For Remainers, Brexit is really about power

At the New Yorker Festival party in mid-October, my astute colleague hardly needed the caution. But you know how at a discombobulating bash you seize gratefully on something to talk about. So as Matthew Goodwin and I rubbed elbows with the East Coast elite at the Old Town Bar in Manhattan (‘Look! It’s Ronan Farrow!’), I warned him about the following afternoon’s audience for our panel on Brexit.

They’ll be Democrats, I explained, and they’re hardwired to associate both the referendum and Boris personally with Trump. They’ve all been brainwashed by the New York Times, which portrays Brexiteers as a cross between the extras on The Walking Dead and the pitchfork-waving villagers in Frankenstein. The only thing that would motivate these folks to opt for a panel on Brexit is indignation. They’ll be 99.9 per cent Remain. They may have visited the UK, and in a comical reverse-colonialism they have a strangely proprietary relationship to Britain, which has gone whacko without permission.