Brendan O’Neill

Jean-Claude Juncker: what a nasty piece of work. There aren’t many politicians I’d say that about. Even most of those I disagree with strike me as being pretty decent people. Theresa May might be a petty authoritarian, but she isn’t sinister. Jeremy Corbyn is wrong about everything, and stuck politically and sartorially in 1983, but he seems a nice enough guy. But Juncker — it is still rare that such a noxious character, such a scheming operator, such an arrogant arse, such a jumped-up, poundshop Machiavelli, darkens the corridors of politics. He’s the worst. All of Juncker’s awful traits were on display at the weekend, in the spat over his dinner with May last week.

Here they come, Tony Blair and his tragic chattering-class army. The former PM, whose rictus grin and glottal stops still haunt the nation’s dreams (well, mine anyway), is on the march with his pleb-allergic mates in business and the media. Blair and the Twitterati, linking arms, united in their horror at the incalculable stupidity of northerners and Welsh people and Essex men and women and other Brexiteers, their aim as clear as it is foul. They’re here to save us from ourselves. ‘Tony Blair is trying to save Britain from itself’, as one report put it. Excuse me while I pop an anti-nausea pill. Yes, Blair, the political version of Michael Myers, the nutter in the Halloween movies who just cannot be slain, is back. Again.

One of the best things about Brexit has been its shattering of anti-establishment pretensions. All the people who for yonks had been getting away with posing as rebels and disruptors and irritants to the status quo have been exposed as utterly allergic to radical political change; as small-c conservatives freaked out by revolt; as the nervous, nodding footsoldiers of political power. From the trustafarians of Momentum, those laptop Leninists who fantasised that they were revolutionaries, to columnists like Caitlin Moran, the Times’ token rebel who once said she lives ‘like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash’ (cringe much?

Today is a great day for British democracy. One of the greatest ever, in fact. Tune out Project Fear, with its overblown claims that Brexit will cause economic collapse and possibly revive fascism, and just think about what is happening today. The largest democratic mandate in the history of this nation, the loudest, clearest, most populous democratic cry Britons have ever made, is finally being acted upon. The political class is starting the process of severing Britain’s ties with the EU not because it wants to — it desperately doesn’t want to — but because a great swarm of its people have told it that it must. This is amazing. This is wonderful. This is democracy. This is what generations of Britons fought for.

For someone who once branded his own Cabinet colleagues ‘bastards’ — and two decades later said he only called them bastards because they were bastards — John Major has of late become weirdly sensitive to rough, colourful language. He’s peeved at what he calls ‘ultra Brexiteers’, who are big meanies, apparently. These ultras are launching ‘vitriolic and personal attacks’ he says, and they seem hell-bent on ‘shouting down anyone with an opposing view’. Their behaviour is ‘profoundly undemocratic and totally un-British’. In short, they’re bastards. Just say it, John.

The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic. Of course they'd been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary’s loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But now they’ve gone over. They’re falling fast. They’re speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It’s tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other. Exhibit A: this week’s New Yorker. It’s mad. It captures wonderfully how the liberal-left has come to be polluted by the paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since Trump’s victory.

Even now, even following their historic thrashing in Copeland, Labourites still cannot face the truth. Sure, there are Twitter tears this morning. I’m sure the vibe in Corbyn’s office is skittish and fearful. There’ll be an explosion in ‘What now for Labour?’ articles. But they still do not get the yawning, abyssal depth of the crisis they face. They still don’t see that their party isn’t merely in trouble; it’s finished, over, kaput. Labour is a zombie party, a Frankenstein creature patched together from dead slogans and middle-class anti-Tory angst; a living-dead entity utterly incapable of making a connection with the living.

Never in recent years has a party deserved to lose an election, to be demolished by people’s ballots and fury, as much as Labour does in Stoke. The way Labour has treated this northern constituency is a microcosm of the metropolitan contempt it now feels for all the rough-handed, gruff-voiced non-Londoners who once made up its support base but who now irritate the hell out of it by doing stupid things like voting for Brexit and believing in democracy. Were Labour to receive a bloody nose from the people of Stoke it would be a wonderful day for British politics, and, who knows, possibly a wake-up call for a left made lazy by its misplaced virtue and self-satisfaction.

The brass neck of Tony Blair. The Brexit vote was ‘based on imperfect knowledge’, says the man who unleashed barbarism across the Middle East on the basis of a student dissertation he printed off the internet. Who marched thousands into unimaginable horror on the basis of myth and spin. That NHS claim on the side of the Leave bus is small fry, infinitesimally small fry, in comparison with the guff this bloke came out with. It didn’t cause anyone to die, for one. For Blair to lecture the British people about truth is an affront to memory and decency and reason. No self-respecting citizen should put up with it.

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. New figures, compiled by the Press Association, suggest that hate crimes soared to 'record levels' in the three months following the EU referendum. Only four police forces around the country recorded a decrease in hate crimes; the others saw a spike. And in the case of three forces - the Metropolitan, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire - the spike was significant: these forces recorded more than 1,000 hate crimes each post-referendum.  This is being held up as evidence that prejudices and madness were unleashed by Brexit. In truth, the hate-crime spike looks more like a classic crime panic, a constructed 'crisis'.

I can forgive many of the sins of the Trump-is-Hitler, Brexit-is-Beelzebub lobby. I mean, we all lose the plot occasionally. We're all susceptible to freaking out. One day you're a paragon of measured political chatter and the next you're on Twitter at 3am screaming ‘FASCIST!’ at eggs and plotting to make Hampstead a republic so you don't have to share citizenship with former miners and women called Chardonnay who don't like the EU. Meltdowns happen. I get it. Let’s not be too hard on these people who've left the land of reason for the world of WTF, where Godwin's Law is permanently suspended. But there's one thing for which I’ll never forgive them: making me defend Piers Morgan. Anything but this. Alas, needs must.