How Brexit Will Be Reversed: A Guide to the Inevitable
Chapter 1: An Introduction
It was September 30, 2013 and I was in Manchester for Conservative Party conference. Nigel Farage was speaking at Town Hall, just outside the secure zone, as he had been banned from attending the actual conference itself. It was an event on – what else would Farage be speaking about in 2013? – the UK leaving the European Union. Bill Cash was also on the panel with Farage.
Sir William Cash is a long-standing Tory MP and could be seen as the grandaddy of right-wing Eurosceptics. If you wanted to write a satire about the Conservative Party, you would be upset with reality for Cash being a part of it already; he’s so perfectly on the nose, it’s amazing he actually exists. He loathes the EU in a way even most Tories who agitated for Brexit don’t come close to matching. Whatever it is that animates his fervent Euroscepticism, pretty much no one currently living has fought longer, harder and louder for Britain to leave the European Union than Bill Cash.
I showed up at Manchester’s Town Hall the day of the Farage-Cash event feeling jaded. I worked at the time for a Westminster NGO that organised events at Lib Dem, Labour and Tory conferences, meaning I went to all three of them. By the time Conservative conference rolled around every year – it’s always sequentially the last one – I usually just wanted to hide under a rock and never think about politics ever again, and 2013 was certainly no exception to this. Yet what I found at the Farage-Cash event was special and perked me up a little. It certainly wasn’t what I had expected beforehand. Used to dry political events attended by an odd assortment of earnest and mostly well-behaved political activists, I walked into the large room in Manchester’s Town Hall to find a sea of angry looking people in purple shirts shouting, ‘Nigel! Nigel! Nigel!’ at the tops of their voices. We live in an age of hyperbole, particularly when talking about politics, but I swear to God I am not exaggerating when I say it felt like a political rally from the 1930s. These people were extremely angry at something or someone and they weren’t prepared to take it quietly any longer. In Farage, they clearly saw a man who was going to save them all from whatever peril was riling them up. The whole thing felt desperately un-British.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to This week in Brexitland to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.