I’m suffering from a modern British ailment first discovered by scientists (and others) back in 2016. It’s called BOBES.
That’s the term for those of us who feel the pain from what medical professionals call “Bored Of Brexit Excuses Syndrome”.
You know how BOBES strikes? It’s like a headache. There you are, innocently watching TV news. Suddenly a heads-of-oak politician is making excuses that “Brexit would have been great if only it had been done right”.
BOBES sufferers like me switch off and head for the pub. But – oh no! The local pub bore is lecturing the bar about how “Brexit’s all the fault of woke Remoaners”.
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You want to remind the pub bore that those in charge of Brexit were the sublimely un-woke May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and that instant cure for insomnia, Jacob Rees-Mogg. But the Brexit bore’s off again. Now he’s saying it’s all the fault of (take your pick) “the Europeans”, “the Irish”, “the Remoaner civil service”, “the mee-jah” or – my favourite – “Lefty Lawyers”.
In 2023, even as the reality of Brexit’s tedious yet predictable failures continue to bite, it must be comforting to be a Brexit bore. After all, it’s always someone else’s fault.
And after seven years and all the empty words of the vacuous Brexit whining, we all know that “Woke” or “Remoaner” or “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” have no meaning beyond the fact that the speaker thinks, “I don’t like you” or “I don’t like what I think you stand for”.
And isn’t it odd that when it comes to Brexit moaning nowadays, it’s not from supposed Remoaners. It’s the Brexiters who actually believed in ‘it’ without having any idea what ‘it’ involved.
People like me were always clear that Brexit would be a pile of excrement. I’m not moaning. I just don’t want to step in it.
The best summary of this came from my wife’s family in Germany. I sat in a summer garden on the outskirts of Hamburg, drinking beer with uncle Bruno. He’s a German doctor who studied in England.
“So,” he said to me with a deadpan expression. “You must explain Brexit to me.”
I gulped the beer, then tried as best I could to explain to someone who generally admires the common sense of the people of the UK what had happened and why. Bruno clearly was not buying my account of Brexit derangement.
I said, “Bruno, you’re the doctor. What’s your diagnosis about Brexit?”
In the straight-faced way of the best of German humour, Bruno replied very seriously. Here was my family doctor diagnosing a serious and possibly incurable condition.
“I think the English had a headache,” Bruno said slowly. “So they shot themselves in the foot. They still have the headache. But now they can’t walk.”
I spluttered with laughter into my beer.
“I’m Scottish,” I said.
“I know,” Bruno said.
Seven years after that conversation I have yet to find a better, clearer or more relevant definition of what Brexit is, was and/or was supposed to be.
Brexit Derangement Syndrome extends from Boris Johnson who promised it would be a “Titanic success” (without perhaps recalling the current whereabouts of the Titanic), to this month’s confected outrage about a few happy people waving European flags at the Last Night of the Proms on the BBC.
The Brexiters were frothing in their own derangement. But – happily – there is a cure for BOBES – being bored of these ludicrous Brexit excuses. That cure is to stop excusing the inexcusable.
Brexit is brain dead. The Brexit zombie requires a decent burial, and that will presumably take place eventually. And of course a happy, successful Brexit, like any zombie, has one obvious flaw. It doesn’t actually exist.
:: Gavin Esler will be writing regularly for The Irish News and is author most recently of Britain Is Better Than This (Head of Zeus).
