On the Joy of Bathing in Remainer Tears. And Other Brexit Pleasures…

Here’s a speech on Brexit I gave recently to the Bruges Group which most of you will enjoy because it features:

A bit where I describe the joy of bathing in Remainer tears and watching the inconsolable BBC presenters trying to come to terms with the horror of the result the morning after the vote.

More jokes at the expense of the BBC, including a digression about what an alien would make of Britain if he drew his conclusions on our nature, character and interests merely by watching and listening to the BBC. (“I see that you are passionately interested in diversity…”)

More gloating.

Some sound observations on the artificial distinction between “Soft” Brexit and “Hard” Brexit which is, of course, entirely the creation of bitter Remoaners hell bent on sabotaging the democratic will of the British people. “Soft” Brexit is their codephrase for the Status Quo Ante: basically, they want to fudge it so that Leave doesn’t mean Leave at all, so that we remain stuck with the EU’s regulations on freedom of movement in return for the privilege of staying stuck within the regulatory regime of the single market to no obvious benefit whatsoever.

The sad thing is that since giving the speech I’ve grown a lot less positive about Britain’s post-Brexit prospects under Theresa May’s administration. That’s because, though I had heard her red-meat opening speech in which she promised to deliver us the “Full English Brexit not the Continental croissants-and-coffee version” (as my colleague Charles Moore so brilliantly put it), what I hadn’t heard were all the subsequent speeches in which she and her senior cabinet colleagues outlined their plans to turn Britain into a fiscally reckless, micromanagerial, inward-looking Big Government paradigm, rather than the free-booting, small state, outward looking trading state some of us had dearly hoped it might be. More on this in another column.

One quick final thought though: that awful speech by Amber Rudd – even after you’ve pinched yourself, really hard, you’ll find to your amazement that she still holds the office of Home Secretary – where she announced plans to name and shame any British companies that employed too many foreign workers, earning comparisons with Mein Kampf.

Was there ever a public statement better calculated to make Britain’s exit from the EU as unpleasant, heavily-resisted and difficult as possible? If you didn’t know better – I’m sure it was down to cock-up, paucity of talent and grotesque overpromotion – you’d almost think it was a deliberate act of sabotage design to make Brexiteers look like a bunch of Nazis…