All the cranks seem to be with the Remainers these days
Iwas sometimes embarrassed by my fellow Eurosceptics during the Nineties. Ours was an apparently hopeless cause, and such causes attract cranks. There were people who blamed every ill on the “Brussels Broadcasting Corporation”. There were paranoiacs who thought the EU was part of an occult New World Order. There were oddballs who turned up to meetings dressed as John Bull. These problems have now migrated to the other side. Every day, demonstrators wearing variants of the EU flag yell angrily at Parliament. Remainers, led by the Labour peer Lord Adonis, have taken to raging at the “Brexit Broadcasting Corporation”. A journalist called Carole Cadwalladr believes that a “shadowy global operation” links Cambridge Analytica to the Leave campaign, and that the referendum was stolen.
The conspiracy theorists don’t represent the 48 per cent, any more than the colourfully dressed weirdos represented Nineties’ Euroscepticism. But they have a way of setting the tone – not least because Remainers are reluctant to repudiate support from any quarter. How suddenly their cause has gone from Establishment to eccentric, commanding to kooky, invincible to irrelevant.