The metaphor of divorce has never felt wholly adequate to describe the complexity of ending 47 years of union with our 27 European neighbours but it has always captured the emotional brutality of the choice. How else, anyway, to imagine that morning this week when, after all these years of angst and haggling, the UK will finally hear the door slam on its long-time family home and find itself suddenly alone with all its baggage in the chill air outside, contemplating what’s next, while the locks are changed? For many, that moment will retain the liberating bravado of bedsit independence, an opportunity to refresh a midlife crisis Tinder profile. For more of us, though – even many of those, I’d guess, who had vaguely wanted out – there will be instead a powerful sense of “what have we done?” And a dawning knowledge that all we have helped to build in Europe since 1973 – for better and worse – will now carry on without us. The 1,650 days of the troubled transition will melt away – all the exhausting wrangling over visiting rights and the price of fish; the costly delays and the desperate triumphalism – and we will be left with the starkness of that decision made in June 2016: we’re out. Of all the false promises made in the Leave campaign, among the first to ring hollow will be the boast that, post-Brexit, Britain will not have to occupy its thoughts with the EU any more, and can concentrate exclusively on itself. Rather, from next week on, we will no doubt discover just how much the magic of frictionless trade and free movement has allowed us to take for granted the benefits of union with our closest neighbours. We will reacquaint ourselves with the fact that borders are made of wasted hours and red tape. “We’re going. No ifs or buts,” Johnson repeated, in one of several juvenile platitudes from the last election. Our self-imposed barriers have, however, instead ushered in an era of enormous if-or-but uncertainty for countless businesses and families. There are those who assume, because of this, that from day one “remainers” will immediately become “rejoiners”. I’m not sure that’s true. In the foreseeable future, it would be a brave politician who sought to reopen the tribal wounds of the past five years to argue for a return to the EU on terms inevitably inferior to those “best of all worlds” arrangements which Britain had won for itself by 2016. More likely, that 52-48 referendum choice will quickly harden into history. Within a decade, schoolchildren will be faced with a staple question on their A-level papers: “What were the reasons that led the UK to Brexit?”
And generations of kids will trot out a memorised list of accepted motivations, just as they have learned to recall the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and shifting alliances to explain the carnage of 1914-18. Those model Brexit answers will have to include the stubborn Euroscepticism that always characterised Britain’s relationship with the union as it inched toward federalism, just as they would note the immediate crises of the Greek financial bailout, and the migrant chaos brought on by the collapse of Syria, and examine how they coincided with long years of stagnant wages and austerity at home. The marking scheme might look, too, for reference to the geographical inequalities of Britain – the sense that the vote against Brussels was also for many a cathartic “up yours” to London and Westminster. And examiners could also give a tick to mention of the role played by tabloid media, owned by offshore plutocrats with a vested interest in deregulation and a reliably profitable line in raucous jingoism. The top grades might be reserved for those framing these arguments with introductory paragraphs on the rise of populism fuelled by the unchecked influence of Facebook and fake news – and perhaps the unique combination of a prime minister in David Cameron who was the opposite of a man of the people, and a throwback opposition leader in Jeremy Corbyn, seeking to hide doubts not only about the EU but also Nato, by not showing up.
The colour in those accounts will be provided by a few of the characters who whipped up latent fears of threatened sovereignty: Nigel Farage, bothering asylum seekers in his union jack loafers and Arthur Daley coat; Dominic Cummings, the self-styled “disruptor” who found new ways to use social media to stoke the oldest prejudices about “foreigners”; and diehards like Bill Cash MP, the emblematic old soldier of the struggle, who spent a political lifetime seeking to “avenge” the death of a brave father killed in the Normandy landings. As with the answers about the lead-up to the first world war, however, none of those factors will ever quite seem sufficient to explain the sudden fervour of Brexit, in which irrational events took on a momentum of their own. As Bertrand Russell once observed, one of the overlooked sentiments in 1914 was that war was welcomed by many simply “as an escape from boredom”. In similar terms, a neglected part of the answer to the question “why did Britain leave the EU?” might well be that on 23 June 2016, a few days after England had been held to a tedious goal-less draw in the European football championships by Slovakia, enough people decided to disregard the weight of evidence and vote leave because, well, something had to change. In that respect, they found their perfect leader in our current attention-deficit prime minister, who could never be arsed to do his homework as Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, so instead made up amusing caricatures about bendy bananas and condom regulations (as if history hadn’t taught the world often enough to beware Old Etonians with an unchecked sense of personal destiny and a mortal fear of appearing dull).
One way of breaking down the referendum result was between those who could recall life before the EU with curdled “you’ve never had it so good” nostalgia, and those who had been born into it and never found it anything less than agreeable; between a younger generation that generally values the idea of joining in and mixing, and one generally more comfortable in bristling at any change. I’m just about in that category who can remember the before – but only that immediate three-day week era in which common cause with Europe seemed the only way to save a desperately uncompetitive economy and maintain influence in the world – the bit that nostalgists conveniently forget. One of the social media memes that has proved most enduring in recent years is that clip of Tony Blair visiting the European parliament during the UK’s turn at presidency in 2005. In it, in response to a typical sneering harangue from Farage, Blair jabs a finger at the Ukip leader, saying: “You, sir, sit with our country’s flag, but you do not represent our country’s interests. This is the year 2005, it’s not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more, these are our partners and our colleagues and our future lies in Europe!” That contrast Blair expressed, between those who wanted to turn back the Bakelite clock and those who wanted to embrace the complexities of the future, looked inescapable – particularly to anyone who had lived through the expansion of the European Union to the east with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The determination of some of those who refused to see the EU as one guarantor of such freedoms proved far more durable than Blair could have imagined, however. I’ve reported on many of the marches and demonstrations for and against Brexit in the past five years. One of the stranger anomalies of those events is that any pick-a-fight anger has been concentrated not among those who had lost the referendum vote, but those who had won. One of the abiding failures of the Leave campaign, it seemed to me, has been its inability to articulate any vision of the future of Britain that does not involve embittered aggression.
At the moment the Brexit transition agreement came into force in Parliament Square on 31 January, the only shouts among the assembled crowd to be heard were “Fuck the EU!” It comes as no surprise that the policies that most excite the most ardent supporters of “global Britain” are the withdrawal of foreign aid and the deployment of the gunships of the Royal Navy against desperate migrants in rubber dinghies. Meanwhile, one of the pointed ironies of the long farewell of Brexit has been that nothing has become the EU quite like Britain’s leaving it. Having tried hard for 70 years to find a single theme that unites the disparate nations of the continent, the EU has finally discovered common cause in the spectacle of serial foot-shooting that has marked Britain’s efforts to depart. As delay led to extension and to prorogation, the approval ratings for the EU never soared so high. Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexiters’ pantomime villain in Brussels, told me last year that Britain has come to represent to Europeans the consequences of not standing up to divisive populism. “You want to see what nationalism does? Come to London.” The sadness of that observation is a reminder of Britain’s failure to bring to Europe the values with which we were once more clearly associated: democracy, scrutiny, a robust sense of fair play. Rather than successive governments insisting on a semi-detached “we know best” approach to Europe, for fear of riling the tabloid press, there would have been more courage in wholeheartedly engaging to reform its institutions. Britain, in retrospect, perhaps always flirted with crashing out because it misunderstood Europe from the start. The best articulation of that misunderstanding that I’ve heard came from Neil MacGregor, embodiment of a tradition of British soft power and cultural diplomacy that is vanishingly absent from the tone of the current government. MacGregor, inspirational director of the British Museum for many years, left the UK in 2015 to chair the board that would create its German equivalent, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. As effective curator-in-chief of the cultural memory of both countries MacGregor – born in 1946 with the continent in ruins – explained how he had come to understand that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they used that charged word “sovereignty”.
Partly because of the ways it has confronted its own deeply traumatic experience of nationalism, in Germany, MacGregor suggested, sovereignty is always taken to mean the capacity for effective coalition. The European debate in Britain looked so bizarre from Berlin for precisely this reason, he suggested. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.” Among those who argued for the benefits of remaining in the EU, there will, in the coming weeks and months, be a temptation to sit back with a double shot of schadenfreude and watch the fantasy of “taking back control” meet with the real world. There is little to be gained in that “I told you so” sentiment. The English nationalism that emerged in the referendum now occupies several seats round the cabinet table. The required enemy without is already being recast as the enemy within. The failures and problems that could once be blamed on bureaucrats in the EU curtailing our freedom to do as we like, will no doubt now be blamed on those covert “rejoiners” at the BBC who report that everything in Brexitland is not as forecast; or on the imaginary “deep state” of the civil service casting shadows of reality on sunlit uplands; or on Ahmed and his family who have just moved in up the road. (Even as I write this, a video of flat-capped Nigel Farage pops up on my timeline, on a tour of green belt sites in the home counties, spreading the idea that they are due to be converted into refugee camps.) As the debt burden of Covid bites and the £350m-a-week promises made in 2016 vanish into air, the debate over what kind of country we want to become will never have been more urgent.
Among the stories that remainers will be trolled for mentioning in the coming weeks are those polls that suggest a significant proportion of people have changed their mind since the Brexit vote, and that demographics have also shifted. The strong likelihood, after all the political trauma, is that we are leaving the EU, on terms no one imagined, with a majority of the population much preferring to stay in. In that regard it will be worth holding on to the fact that the saving grace of black irony has always been a vital component of life in this country. In all the hours and weeks and months that I have listened to the entrenched arguments around Brexit, my favourite answer to the question of how we got here came from that caller, named Mark, who contacted Farage’s LBC phone-in show last year, to thank him for everything he had done for Britain. “I used to be an ardent remainer,” Mark said. “I believed in the European project and that staying in the union was the best thing for us, and then something monumental happened and I completely changed my opinion on all of it.” “And what,” Farage asked, “was that monumental thing that happened, Mark?” “I was kicked in the head by a horse.”