘It’s probably because I’m wasted,’ I told her. ‘Or in denial. Or Scottish.’ Although it wasn’t. I see that now. It was something else.
I was sad afterwards, obviously. I went home, sobered up, wrote the odd column, did the odd TV appearance, and my approach, I think it is fair to say, was morose. There were practical reasons for this, obviously, but at heart probably was a sense of rejection. Don’t play your tiny violins at me; I’m just saying. After all, wasn’t that what I was supposed to feel? A million times, by then, I had read that Brexit wasn’t about immigration, wasn’t even about Europe, but was actually a blow struck against precisely the sort of aloof, condescending, bubble–dwelling media-politico idiot that the comments under my articles ceaselessly tell me I am.
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