Rory Bremner: maybe I’ve got Brexit all wrong

As I write, there’s a leaving party going on in the European Parliament. The party that’s leaving is, of course, the eponymous Brexit Party, taking the rest of the country with it. And not going quietly, either, but with little union jacks and glasses of champagne. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the odd party blower as Farage, Widdecombe and co dance out of the chamber in a display that’s as tacky as it is lacking in dignity. (“Let’s all do the Cong-a, we want Big Ben to Bong-a!”) This lot wouldn’t be really happy unless the moment of our leaving the EU was marked by the inflation of a ginormous inflatable two fingers above Parliament Square, pointing in the general direction of Brussels, accompanied by cries of “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”.

That it should come to this. I increasingly think of the 2012 London Olympics as the high point of our standing in the world, in my lifetime, anyway. In particular, that opening ceremony, and Danny Boyle’s vision of what made us great: the industrial revolution, our British sense of humour, the NHS, and the World Wide Web, given to the world for free by British inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Bread and circuses under a deceptively benign Coalition, maybe (TV’s contemporaneous hit The Great British Bake-Off providing the former), but nonetheless a moment of national pride, achievement and success.

Then it all went wrong. Starting with the 2014 Scottish Referendum, almost lost by a chancing Prime Minister who reacted by walking straight back into the Casino and putting it all on red again. Now, the prospect of Northern Ireland (cheerfully) and Scotland (not unreasonably) leaving an English Nationalist government to enjoy the exotic “spresm” (as Vince Cable put it) of leaving the EU is one which leaves many remarkably relaxed — including Louis de Bernieres, whose enthusiasm for a new relationship with the US and China left me idly wondering about Captain Corelli’s Mandarin.

But we are where we are. But, where are we exactly? From what we can gather this month, it seems we’re going for a short transition, a hard break-up and a sort of Canada solution. Or was that just Harry and Meghan? The soon-to-be-EX-royals’ recent plight (caused by an allergy to being too close to the crown, a condition we now know as coronavirus) at least kept Brexit off the front pages for a convenient fortnight or so in the run-up to “V to EU” Day.

So finally, we Get Brexit Done. Except we don’t. The disingenuousness that has masked this whole issue from the very beginning continues as we embark on the third series of the Brexit box-set with Leave hero Boris crowned with an 80-seat majority despite the fact that more people voted for Remain or Referendum parties than for his Brexit Conservative alliance. Make no mistake, Boris didn’t win this election because of Brexit, but because of Corbyn’s ocean-going unelectability. If, as the culpably French philosopher Sartre wrote of football, “everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team”, then for Brexit, everything was hugely simplified by its absence.

And what Brexit did we vote for anyway? The EU Referendum was the first instance I know of where the manifesto turned up seven months after the vote. It wasn’t until January 2017 that Theresa May (whatever happened to her?) rocked up at Lancaster House and declared that Brexit meant no Customs Union and no Single Market, the latter doubtless sending its original champion Margaret Thatcher into a subterranean spin-cycle.

That it took another three years to “Get It Done” was not because of the evil Remain establishment thwarting the will of the people, but because the European Research Group and others kept voting against May’s Brexit because it wasn’t hard enough. And what were they researching anyway? When the Irish backstop needed finessing, they shuffled their feet, mumbled and bumbled until Boris decided that the best use for the Brexit Bus was to throw the DUP under it and create not one Irish Border but two.

So we have — what? Hard to tell. The government is currently flying more kites than Mary Poppins, from moving the Lords to York, to re-opening the railway lines Beeching closed (Look! My friends! Over there! A puffin!), realising that with Trump on one side and China on the other, the only way to thread the Brexit Camel through the eye of a needle is to stick it in a blender, something best done when the children aren’t looking.

For the rest of us, it’s still raw. How something that began as an angry little tumour in a fringe of the Conservative Party has metastasised into this UK-threatening Leviathan, killing off no fewer than four Prime Ministers in the process. Brexit was the answer to a question few were asking before 2015, when only 5 per cent of polled voters considered Europe a main issue at the election.

And yet now, four years and three elections later, it has the blessing of the people, if not numerically, then electorally thanks to the genius combination of a dead donkey opposition leader and a First Past the Post voting system. So part of me feels a period of humility is in order. Maybe I’ve got this all wrong. The new talk is of no alignment with Europe. Is this just to frighten the crap out of Brussels, or do those who salivate at the prospect of a British Singapore on the northern shores of Europe — and I’ve met some of these — really have Boris’s ear?

What I do know is that I don’t know. I’m not even sure what we are as a country any more. Who is the Establishment? The Liberal Elite Establishment (and one-nation Conservatives) blamed for frustrating Brexit, or the Etonian, Industrial Magnate (and one-nation Conservative) Establishment that made it happen?

In the last decade or so, many of the institutions that defined us, like them or not, have fallen into disrepute, one by one: the City because of the financial crisis of 2008; the Church because of its lame handling of women priests, gay bishops and child abuse; the Press because of phone-hacking and Leveson; Parliament because of MP’s expenses (and, well, Brexit); and, most recently, the Monarchy, because of Prince Andrew and Megxit. Like the vast and trunkless legs of stone of Ozymandias’s statue, their damaged pillars stand as testament to a vainglorious past, while the lone and level sands stretch far away. Or, to choose an unfashionably European writer — French again, I’m afraid — I’m reminded of Chateaubriand (to me, a poet; to Mark François, a steak.) His romantic hero René surveyed Europe in 1802 and found “rien de certain parmi les anciens et rien de beau parmi les modernes” — nothing certain in the old world and nothing beautiful in the new.

But then, Romantics always were whingeing Remainers.