MALEVOLENT AUTHOR WHO WANTS BREXIT VOTERS TO DIE

FOR sheer arrogance, the writer Ian McEwan reminds me of roadhog Mr Toad in The Wind In The Willows. Right up close in your wing mirror he comes. Poop-poop! Outta my way, slowcoaches! Get off the road, you oldsters! Zoooom!

It is a pity, really. McEwan is in some ways a fine writer and an agreeably cerebral figure. He is an egghead who has won international prizes and contributed high-brow articles to Left-leaning journals. But he showed his Toadish side with a malevolent, gleeful little speech in which he looked forward to hundreds of thousands of old people dying.

He wanted them out of the way because he disagreed with them over Brexit. Let the deluded fools who voted Leave in the EU referendum die, and die sharpish, he argued, so that the country could soon hold another referendum and this time reach a different verdict. He, McEwan, as a Europhile, was superior to such fools and wanted rid of them.

McEwan made little attempt to be objective about the referendum result. Having watched the campaign with elevated detachment, he felt stung when the result went against his ilk and he wailed that Britain had been ‘changed utterly’ by the outcome.

Yes, a ‘progressive’ novelist was railing against change.

The outwardly urbane McEwan is supposedly a wry observer of humanity. He is not, though, a John Osborne, Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Burgess, raging against the powerful. Far from it. He is part of the Establishment.

Has he been spoilt by becoming too close to an elite he should be satirising? Was his work undone by all the prizes he kept winning, with the attendant trips to splashy dinners?

The novelist, particularly one who (we are told) is so brilliant, might keep his distance from the powerful. He might also wait a year or two to see how events pan out and which leaders of society made the ripest fools of themselves.

But the Establishment artist is expected to man the barricades when something interesting like Brexit happens. She or he must be heard to defend the powerful, even as all this fascinating change is unfolding — change that may well upend the ruling caste.

McEwan was asked to speak at a gathering of concerned snoots, the Convention On Brexit, co-organised by Henry Porter, a journalist so suave he could be George Clooney’s older, cleverer brother.

My dears, they were all there — from Nick Clegg and high-profile anti- Brexit campaigner Gina Miller to Alastair Campbell, Newsnight snore Evan Davis and that grande dame of the law, Dame Helena Kennedy.

John le Carre gave the convention a plug. So did little Alain de Botton, a deliciously absurd selfcreation — a media philosopher with a personal fortune. He said Brexit had thrown up ‘large and agonising questions’ and there was ‘a desperate need to ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve and what the right strategy might be’.

By ‘we’, Baby de Botton may not have meant the wider electorate of Britain who have to park their cars outside their common little houses and shop at Aldi. He may have meant the elite.

ADDRESSING this gathering of the hoity-toity, McEwan said he was ‘ a denialist’. ‘ I am still shaking my head in disbelief,’ he moaned on. ‘I don’t accept this near mystical, emotionally charged decision. How can it be that in a one-off vote, a third of the electorate have determined the fate of the nation for the next half-century?

‘A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth.’

He wanted a re-run. ‘By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5 million over-18s, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.’

Er, what was that about ‘angry old men’? Here was a 69-year-old member of the elite raging that a national election had gone against him and his lot, and his response was to relish the prospect of mass deaths among Leave voters.

How did the audience of elitists react? Why, with cheers. Serial charmer Sir Bob Geldof said he loved McEwan’s ‘rejectionism’, adding: ‘Anger is a great animus.’

Indeed it is. Just look how it animated the country’s electorate to tell the Brussels bloodsuckers to fling their fishhooks.

ONE OF the pleasures of writing for the Mail is that it makes Establishment bores so terribly cross.

For journalists, it is much more fun to write for an iconoclastic paper than one which sucks up to the powerful. And, boy, the high and snooty certainly went nuts when we took a pop at three High Court judges who found against the government in Gina Miller’s anti-Brexit case.

Miller wanted to force Theresa May to submit Brexit to Parliament for approval. The judges agreed. The keenly pro-Brexit Mail, in noisy campaign mode, ran a headline calling them ‘Enemies of the People’.

It was quickly made clear that criticising the law is close to a thought crime. Lofty Lord Hope (lawyer) declared democracy was imperilled and that youngsters might be deterred from seeking a career in the law. Cue a chorus of the Bee Gees’ Tragedy.

If democracy was being placed in danger, it was possibly being done so by a political class outsourcing our law- making to unelected foreigners in Europe.

All manner of accusations were thrown at the Mail: it opposed the rule of law, was an agent of tyranny, was fascist, etc, etc.

No, it wasn’t. It was pointing out, with the brio to be expected from a popular newspaper, that, although the nation had voted for Brexit, lawyers were forcing that vote to be approved by a Parliament composed largely of Remain supporters.

Must judges remain above any criticism? Decades ago, journalists such as Ludovic Kennedy and the great Richard Ingrams overcame deference to lawyers and revealed some judges to be grievous Establishment stooges. Are we to accept that today’s judges, miraculously, have quite, quite altered and are above such traits?

You would certainly think so from the scorn that was thrown at journalists who questioned the ability of the Supreme Court’s top judge, Lord Neuberger, to chair the Miller case’s appeal after it was revealed that his wife had publicly (on Twitter, repeatedly) raged against Brexit, calling it ‘mad and bad’.

The Supreme Court’s guidelines acknowledge that political activity by a close family member can imperil public trust in a judge. Yet those guidelines were pushed aside like sprouts on a fussy child’s plate. Lord Neuberger was permitted to continue on his way, a court spokesman saying that Neuberger would be able to separate political views from points of law.

Oh really? The points of law were sufficiently debatable for the court’s judges to be split in their verdicts.

I came across Neuberger once, at a dinner in Oxford. He sidled up to me and said we should get to know one another. Maybe he was just being friendly. Maybe it was more careerist than that.

Far from coming across as a distant, dispassionate figure, he struck me as a networker, eager to ‘make contact, put a face to the name, always been an admirer of your work’ and all that. Not ideal in a judge, really.

TOMORROW: Brainwashed by modern gender politics