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Fintan O’Toole: After Brexit, who will be UK’s Michael Collins?

No one in the British government has the courage to be a true patriot

Brexit is England's Easter Rising – an unlikely event that allows a zealous minority to change the course of a nation's history. But who, then, will be England's Michael Collins? The grand gesture of national self-assertion must be followed, eventually, by a painful reconciliation with reality. After the rapture comes the reckoning. After their glorious resurrections, nation states do not actually ascend into heaven – they come back to Earth. Guiding that descent is the greatest test of political skill, of moral courage and of genuine patriotism. England's tragedy is that there is no sign that anyone in power has those qualities.

On the face of it, the English nationalist revolution (which is what Brexit really is) should have a relatively easy comedown from the euphoria of that extraordinary night last June to the long, hungover dawn of messy compromise. By the standards of nationalist revolutions – standards we know very well in Ireland – the English have one enormous boon. The Brexiteers do not have blood in the game. The thing that usually makes the ultimate concession to reality so bitter is that people have killed and died for the idealist cause. As Patrick Pearse understood so well in 1916, the blood sacrifice is also a kind of historical blackmail. It forces those who come after to either match the intensity of its zeal or be guilty of betraying the martyred dead.

Phoney enthusiasts

The only person whose blood was shed in Brexit was a Remainer, the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox. The people who are now driving Britain towards the cliff – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Davis – risked nothing at all. Brexit has been a great career move for them: May, who bravely sat on the fence with a lukewarm endorsement of Remain and a wink at Leave, got to be prime minister. For people like Johnson, the whole thing is a jolly escapade, a thrilling game in which, as it turned out, he couldn't lose. There are genuine zealots, of course, but the people who have made a hard Brexit inevitable are phoney enthusiasts. Their nationalist bliss is all an act. The politics of the fake orgasm are not the politics of the blood sacrifice.

The other thing that should, in theory, make an eventual climbdown easier is that Brexit, as it was actually framed in the referendum, was a vague proposition. Its most tangible promises – such as the infamous £350 million a week for the National Health Service – were such patent lies that they were immediately abandoned after victory. That sell-out is already a done deal. On the substantial question of Britain’s relationship with the European Union, there was no coherent proposal at all. The basic pitch to voters was Johnson’s “having your cake and eating it”: Britain would enjoy all the benefits of EU membership – including unfettered access to the single market – while bearing none of the costs. When your come-on is so self-evidently fantastical, it should not be hard to admit that the eventual outcome will not be quite as advertised. After all, politicians do this all the time – they campaign in poetry and govern in prose.

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Delusion of omnipotence

And yet, instead of preparing its electorate for compromise, the Brexit government has taken the bad poetry of the campaign and turned it into ludicrous heroic verse. It has gone harder, noisier, more absolutist. Instead of dealing with the hangover, it is sniffing more lines of white nationalist marching powder and relishing the drug-induced delusion of omnipotence.

Let’s be optimistic for a moment and assume that, for May herself, this posturing is a negotiating tactic: start with the extreme so you end up with a somewhat better final bargain. Does she then know how much this will demand of her? Does she realise that the more inflated the position she is starting with, the more air she is going to have let out of it when the time comes to make the deal? Is she ready for the screams of treason that will now accompany any possible compromise? Will she have the guts to tell the obvious truth: that if Britain wants a deal it will have to accept the bulk of EU regulations and continue to pay into the EU budget?

Michael Collins had to come down from the mountaintop of nationalist fervour and say: sorry, but this is the best deal we can get in the real world. He had to face down men with guns who could – and did – kill him. Theresa May merely has to face down the Daily Mail. But nothing so far suggests that she or anyone who might replace her has the courage to do even that. England has placed itself in one of those strange historical moments when the road to self-harm is also the path of least resistance. The stroll to the cliff edge is strewn with daisies; to veer away from it is to wade through thorns. Long-term madness is short-term careerist calculation. The current logic of English politics is that logic must be abandoned. Heroic failure beats down courageous realism. In this imaginary replay of the Battle of Britain, it is easier to be shot down in flames than to bring the country to a safe emergency landing.