Boris’s Brexit vision is an answer to a non-existent problem

The thing to understand about Brexit and Remain voters is that Brexit is only part of the problem. Many Remainers cast their votes with only moderate enthusiasm. They were not motivated, most of them, by any great enthusiasm for the European project. But they took what they considered to be a prudent, pragmatic, view of the national interest. They wanted a moderate, quiet life; and the status quo, however irritating it might sometimes be, was at least a known quantity and therefore preferable to the great unknown that must be unleashed by Brexit. Remain was a proper, old-fashioned, Tory choice. 

And therefore, of course, rather unfashionable. But then, as far as many Remain voters were concerned, if Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were for Leave, then there had to be something distinctly fishy about the entire enterprise. One purported to offer starry-eyed internationalism and the other dead-eyed nativism and it was hard to see how both could have the Brexit they promised. At