Tusk’s diabolical cheek

“It’s useful to be reminded every now and then just how much the Brussels oligarchy hates us,” said Brendan O’neill on Spiked. So let’s be grateful to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, for his comment last week. At a press conference with the Irish PM, Leo Varadkar, Tusk wondered out loud “what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely”. The mask slipped, revealing that the Brussels elite really do view those who disagree with them as “evil beings, sinners, disrupters of decency”. It was only the latest piece of “gratuitous mud-slinging” from Tusk, said the Daily Mail. When Theresa May went to Salzburg to sell her Brexit plan last year, he published an Instagram picture of him offering her cake, with the childish caption: “Sorry, no cherries.” The explanation for Tusk’s rudeness is simple: his “diehard Eurocrat’s contempt for the popular will”. The Polish politician is on record describing the 2016 referendum as “stupid”.

So Tusk was rude, was he, asked Mark Steel in The Independent. Of course, Brexit’s “delicate spokespeople”, such as Nigel Farage and The Sun, only ever use the politest language. Boris Johnson “calmed everyone down” when he compared the EU to Hitler’s European superstate. As for the idea that those who promoted Brexit didn’t have a plan, that’s “outrageous”. There was Liam Fox, who said that Brexit would be “the easiest deal in history”. And David Davis, claiming that Britain would soon make individual trade deals with EU nations – apparently not understanding the basic rules of the bloc. The first and second Brexit secretaries resigned, and then opposed the plan they negotiated; the Government is now holding rehearsals for when tens of thousands of lorries are stuck in Kent, while businesses stockpile toilet rolls and insulin. All of this was clearly part of the plan. “Tusk should be criticised not for his malice, but for his moderation,” said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. He should have added that, within that special place, “there should be an executive suite of sleepless torment for those politicians who promoted Brexit without ever giving a stuff about Ireland”.

It’s easy to understand Tusk’s frustration, said John Manley in The Irish News (Belfast). Even so, the tone of his remarks “was unbecoming for an EU figurehead”. It wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment – he also tweeted it – and it merely ratcheted up the tensions. The DUP’S Sammy Wilson responded by calling Tusk “a devilish, trident-wielding euromaniac”; Tory MP Peter Bone called it a “completely outrageous insult”. Actually, the most revealing part of the press conference wasn’t the comment about hell, said Katy Balls in The Spectator. It was the bit afterwards, where Tusk, a long-time proponent of a second referendum, said that there was no longer any hope of one. In Brussels, denial seems to have given way to anger. So perhaps Tusk’s rhetoric marked a “turning point” of sorts.