Who is to blame for Brexit?

With Italy facing a referendum that could unseat its president, the EU’s member states in furious conflict over immigration, and Hillary Clinton looking like an increasingly shaky last line of defence, our very own Brexit is being held up as the model of a new, disruptive politics.

But its meaning has been debated. For some, Brexit was democracy delivering justice: the West’s ‘first big fightback’, as Nigel Farage said on Sunday, against ‘a metropolitan elite, backed by big business, who’ve just been increasingly getting out of touch with the ordinary voters.’ The counter-narrative is that Brexit was a fake revolution: a coup by fellow-members of the elite who ‘lied to please the mob’. These contending stories will fight it out in the forthcoming ‘inside stories’ of Brexit, five of which are about to hit the bookshops. But the first of these books, to be published on Monday, suggests that both narratives are defensible. Brexit Revolt, by Michael Mosbacher and Oliver Wiseman of Standpoint magazine (full disclosure: these generous people occasionally print my articles), is based on interviews with some of the Leave campaign’s protagonists, and access to some revealing emails.