The unbearable lightening of Brexit

“Brecks-it”, or “Breggs-it”? Even before all those “Brexit means breakfast” foul-ups on the broadcast round, it’s fitting that we never even settled how to mouth the damned neologism. Much as economic historians would like to centre the financial crash as modern Britain’s Genesis story, 23 June 2016 is simply the unmatched year zero of our national crisis – or at least our national hysteria. This isn’t purely a question of theatrics – though the victory of Vote Leave is a perfect underdog story. There’s a reason the films about 2008 are all set in America, and never feature, say, the restive queue outside the Northern Rock branch in Darlington.

Something did break in 2016, or something was released, or something simply changed, even if it was just the rules of engagement. Like a ship passing out of an estuary from a placid freshwater river to a stormy saltwater ocean, neither the currents nor the taste of British politics has been quite the same since. New and faceless forces surged from the deep – democratic and digital, national and identitarian. But still, as the European Question re-enters the political debate for the first time in years, there is a sense that we are sailing with the captain tied to the mast, with no ability to interpret or escape, or even just ride these waves.

The documentary series Brexit: A Very British Civil War arrives lacking any form of resolution for this state of affairs. The cliché of the title makes no effort to conceal that this must be the 12th retrospective on the referendum (soon – and this is no fault of the great Chris Mullin – everything British will be so quaintly “very British” that we’ll have “A Very British Heart Foundation” and “A Very British Retail Consortium”). But, in fact, it is the second half of the title that is more misleading. Real civil wars mobilise and wrack entire societies (and Brexit was in that sense something like a real civil war). This is a programme interested in Brexit as a palace drama, its tittles, tattles and intrigues.

“Higher gossip” is one phrase for the bookmen arcana that fill so much literary journalism; this is a documentary formed of the “lower gossip” of SW1, or at least the last remaining “source quotes” from this time that Tim Shipman hasn’t yet gobbled up. Did you know that the Conservatives didn’t expect to win the 2015 general election, and possibly expected to trade away their referendum commitment in coalition negotiations? That Nigel Farage brewed up his “Leave.EU” campaign on a fishing holiday in Belize? Did you know that Bernard Jenkin felt Dominic Cummings’s spittle on his face when they had a stairwell row in Vote Leave towers? Or that, as he weighed the Brexit dilemma, and wrote articles arguing both cases, Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel brought him a lasagne? (Incidentally, how many times has Rachel Johnson said the phrase “world king” to a TV camera?)

Only one of these asides really caught my ear (it was funny to hear that David Cameron told Boris, “I will fuck you up forever,” should he support Brexit, though Cameron denies saying this). But, as we cut between talking heads and archive footage, memory lane becomes a dreary ramble (who wants to be reminded of the existence of Chris Grayling?). There’s a second episode to come, but I’m not sure I can face another account like this. And this narrative of Brexit – as an outgrown common-room fracas, rooted in Etonian rivalries and dinner-party plotting – has an important interpretive function, or interpretive failing. There is a still very pervasive view that Brexit was a fumble, or a bungle, an election-winning promise gone awry. If we’d never asked the question, the country would never have had to give an answer. We might, at this very moment, be celebrating the third year of George Osborne’s second ministry.

I can’t buy this. The more arduous documentary to make, but the more imaginative one, would attempt to read the social anger underneath the Brexit vote, which the result registered but could not properly reflect. Our elections are still stratified along the lines of that referendum. It is the most important British political event of our century so far. We can do better than retelling the backroom war stories of its Tadpoles and Tapers.  

[Further reading: Married at First Sight relies on cruelty]