The best thing about being a Remainer is obviously the dinner parties, where we all sit around being incredibly well-heeled in leafy Islington. Bloody love a good heel, I do. And a leaf. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Eddie Izzard and Nick Clegg crack jokes at each other in French, as Lily Allen and Matthew Parris do impressions of old people from Northumberland, while in the background Bob Geldof and Professor Brian Cox duet on the piano. It’s almost literally how I spend almost all of my time. Whereas Leaver dinner parties, so I’m told, are just IDS and a Scotch egg.
The worst thing about being a Remainer, though, is Jean-Claude Juncker. Indeed, I’d go further and say that he’s the worst thing about the European Union altogether. Even if the fantasists were right, and the whole thing was a Hun plan for a federal Fourth Reich, with borders collapsing and Turks taking your jobs and waves of possibly Eritrean immigrants coming off boats and setting up mosques-cum-brothels in formerly pristine Home Counties cricket pavilions. Not from the Atlantic to the mouth of the Danube, nor from Italy’s shoe to Finland’s pointy bit, would you find something more awful than Jean-Claude Juncker. He’s the pits. He really is.
It’s not just that he’s Luxembourgish. They’re all a bit Luxembourgish. It’s more the way he’s smug and lazy and unelected, and secure, and utterly impervious to everything. I am not fond of comparing the EU to the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, but if this was that, then the president of the European Commission would be Darth Vader. Only Darth Vader, in this case, would be an overly familiar struck-off dentist, a bit pissed on claret, which would mean that the Rebel Alliance would not just be oppressed but incredibly irritated all the time, too.
In fairness, at least he’s consistent.
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