Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  On reflection, I don’t think it’s meant to sound posh. The theatre’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, explained that “we felt the name reflected our home in Kilburn. And a kiln is also a space for transformation, so we felt it fitted in with our ideas of what we should be all about.” A kiln is a space for a pretty predictable sort of transformation, not the sort you’d want to sit and watch. More akin to paint drying than a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but I accept that the word shares four of the seven letters of its location’s name, and maybe that’s good.

  You can probably tell that I’m not 100% supportive of this rebranding. Partly, I feel possessive of the place because I used to live nearby. Admittedly, I never actually went to the theatre part of it, but I saw Quantum of Solace in its cinema, so you can’t say I haven’t suffered in its interests. But mainly I can’t see the point in the change. It will have cost money and has merely turned a theatre that quite a few people had heard of into one that virtually no one has.

  I’m not the only naysayer. Rubasingham’s direct predecessor, Nicolas Kent, who ran the Tricycle from 1984 to 2012, described the decision as “tragic” and “a commercial misstep”. There’s also a protest group calling for it to be reversed and an online petition signed by over 1,400 people.

  I haven’t signed the petition. I don’t like the decision – I can’t see any reason for it other than a self-important instinct to tamper with things – but it’s not up to me, or to any random online signatories. The naming of theatres is not a democratic process but the decision of the people running them. It’s a tiny part of the venue’s artistic offering, a creative choice. The rest of us can slag it off, just like we can slag off any shows we didn’t enjoy, but we cross a line when we dispute their right to make it. If you want to decide what a theatre is called, get yourself a job running a theatre. A few thousand votes from people who don’t know what they’re talking about are no reason to change course.

  As the Boaty McBoatface saga shows, you can’t always bow to a snapshot of popular opinion. Who knows why people voted as they did – in what spirit of lashing out against the establishment, of tweaking the nose of the ruling class – without having fully thought through, or been properly informed of, the long-term implications. Sometimes someone has to step in to stop something crazy happening – something terrible that does lasting damage. But only if it’s a really important issue, like a boat being given a silly name.

  8

  Brexit: Snapshots of a Festering, Self-inflicted Wound

  There is a chance that, in choosing the title “Snapshots of a Festering, Self-Inflicted Wound” for the chapter focusing on Brexit, I may have betrayed a tiny bit of bias. So I’d better come clean: I am not in favour of it. I’ve probably already let that slip with all the snide references earlier in the book, but I might as well make it clear.

  So if you’re in favour of Brexit, or are happy with the way it’s been handled, you may not enjoy this chapter. And if you’re both in favour of Brexit and happy with the way it’s been handled, then all I can say is: thank you for reading my book, Mr Putin.

  We don’t know how well, or indeed whether, this festering wound will heal. At time of writing, the infection has already seen off two prime ministers, and still nothing is settled. Here are my thoughts on it at various points in the currently-still-endless process.

  29 May 2016 – 25 days before the referendum

  When lost, baffled and afraid, I yearn for guidance from an outside power. But is there a God? I hope so. It’s hard to be sure, though. If there is, He doesn’t seem to pipe up that often with concrete advice. The same cannot be said for the man some consider His slayer, Richard Dawkins. He is possessed of all the certainty I look for in the Almighty, and his truth is a lot more effable. God is dead, long live God. In the apparent absence of omniscience, I’ll settle for a know-all.

  So I was glad to hear that the revered professor had spoken out about the forthcoming EU referendum, a subject that has made me feel particularly lost, baffled and afraid lately. Don’t misunderstand me, I know how I’m going to vote – I’m for Remain. I’m unshakeable on that. I just don’t know if I’m right. And I also don’t know if the side I’m going to vote for will win. I fear the consequences of its defeat and, to a lesser but still significant extent, I fear the consequences of its victory. I’m not finding any of this much fun.

  But Dawkins’s words gave me solace. He said: “It is an outrage that people as ignorant as me are being asked to vote. This is a complicated matter of economics, politics, history, and we live in a representative democracy not a plebiscite democracy. You could make a case for having plebiscites on certain issues – I could imagine somebody arguing for one on fox hunting, for example – but not on something as involved as the European Union. This should be a matter for parliament.”

  Goal! Hear, hear! Amen. That is so totally what I think, but I didn’t realise until I heard it. It was a wondrous epiphany. If the man can work such miracles, maybe there is no God. And I was comforted by the thought that Dawkins too longs for the intercession of a greater power: not God, but government. In Britain we get to choose our leaders, and dismiss them if we’re disappointed by the direction they’ve led us in. But we must surely reserve our bitterest disappointment for leaders who refuse to lead us anywhere at all.

  Calling this referendum is the worst thing Cameron has done to Britain. It’s such a hugely selfish and irresponsible act that I can hardly believe we’ve wasted so long talking about how he’s eviscerating the NHS, attacking the BBC and slashing disability benefits when, horrendous though those developments are, this crime is much greater because its consequences could be irreversible.

  The issues surrounding Britain’s membership of the EU are complicated. The EU’s problems, its waste and questionable democratic accountability, are clear. So are its trade advantages and the transformation of Europe under its influence from the world’s most murderous war zone, in which each generation strove to slaughter in greater numbers than its predecessor, to a largely peaceful continent. Crucially, the EU has made the prospect of a war between France and Germany unthinkable. The world of 1945 would be amazed and overjoyed by such an achievement.

  Maybe the EU’s flaws are leading inexorably to tyranny. Or maybe imperialist and xenophobic emotions within Britain are luring us into a self-defeating isolation that will insult our neighbours and make us poorer. These are just the quandaries that come up when you think about it for five minutes. The deeper you get into it, the more terrifying questions arise.

  What is the point in politicians if it isn’t to give clear answers to those questions? To understand the broad truth that this country wants to continue to exist independently, but also wants to accept global realities enough to protect its prosperity, and then to make a bloody decision? Yet both major parties are, to a certain extent, divided on the issue – the party of government disastrously so.

  Cameron has structured his whole career around avoiding this question – around continuing to lead a party that’s divided on the most important decision about the country’s future. All because he worked out that, if the subject of the EU was properly debated by the Tories, the party would split, and it would be harder for him to become prime minister.

  So he has conspired in the absurd scenario where successive general elections have been fought on other issues – where Britain’s future in Europe has not really been addressed by the Tories, and instead this bunch of aspiring leaders who can’t agree on this vital issue of leadership have brushed it aside, saying: “We’ll hold a referendum”; “We’ll let you decide”; “Let us be captain of the ship, but we’ll negotiate the most lethal reefs by holding a steering vote among the passengers.” I don’t think a political party has any business existing if it can’t agree a policy on this.

  Cameron’s policy-avoidance policy was deftly done, mind you. It plays well, rhetorically – telling people they’ll get to decide, flattering the public’s estima
tion of its collective wisdom. It’s a rhetoric politicians have increasingly used of late: “We’re just normal, decent people who listen”; “We’re like an unthreatening mate whose heart’s in the right place”; “By putting us in power you haven’t committed to anything except fair and sensible niceness for hard-working people who do the right thing.”

  “Make the public think that all a leader needs to be is normal and inoffensive, and then maybe I’ve got a chance!” is the modern politician’s motto. We’ve stopped looking to MPs to display great intelligence, insight, fortitude or a cool head in a crisis. Now they just get to shrug and say, “It’s tricky, isn’t it?” “Vote for me, I think it’s tricky too!”

  They won’t step up and lead. They won’t say they know. Expertise is dismissed as elitist. It’s worse to be “out of touch” with the price of milk than to misunderstand the consequences of Britain suddenly severing all its trade deals. They’re happy for that decision to be made by random vote after a frenzied few months of both sides trying to make the other seem the more apocalyptic or Hitlerian, each suddenly so certain in its hyperbole.

  Except perhaps David Cameron himself. He’s campaigning for Remain but, according to his long-time political ally Steve Hilton, Cameron’s “instinct” is for Brexit: “If he were a member of the public … I’m certain that he would be for Leave.” So perhaps he can’t decide. Our leader doesn’t know which way to go. I’m not just sorry he’s prime minister; I’m sorry he gets a vote.

  2 April 2017 – three days after the triggering of Article 50

  A dramatic photo-essay played out on the front pages of the newspapers last week. On Tuesday: a snap of Theresa May solemnly signing a letter. On Wednesday: one of Sir Tim Barrow solemnly handing it over to the disapproving president of the European council, Donald “Tsk” Tusk. I didn’t buy a paper on Thursday as I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitable picture of Tusk solemnly wiping his arse with it. I’d already got the gist.

  Please excuse the remoaning. I know it’s frowned upon. It wasn’t for this that all those elderly Leave supporters dragged themselves out to vote! This isn’t what they fought a war for! Though not many of them actually did that. Those guys are mainly dead. The Few are now the Fewer, soon to be the None. So I should say: this isn’t what they, in many cases, lived through a bit of the war for (but often as infants, so they can’t really remember it)!

  If they can’t remember it, perhaps that explains why they’re so sanguine about renouncing an institution that’s done more than any other in history to preserve peace between the major nations of Europe. I wonder if their parents would have been so hasty. The demobbed Tommies who voted for Attlee over Churchill might not have been as easily convinced as their children have been that youngsters with foreign accents working in coffee shops is such a diabolical threat to Britain’s values and existence. They’d probably seen worse.

  Anyway, this kind of remoaning isn’t what members of the luckiest generation ever born betrayed the sacrifices of their parents for! I’m sure that’s a form of words we can all agree on. What it feels like they actually did it for, and the clamour against remoaning has contributed hugely to this feeling, is for the Remainers to shut up. That seems to have been an outcome that was confidently expected among Leavers, and nobody even painted it on a bus.

  “Come on, you lost – you have to shut up now! For years you’ve been going on and on and on about multiculturalism and fair trade and equal marriage, and how foreigners are lovely and we’re nasty, and chickens get treated terribly, and recycling and rape and pitta bread and how nothing is quite as it seems, and now you’ve got to stop or it’s not fair. Everyone voted to say they were sick of it, and that’s that!”

  That would explain why, as the consequences of last year’s referendum grind remorselessly on, there’s so much anger and bitterness on both sides. Surely the winning side should be chipper, at least for the moment. This is the honeymoon period – if a divorce can have a honeymoon period. Which I imagine it can: this is the leave your socks on the floor, get drunk and piss in the sink bit. The bleak contemplation of a vast acreage of solitude stretching ahead towards a cold grave is still to come.

  So come on, Ukip, put on your favourite pants and order another takeaway, safe in the knowledge that there’s a growing chance the bloke who brings it won’t be able to live here soon. “Sergei, Sergei, you know me – it’s nothing personal! There is just, quite simply, not enough room, yeah? Capeesh? Now what do I owe you, my friend?”

  But the Ukippers, even in their hour of victory, don’t appear to be very happy. They seem baffled and in disarray, even by their own bickering standards. I suppose they’ve been going through a bumpy patch: it took them a long time to find a leader who could pull off the elusive double of both being able to stomach the job for more than 18 days and not being Nigel Farage; they’ve just lost their only MP (not in an election – there was some sort of falling out, as usual); and nobody seems very optimistic about their prospects in the local elections in May.

  It’s not just that, though. I think the party’s Brexit spokesman, Gerard Batten, really got to the heart of the malaise when he said last week: “We don’t want Article 50 to be triggered.” Wow. My daughter is 23 months old, so never in my life have I been more aware of what Farage would probably describe as “a woman’s prerogative”. Still, was ever such an energetically campaigned-for rice cake so rebuffed? “You what now?!” is the only response.

  Contextualised, Batten’s statement is marginally less mad. He reckons the whole Article 50 process is “a trap” and we should just leave. Don’t get sucked into all that metropolitan liberal elite article-triggering claptrap, he reckons; instead, we just go. Brick up the Channel tunnel, throw a lasso around Rockall and then pull ourselves off into the sea – like the good old days, eh Gerard? The whole complex negotiation of Britain’s departure is something he says we could “do in an afternoon”. And he’s Ukip’s Brexit spokesman, so it’s definitely his area of expertise.

  The party’s new leader, Paul Nuttall, was slightly less down on Article 50, but promised that Ukip would be the “guard dogs of Brexit”. He also set out “six key tests” for Brexit that he’ll definitely be able to say aren’t met.

  So it’s all happening like they wanted it to – like they’d barely have dreamed of 15 years ago – but they’re still cross, still picking holes, still cueing up the future rhetoric of betrayal. Meanwhile, Nuttall is promising a huge shake-up of the party, its structure and its policies. “The name will stay, that’s the one thing I’ll guarantee,” he says.

  On one level, this is a response to a practical problem: Ukip was established as a one-issue party, and that issue has been resolved in its favour. It’s lost its ostensible reason to exist, but it still exists. New issues to bang on about must be found.

  But my instinct is that their crisis runs deeper than this. The leading Ukippers have spent decades convinced that the anger and dissatisfaction they felt, with which their lives were infused, was caused by one thing. And now the thing has gone. What if they feel the same? A crushing realisation for them, but also for the rest of us. Their misdirected zeal could easily have tipped the balance in the referendum.

  So excuse the compl(rem)aining, but we really must stop people self-medicating their undiagnosed psychological problems by causing huge, ill-conceived geopolitical shifts. First the Iraq war and now this. I blame social services.

  29 July 2018

  Who would have thought Jeremy Hunt was such a massive nostalgic? I mean, he’s not called Jeremy Hostalgic! Seriously though, it turns out he’s a real old softie, and I fancy there must have been a tear in his eye on his visit to Berlin last week.

  I’m not saying he misses the Nazis! Honestly! I know hyperbole is fashionable at the moment, so it’s probably worth making clear that I don’t think Jeremy Hunt is a Nazi. I mean, he’s not called Jeremy Hazi! Seriously though, the man’s not a fascist, even if I don’t much like his politics. Having
said that, English is all about usage, and I reckon the word “fascist” is regularly used online to mean “someone whose politics you don’t much like”. Which, oddly, makes it a synonym for communist.

  The foreign secretary betrayed this sense of nostalgia when criticising Brussels’s conduct over Brexit. “Without a real change in approach from the EU negotiators we do now face a real risk of a no deal by accident, and that would be incredibly challenging economically,” he warned, adding that the British people would blame the EU for this and it “would change [their] attitudes to Europe for a generation”. So there he is, a Tory cabinet minister, saying that British problems are the EU’s fault. Just once more, for old times’ sake?

  Bless you, but you can’t do that any more, Jeremy. Those days are gone. When we chose to leave, the EU’s duty of care over our country came to an end. It isn’t supposed to look out for our interests any more; it’s not accountable to the people you say will blame it. You might as well say that Sainsbury’s shareholders will blame the CEO of Tesco if their investment loses value. So what.

  I understand how he must feel. For his whole political career, the EU has been there for him. Despite favouring Remain in the referendum, Hunt subsequently told LBC that he’d changed his mind due to the “arrogance of the EU”. But in Berlin the other day, he said that, if Brussels allowed a no-deal Brexit, “it would lead to a fissure in relations which would be highly damaging for that great partnership we have had for so many years, which has been so important in sustaining the international order”.

  He doesn’t seem to realise that that’s all happening anyway. The “fissure in relations”, the complete ending, not just damaging, of the “great partnership” is what we as a nation have decided to do. Which means that’s all good, isn’t it? It’s the will of the people, Jeremy, it’s lovely! The poor man is so confused and emotional, he’s started talking Britain down.