Fintan O’Toole: Collapse of Vote Leave gang comes too late to save Brexit-addled Britain

The ancient Greeks knew that the most tragic phrase in any language is: too late. The tyrant Creon, for example, realises at last that he has made a terrible mistake in imprisoning Antigone in a cave and leaving her to die. But when he rushes to release her, she is already dead. His own son and wife take their own lives. Recognition comes too late to stop the forces he has unleashed from reaching their awful conclusion.

Brexit has always had large elements of farce, but as it stumbles towards its end, it has that tragic plot twist: too late. The fall of the Vote Leave regime in London might have been a new dawn for realism. Instead, it is just a cultic twilight, the fag end of a strange infatuation that has already done irreparable harm.

Brexit is the most efficient engine of regime change the UK has ever known. Since 2016, three administrations have come and gone: David Cameron's, Theresa May's and the weird hybrid government run by Dominic Cummings and his mates and fronted by Boris Johnson.

Each of these regimes was more Brexity than the last. Cameron practised a creepy kind of Euroscepticism; May abandoned the most sensible compromise in which the UK would stay in the Single Market and Customs Union; Cummings embraced an extremist Brexit, not so much for its own sake, but as the great disruptive force that would be the catalyst for remaking the entire polity.

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Revolutions tend to work like this, throwing up a series of increasingly radical juntas, each pledged to a purer version of the ideological faith, each accusing the last shower of cowardice and/or betrayal.

Chancers and zealots

This momentum allows chancers and zealots to surf its waves. In all the uncertainty, it becomes possible to believe the most obnoxious oddball just might be the saviour. In her Diary of an MP's Wife, Sasha Swire explains: "Thing is, we all know Cummings is stark raving mad (you just need to look at his blog) but we are hoping that his maverick, radical, lunatic streak is what just might, possibly, get us over the line." If Brexit is England's Sinn Féin moment, let's get ourselves a loon.

To be fair, not even the fanatics really believed that Britain would be the Mother Country of this renewed Anglosphere

But this pulse of deranged energy can never be sustained. Brexit has now followed the usual pattern of the revolution that devours its own children, right down to the slim pickings on the shifty spads who – hilariously – seized power on the back of a revolt against “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels”.

It has chewed rapidly through the bones, but just not rapidly enough. Cummings should have gone in May, when his contemptuous breach of lockdown restrictions was revealed.

If Johnson had sacked him then, there was still time to ask the EU, in effect, to put a hold on Brexit. The terms of the withdrawal agreement allowed the UK–EU Joint Committee to extend the transition period by up to two years, if it was agreed before July 1st 2020.

The EU would have gone along. The pandemic would have given Johnson cover for this retreat. But he was so terrified of actually having to govern that he allowed Cummings to flaunt his own indispensability. The moment was lost, and it is now impossible to regain it.

Old white empire

The advent of the Joe Biden presidency now bursts the bubble that has filled the space where the Brexiteers' brains should be: the Anglosphere. Freed from the shackles of EU imperialism, Britain would put the old white empire back together in a union of what Winston Churchill called "the English-speaking peoples": the UK, Canada, Australia, the US, maybe even Ireland.

To be fair, not even the fanatics really believed that Britain would be the Mother Country of this renewed Anglosphere – that role, they conceded, belonged now to the US. The obvious lack of interest on the part of Canada and Australia could be ignored as a minor detail so long as the mirage of a transatlantic partnership still glimmered on the horizon.

Even that hallucination has dissolved now. For all but the most deluded (admittedly a copious exception), Anglospheric dreams are over.

The brutal truth is that there are three big blocs: the EU, China and the US. Britain is drastically weakening its ties with the first; is doomed to long-term tension with the second over Hong Kong; and has hugely diminished its usefulness to the third.

The fever has broken. The 2016 moment when it seemed  Brexit was the harbinger of a new world order is gone

This truth is dawning. But so is the realisation that it is too late to hope for anything except a minor mitigation of the damage.

Polls now show quite consistently that Brexit is yesterday’s fashion. Asked whether “In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the European Union?”, 49 per cent say “wrong” and only 39 per cent “right”.

The fever has broken. The 2016 moment when it seemed that Brexit was the harbinger of a new world order is gone. The British are left with permanent wounds from a war that seems increasingly meaningless.

But this, as the Greeks knew, is what the sadistic gods do to you. It is not enough for them that you should suffer the consequences of your choices. You must forever hear that mocking cry: too late!