Of course, by now it’s almost purely about embarrassment, which just serves to make the whole thing even more embarrassing. It was embarrassing enough that David Cameron’s reckless short-termism in trying to manage his party’s lunatic fringe dumped a referendum on us in the first place. That embarrassment was compounded by the complacency and incompetence of the Remainers’ campaign, based round fear and finance, while the zealots filled people’s hearts with beautiful if deranged dreams of Taking Back Control and getting our fondling hands back on all that throbbing sovereignty. And we probably all know how embarrassing it is waking up in a hostel the morning after that kind of dream, still flushed and sweaty as you unstick yourself in full view of the world from the soggy bedsheets.
But we’re now into a wholly different degree of embarrassment. This is the embarrassment familiar to the political classes, but usually only to individual members of it: you commit an outrage of personal hypocrisy, you’re found out, you deny it, you ratchet up the denial, the denial falls to pieces, you deny any wrong-doing while assuring everyone lessons have been learned and then your career crumbles to dust. Which is just about containable for everyone else, although the embarrassment tends to spread out like blood across a blanket. This is the template for Greek Tragedy, which provided a ritual to explain us to ourselves over two and half millennia ago.
This time, however, the embarrassment is universal, and until someone is brave enough to tell the truth, it’ll just get worse. Worse still, telling the truth will be the most embarrassing thing of all. Here’s why. In the real tragedies which have echoed Greek Tragedy throughout history, the instigating error which triggers the cascade into chaos and ruin often lies as much in the motivation as in the deed itself. Taking only the most recent example before Brexit, a desire to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was entirely laudable, but the Americans’ motivation for it was appalling, being a lethal cocktail of revenge and looting bolstered by lie after lie. This then infested Tony Blair’s motivation, which was stunk up by his belief he needed to hug the US close, even when it would inevitably completely cock the whole thing up, through hubris and a fatal complacency in failing to bother to plan at all for the future.
Any of that sound familiar? Because there remain laudable and honourable reasons for disassociating ourselves from the EU and the conspiracy of Thatcherite bankers who run it, and who five years ago carried out coups d’etat against two democratically elected governments in order to appease the bond markets. It’s just that these were not the motivations of the Leave campaign. They were driven by a foul melange of fantasy, nostalgia, kneejerk racism, cynicism, personal ambition and in Michael Gove’s case an almost Maoist belief in creative chaos, added to the warped psychopathology deep in the Tories’ twisted Id, that they can never decide whether they love Global capitalism more then they hate foreigners (who also own the Global Capitalism, by definition).
If that final dilemma appears, for the moment, to have been resolved by Theresa May collapsing back into her Safe Space of cosy xenophobia, don’t be fooled. I suspect May’s current positioning is simply squalidly Freudian, and therefore as embarrassing as everything else concerning Brexit: having no idea what to do next, she’s decided to give the appearance of acting tough while simultaneously evoking the England of her childhood, because it makes her feel good. Indeed, the increasingly defensive aggression – and the straightforwardly aggressive aggression – of the Brexiters is looking more pathological by the day. You’d expect licenced psychopaths like the editors of certain mid-market newspapers to start tub-thumping with talk of Treason, but most democratic politicians don’t dismiss half the electorate by calling them a sneering metropolitan elite, mostly because they’re not. Nor does it seem entirely sane, in the name of restoring the Sovereignty of Parliament, to deny Parliament a say in achieving it. Unless this is simply faux-statesmanship desperately disguising cluelessness, the political equivalent of trying to tough things out by saying you’ve left your homework on the bus or, more precisely in this case, claiming the dog was sick over it. Because this is a madness born of embarrassment, of how desperately cringemaking it will be when someone – anyone – admits the Brexit vote was a terrible mistake: not just economically senseless to the point where it begins to look like national suicide, but also politically toxic, because of the deep dysfunction in both the motivation and conduct of the winning side.
And how do you admit that? How do our leaders ‘fess up to the fact that they’re a mixture of cowards, clowns, incompetents, careerists and crazed zealots? Worse, that means there’s now a stark choice between our nation’s prosperity and our democracy (while admitting there’s a reason why plebiscites are the only democratic tool favoured by dictators)? And who’s going to tell the People that their leaders are the worst people who’ve ever lived, but not as bad as the People themselves, who voted for this catastrophe? Like I say, it’s all rather embarrassing, and it’s going to get a whole lot more embarrassing yet.