Bonne Chance indeed
June 28, 2016
If you’d asked me to predict the outcome of the Brexit vote I’d have said it would be Remain, for sure. When I left the coverage at about 1am on Friday, the pollsters had called it for Remain. That’s the same pollsters that called a coalition government at the last election. If only they had been right both times; if Cameron had had to lead another coalition – as he expected – he would never have been able to call a referendum. But, the pollsters got it horribly wrong again.
Cameron is going – he won’t be missed. His judgement on every major issue and on the people he has around him has been calamitous at every turn – remember Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. Now he will go down in history as the PM who accidentally crashed out of the EU and trashed the United Kingdom – the only thing that will stop Scotland leaving the UK is if the EU doesn’t want them.
Cameron is a man from a massively privileged background who viscerally believed he was born to rule and that that was enough to justify his ending up in No 10; he was/is unencumbered by any real ideology, ideas, beliefs or aims. Boris Johnson is the same; he believes he deserves to be PM and so he will be – but what for, what is he actually for? He was for the EU less than a year ago and, having run a campaign that persuaded a vast tranche of the kind of UK citizens who live at the furthest opposite end of the social and economic spectrum to him and Cameron that Brexit meant no more migrants, he is now energetically rowing back from that.
As French daily Libération put it so eloquently, with a picture telling a thousand words: Good Luck. Wish us well as we begin to tread a new and uncharted road, whether we wanted to or not.
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