There are still four months to go before the vote, but I already feel quite exhausted by the Europe referendum campaign. Such has been the excitement in the British press that I have taken to starting the day by reading the New York Times online, which is so uninterested in this historic matter that it never seems to mention it at all. Monday’s British papers, announcing Boris Johnson’s defection to the Brexit camp, provided the kind of coverage you’d expect if the country had just won a war. Indeed, the Daily Telegraph looked exactly as if it had, with most of its front page, including its logo, consumed by an enormous colour photograph of a triumphant, smiling Boris acknowledging the applause of an invisible crowd. He looked a bit like Churchill on VE Day.
Most other papers had Boris on their front pages too, but the Times, for example, showed him looking like a frenzied, jutting-jawed rabble-rouser. I might have taken these choices of photo as first indications of which side each paper would eventually take in the referendum, had not the Daily Mail, which seems already to be heading inexorably for Brexit, decided to use the same repulsive photo of Boris as the Times.
In any event, the Brexit campaign has got off to a flying start. It has acquired convincing leaders in Boris and Michael Gove, who see it as a home for the bold and the free, those ready to take risks, who believe that Britain can be great on its own again. Those arrayed against them are portrayed as wimps and cowards, with no faith in their country, or members of a secretive establishment bent on survival and self-enrichment, whatever the cost to the rest of us.
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