Philippe Sands

Diary – 30 June 2016

Also in Philippe Sands’s Spectator diary: the medical effects of Brexit, and a daughter discovers her French side

issue 02 July 2016

Referendum day is as nondescript and wet as the day before, happily spent in Cambridge at my son’s Leo’s graduation. Even here the coming vote intrudes. Some students say that the master of Trinity College has come out for Brexit. Leo’s boyfriend Eddie, newly graduated in German studies and about to head to a job in Berlin, worries about job prospects. Our lunch table is shared with genial and smiling but very divided family. The polling station is equally lively, a place for chat with neighbours. The working day is uneventful. Dinner with friends in the evening, asleep before the first results. I wake in the middle of the night, switch on the television, and see it’s going the Brexit way.

On Friday I’m on the Tube early. The mood is horribly subdued. Some travellers are immersed in their papers, others look shell-shocked. A man in sunglasses wears a Union Jack shirt and hat, looking resolute.

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