How not to understand the Brexit referendum

Simon Kuper’s Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK is a wonderful compendium of anecdotes about Oxford in the 1980s, one of the best of which concerns a lecture he attended by the Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eagleton dismisses the collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe as a minor source of annoyance that has no bearing on the validity of his beliefs. A student on Kuper’s right takes notes throughout and at the conclusion of the lecture reads his summary: ‘Presumably ironic.’

Eagleton wasn’t being ironic, and neither is Kuper in this blistering attack on Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings, among others, for masterminding our exit from the EU. Indeed, Kuper’s theory about what motivated these scoundrels is straight out of a Marxist textbook: it was a cynical attempt by Britain’s desiccated ruling class to repatriate power to Westminster so they could assume their rightful place as masters of the political universe.