Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part but isn't there a noticeable change in the Brexiteers attitude as all the unremittingly bad news keeps coming in? Before the vote they were consistently upbeat and positive with all the faith and unshakeable confidence of evangelists selling a Utopian dream. But now when they're on the TV you can almost see the cockiness draining away as they have to come up with an explanation and a defence for the latest intrusion by reality, invariably dressed in a wet blanket.
The tables are turned. It's now as it was always going to be, the remainers who are asking the hard questions and the Brexiteers that are struggling to find sensible answers. The shambolic negotiations are going far worse than even the most pessimistic remainer could ever have imagined. The EU are making no concessions, we are making them all. The £50 billion divorce bill, the impact assessments, the Irish border problems are all nails in the Brexit coffin.
I saw Kwasi Kwarteng MP on Channel 4 News last night trying to defend the divorce bill that neither he nor any other Brexiteer mentioned before the vote. He struggled to explain why nobody on the leave campaign said we would end up paying £50 billion. He looked like a deflated balloon. Ian Duncan Smith was on earlier in the day and remarkably subdued. There is plenty of other stuff the voters didn't realise during the referendum to come out as well. They are going to be be very busy - and with no one else to blame.
I suppose there is always a moment when this happens. Readers of this blog may know I was a salesman for large capital equipment for most of my career and one learns quickly that you can sell as many dreams as you like, exaggerate the quality or performance or reliability to your heart's content, but one day you have to make good on those promises and woe betide you if you can't. One realises a bit of circumspection at the sales stage is very helpful. The claims you make must be substantiated.
Brexiteers are now at that point where the exaggerated fantasy claims are having to be defended and there is a lot of back pedalling going on. They are learning what every good salesman knows believing something is not the same as knowing it.
They have based their whole philosophy on two fantasies. You can see this in social media postings as well as most of the poisonous right wing press. The first fantasy is that the EU is a corrupt, expensive bureaucracy, both petty and over powerful, bullying and threatening the very existence of Britain as it seeks to dominate Europe. This erroneous world view has been created over the years by Johnson and others with all the bent banana stories and the like
When this fantasy had taken root they didn't need to work hard at the other one.
This fantasy has the UK, once free from the EU's shackles, restored to our rightful place bestriding the globe like modern buccaneers, trading our way to vast wealth to be spent on public services and infrastructure that will enrich us even more and make us the envy of the world. Both are just that - fantasies. As we are all about to discover.
