Brendan O’Neill

At last they’ve found a name for it. A name for the meltdown that has occurred in certain political circles since June 2016. A name for the daily Twitter-rage against That Referendum. A name for the clearly potty belief that we are heading for the End of Days and that it is all the fault of dumb voters who don’t like the EU. A name for the non-stop fuming about Britain’s ‘inferior’ people and the almighty mess they have apparently landed the nation in. It’s called Brexit Anxiety Disorder. At least that is how Tom McTague at Politico sums up the findings of two psychological experts who have looked into post-referendum craziness. And we know how much Remainers love experts, so no doubt they will fully take on board this expert diagnosis of their malady.

Imagine if there existed a photograph of Boris Johnson next to a man whose associates subsequently axed to death four imams in a mosque. Just imagine it. Imagine how much discussion there would be about the mainstreaming of Islamophobic fascism. About how Boris was enabling murderous racial hatred. About how the Tory party was falling to an extremist loathing of Muslims. Corbynistas in particular would never stop talking about it. Everything they wrote about Boris, forever, would mention his rubbing of shoulders with a man who was cool with the slaughter of imams. Of course, no such photograph of Boris exists. But a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn in a similar position exists. It was revealed in the Times this morning.

The Muslim Council of Britain wants Theresa May to subject Boris to a ‘full disciplinary inquiry’ over his comments on the niqab and burqa. Let’s call this by its true name: an inquisition. This inquiry would be a 21st-century inquisition of a man simply for speaking ill of a religious practice. May must resist this borderline medieval demand that she punish a member of her party for expressing a ‘blasphemous’ thought. She must put aside her Borisphobia and stand up for freedom of conscience against the inquisitorial hysteria that has greeted Boris’s remarks. Burqagate has been mad from the get-go.

A truly bizarre thing happened yesterday: Boris Johnson was branded an Islamophobe and a bigot for writing in defence of Muslim women who wear the niqab. In his Telegraph column, Johnson said it was wrong for Denmark to ban the niqab and burqa in public places because the state should not be telling any ‘free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear, in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business’. Top-down burqa-banning risks ‘play[ing] into the hands of those who want to politicise and dramatise the so-called clash of civilisations’, he said.

Where’s the concern for Labour MP Sarah Champion? Where are the leftists demanding that this female MP stop being harassed merely for expressing her views? Where are the tweets drawing attention to Ms Champion’s plight — the fact that she now needs an actual security team because people who hate her political views want to physically harm her? In this post-Jo Cox era, I thought we were all meant to have the backs of elected politicians who are under threat from extremists. And yet when it comes to Champion — just such an elected politician — people seem to be looking the other way. It isn’t hard to work out why.

Gary Lineker is coming to save Britain. From what, I hear you ask? From you. And me. And the rest of the dim-witted electorate who screwed up the nation with our pesky vote to leave the EU. The football commentator turned crisps advertiser turned spokesman for the weeping Brexitphobic Twitterati has announced that he is backing the campaign for a People’s Vote on the final Brexit deal. Why? Because the nation is in a ‘mess’, he says, and it’s all down to the fact that ‘politicians seem unable to resolve the problem the people gave them in voting Leave’. Got that? The problem isn’t useless politicians: it’s ordinary people and our catastrophic stupidity. Lineker wants to save Britain from Britons.

Remember when leftists and liberals were against capitalists throwing their weight around in the political sphere? ‘Just because you’re filthy rich doesn’t mean you should have more clout than the rest of us’, they might say. No longer. Now they love it when the boss class tut-tuts about democracy and wonders out loud if we should just ignore the little people and shape politics so that it suits us, the moneyed and powerful. Consider the glee with which some leftish Remainers have lapped up Amazon’s dire warnings about a no-deal Brexit.

So this is what a principled politician looks like. They can be hard to spot these days, but last night, in parliament, we saw four of them in action. Kate Hoey, Frank Field, John Mann and Graham Stringer. Four Labour MPs who, despite knowing they would get flak from both Corbynistas and centrists, despite knowing the Stalinist sections of left-wing Twitter would shriek for their deselection, despite knowing they would be paraded online as ‘Tory stooges’ whom all good Labourites have a duty to despise, nonetheless voted with their consciences and rejected an amendment to Theresa May’s trade bill that could have kept Brexit Britain entangled in a customs union with the EU They are being credited with saving May’s bacon.

There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers: their walking away has allowed Theresa May to further surround herself with fellow Remainers, and pretty much expel the Brexit outlook from her cabinet. The new foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, voted Remain. As did his replacement at the Department of Health, Matt Hancock. Hancock is a former acolyte of George Osborne, arch-Remainer and now chief media ridiculer of Brexit via his newspaper the Evening Standard.

Stop it. Stop saying we can’t be sure why people voted for Brexit. Stop saying it was just a screech of rage against politicians and so must now be tempered and made into sensible policy. Stop saying it’s fine for Theresa May in her Chequers showdown to ‘soften’ Brexit and keep us entangled in a customs union, and even in the European Court of Justice, because we don’t know if people really want to leave these institutions. This is all untrue. We know very well why people voted for Brexit, and we know that what May is offering is a betrayal of what they voted for. It is testament to the chutzpah of the anti-Brexit lobby that they can say, ‘No one knows what Brexit means or what those 17.4m voters were really asking for’.

Oh so you all love Danny Dyer now? The turnaround in Dyer’s fortunes over the past 12 hours has been extraordinary. He’s gone from being the butt of posh tweeters’ jokes to a celebrated political sage. From a ridiculous uber-lad whose cosying up to football’s hard men and promiscuous use of words like ‘slags’ and ‘twats’ provoked laughter and/ or horror among the chattering classes, to the Twitterati’s favourite working-class person. What changed? He dissed Brexit. And if you diss Brexit, they love you.

Fifa is worried. It is freaking out over the possibility that England fans will take a Brexit-related swipe at Belgian fans in tomorrow’s game. Our boys face the Belgians at Kaliningrad tomorrow evening. And given that a great many England fans are a) fond of Brexit and b) known to have a few pints ahead of a game, Fifa stiffs are concerned that a bit of Brexit-loving and Belgium-bashing might leak into their chants. ‘There is a risk of punishment’, Fifa has warned members of the En-ger-land lobby who are thinking of mentioning Brexit. What a bunch of miserabilists. It is further proof that the overlords of football don’t actually understand football. The role of the football fan is straightforward: to big up one’s team and dent the confidence of the other.

Imagine the industrial levels of brass neck it must require for EU-supporting MPs to present themselves as defenders of parliamentary sovereignty. That’s what they’re doing today, on ‘Brexit Super Tuesday’, as they start voting on the Lords’ amendments to the government’s Brexit Bill. They say they are backing the amendment that would give MPs a ‘meaningful vote’ on the final Brexit deal because they love parliamentary sovereignty that much. Pull the other. These are people who for years happily handed over huge swathes of law-making to Brussels bureaucrats and would still like EU law to enjoy supremacy over UK law. They support parliamentary sovereignty like an electric chair supports your back.

Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury praise the EU as ‘the greatest dream realised for human beings’ for more than a thousand years, and as the gracious deliverer of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ to the peoples of Europe, I felt like reminding him of one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.’ The way Welby yaks about the EU you’d think it was the Kingdom of God, here at last, though attended by corporeal technocrats rather than angels with trumpets. All we needed was for him to prostrate himself on an EU flag and profess his faith in the Word According to Juncker for his conversion to the cult of Brussels to be complete.

It’s always good to remind Sadiq Khan that Brexit is more popular in London than he is. Khan loves to play the role of Mayor of Remainia, the political figurehead of this oh-so-clever capital city that can see through the folly of Brexit that those strange inhabitants of Essex, the North and Wales voted for. And yet while it’s true Londoners voted Remain by 59.9 per cent to 40.1 per cent, the fact is more of us voted for Brexit than we did for Khan: 1,513,232 Londoners want to leave the EU, which is 200,000 more than the 1,310,143 who wanted Khan as mayor. So Brexit was such a massive and popular demand for political change that even in ‘the Remainer city’ of London its supporters comfortably outnumber supporters of the actual mayor.

Andrew O’Hagan of the London Review of Books did something very valuable this week: he re-complicated Grenfell. His 60,000-word piece ‘The Tower’, which takes up the entire current issue of LRB, wrestles the Grenfell calamity from the infantile moralising of Corbynistas and much of the commentariat, and reminds us that this was a strange and complex and horrific event that is not bendable to simplistic point-scoring. And of course he’s being pilloried for having done this, for daring to suggest the Grenfell horror isn’t a black-and-white one. His piece is a thorough account of both the fire and its fallout. It makes for grim reading.