The FT has become the Daily Mail of the Europhile elite

An enjoyable aspect of the EU referendum campaign is the nervous condition of the Financial Times. Unable to maintain its usual pretence at judicious balance under the strain, it has become the Daily Mail of the Europhile global elites, warning of the Seven Plagues which will afflict us if we vote to leave. Rather as the Mail loves the headline beginning ‘Just why…?’, so the FT all-purpose referendum headline begins ‘Fears mount…’

Its star columnists like Philip Stephens and Janan Ganesh pour withering scorn on Eurosceptic ‘nostalgists’ and bigots. Although they — and most of the paper’s writers — are highly intelligent, it does not occur to them to take seriously arguments which, in other contexts, they would mind about, like the age-old question of who exercises power on behalf of whom. They do not realise, to adapt Matthew Arnold, that the sea of EU faith was ‘once, too, at the full’, but now isn’t.