I may have made the odd disparaging remark about Brexiteers during the heat of the referendum campaign, but I have been the perfect gentleman since. Although a Remainer, I have accepted the referendum result with good grace and treated the winners with courtesy and respect. I’ve never called them swivel-eyed, or xenophobic, or racist (or ‘deplorable’, as Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump’s supporters). I regard them as normal human beings.
I don’t even dismiss them as angry working-class rebels, driven by resentment of a heartless ruling elite. They come from every part of society. If there is a class war, it is going on in America, not here. I have American friends who say they have never met a Trump supporter. Here, however, I have constantly bumped into Brexiteers; and I don’t only mean Nikki, my cleaning woman in Northamptonshire, and Gary, the man who mends the television, whose grandchildren have lost school places to Polish immigrants. I also mean plutocrats, art-lovers, opera-goers, and people of refined tastes; colleagues on The Spectator, for example; even members of my own family.
No, the Leavers were a coalition of groups with different grievances. Some raged against immigration, some against bureaucracy, some against loss of freedom; and all of them blamed these ills on the EU. They wanted done with it, and in the referendum they got their way.
It wasn’t an enormous victory — 48 per cent of voters wanted Britain to stay a member — but it was a decisive one nevertheless, and an unexpected one. How exciting it must have been for the Brexiteers to have won, how thrilling to have proved the pollsters wrong! But the extraordinary thing was that they didn’t seem very pleased at all.
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