The politics of the personal

Guardian journalism on Brexit has become increasingly personal since the Referendum, of course, with hatred of Johnson probably in the forefront, but with revenge fantasies extending to all opponents of the Islington tendency. The return of N Farage to active politcs has been greeted in the familiar way today:  'It is an exciting prospect: the “bad boys of Brexit” on the road once more, selling snake oil and lies wherever the freedom-mobile leads them.'

However, the bile is concealed in a soft revenge fantasy: it will all backfire and strengthen the campaign for a People's Vote (ie a Remain vote). That happens because campaigning to oppose what Farage sees as a May sell-out wil lonly reawaken debate:

Yet the very act of – to use his own choice of verb – “restarting” the campaign will encourage the impression that the 2016 result is suddenly provisional, that the battle is not yet won, that there is all to play for. This is precisely the narrative that the People’s Vote campaign has been seeking to encourage: that nothing is inevitable, that true democracy is all about absorbing and responding to new information, that there is, in Dunkerton’s [Superdry millionaire donor] words, a “genuine chance to turn this around”.

People will change their minds because of a compelling narrative -- the Cambridge Analytica view of public opinion. 

Farage must secretly know that d'Ancona and the Grudina are right ,so hhis decision must be further explained as something irrational, defying the march of Reason and Right. It's those populists -- they can't help it even if it leads to their own demise:

Populists survive by staying in motion. They are allergic to reflection, unable to stay still, naturally kinetic. They despise policy detail, nuance and pauses for thought. The essence of populism is not democracy, but the insistence that there are simple solutions to complex problems – solutions that are withheld from the public by a metropolitan elite of “saboteurs”, “enemies of the people” and consumers of carrot cake...They seek power by claiming that the best interests of the people are being thwarted by a nebulous conspiracy. Indeed, they need the public to believe in that conspiracy so that they themselves are not held to account for their failure to deliver what they promised.

Activity is all:

Imagine if May, in a bedazzling change of form, suddenly delivered the hard Brexit that Farage wants: all “control” taken back, untrammelled self-government, immigration slashed, Pomp and Circumstance pumped by Tannoy into every British classroom. What on earth would he do with his time then?

Hardly a compellingly narratived version of hard Brexit -- are we still being serious? And rather revealing in a 'you too' sort of way . What would Guardina columnists do when Brexit takes place? Continue to bang on and on? Revert to their usual concerns for lifestyle politics and symbolic insults? It seems to me that activists on either side need each other to keep the whole thing aloft.