The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Brexit and Britain’s suicide note
Former French ambassador’s acidic and gossipy take on EU referendum
READING Au Revoir Britannia is a strange, troubling and almost schizophrenic experience. This account of the Brexit years by Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to Britain at the time of the EU referendum, is often laugh out loud funny – she has a gift for subtle but acidic putdowns; it’s insidery; it’s gossipy – but it’s also like reliving a nightmare you’d started to forget.
Brexit feels like it happened an aeon ago – bridged off from the present by Ukraine, pandemic, the rise and fall of Trump, and the grotesque circus of Partygate. Yet it’s a mere six years since we voted Leave or Remain, and just two years since Britain officially left the European Union. We live in accelerated times.
What shocks most when reading Bermann’s book is how much of the insanity of the Brexit years has drifted out of memory – all the bizarre terms we became familiar with like the Malthouse Compromise and prorogation. Who even remembers Andrea Leadsom now? Yet she was villain of the week back in 2016 when she made grotesque comments about Theresa May not having children while trying to get her behind into the Prime Minister’s chair.
Bermann’s book is like a ouija board – summoning the worst spirits of the past. It’s as if, suddenly, those demented Leave and Remain protestors, who once claimed residency in Parliament Square, with their loudhailers and clothing made from Union Jacks or EU flags, were back again, blaring their wild slogans into our ears. Whatever became of them?
Bermann is clear that Brexit was an act of monumental stupidity – not even the Brexiteers knew what Brexit meant. “A country enjoying enviable prosperity decided to change course overnight. I looked on as the United Kingdom, flourishing and selfconfident, turned into a profoundly divided country where the prevailing atmosphere, tinged with xenophobia, was one of bitterness in which Europeans, and the French in particular, seem to have become its enemies.”
It’s fascinating to read Bermann’s account of the British as a people. Bermann, to quote Robert Burns, gives us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. Though, often, she’s speaking about the English rather than ‘the British’.
If there’s any fault in the book, it’s this blurring. She notes that “the British were … as culturally different as the Chinese, if not more so”. Yet she goes on to list a series of archetypes which will mean little to many Scots, Irish or Welsh: “The royal family and the parade of monarchy; the Queen’s hats; the pomp of the Tudors at Westminster … the ‘old boys’ clubs; horse racing at Ascot; the annual City Guild parades”.
Mention the ‘Queen’s hats’ to most Glaswegians and you’re probably guaranteed, at best, an askance look. This is a view of Britain seen through the experience of a foreigner living in London. It’s forgivable, nonetheless. I’ve yet to meet an American who doesn’t mix up British and English. And all of us – Scot, Irish, Welsh or
English – will see most foreign nations through the lives of their capitals and big cities, eliding Paris for France,
New York for America and Beijing for China.
Brexit, Bermann says, became the British equivalent to France’s ‘Dreyfus affair’ – the scandal over anti-semitism which consumed and transformed the country in the late 19th century. Yet we – and the rest of the world – still don’t understand what exactly happened. A cabal of minor political obsessives – the hard Europhobic right – somehow captured the national conversation and knocked Britain off course, sending us from the top of the premier league into the minor divisions.
“Demons had been let loose,” she says, “xenophobia and racism legitimised.” She wonders in bafflement how a nation which helped birth the enlightenment became a land where “terms such as ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘saboteurs’, reminiscent of La Terreur [The Terror] following the French Revolution, or of Stalin’s reign of terror, made the front page of the Daily Mail”.
It was lies – and identity politics – which did for us. Bermann holds up lie after lie, like a prosecutor parading criminals before a jury: the £350
million for the NHS written on the side of a bus, the claims that millions of Turks were headed this way, the wicked conflation of immigration from Africa, Asia and the Middle East with EU freedom of movement.
At root, she reminds us, the “whole Brexit affair” was down to “the toxic situation in the Tory Party” where David Cameron, fresh from victory in the Scottish independence referendum, thought he could drive a stake through the heart of his Eurosceptic wing forever and kill off Ukip. In the end, the campaign was “a battle between the elite” – with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage on one side, and Cameron on the other: public schoolboys all, with Johnson and Cameron both products of Eton and Oxford.
Remainers failed to create a narrative to counter the Leavers’ simplistic ‘Take Back Control’ – a wilfully obscure slogan which could mean anything to anybody. If Remainers had fought harder, she believes, we would still be in Europe today. But the weakness of Jeremy Corbyn and the refusal to discuss how the EU had brought an end to war in Europe, sealed the nation’s fate. Bermann notes despairingly: “Against all the evidence there [was] a refusal to
concede that the EU has made it possible for the members of the European Union to live in peace for over 70 years.”
Bermann, rightly, pins Brexit on Britain’s – for which read England’s – endless obsession with empire. “The visceral Europhobia of the Brexiteers is based on nostalgia for a country and a world that no longer exists – the British empire ruling the waves.”
As a diplomat she has little hope for Britain now we’re on our own. Isolationism means we’re destined to be “losers … against the giant continent-sized states that dominate today”. The more clubs you’re in, when it comes to power on the world stage, the better. And we just chucked ourselves out of one of the biggest clubs on the planet.
Here at home Brexit’s biggest achievement is to threaten the “unity of the United Kingdom” as Scotland and Northern Ireland react against Brexit – all in the interests of “British exceptionalism” and “Little Englanders”.
To read Bermann is to read the suicide note of a nation.