The new issues -- stents and new 50p coins

The GRaun is trying for a new stance, having lost horribly with its virtue-signalling rants. It consists of taking a mildly loftier and detached style, leavened with a bit of nearly self-deprecating humour. It is still personalised but less focused on emotions.

R Behr has had a heart attack, and, while recovering, he saw a political analogy. It won't surprise anyone to read what that was

I was still hooked up to cardiac monitors and full of morphine, barely an hour after the insertion of two stents, when the metaphorical comparisons first presented themselves. The Labour party had ignored vital warning signs for years, failing to change course when avoidance of calamity was still available. So too had Britain’s pro-European campaign. I won’t stress the point too hard, being on doctor’s orders to minimise stress of all kinds. The compulsion to turn even my own medical emergency into a political analogy flagged a lifestyle habit in need of healthy adaptation [well done]

It pushes the metaphor too far to say that Brexit broke my heart. I was culturally and emotionally attached to the European project. 

Has anyone checked P Toynbee lately? Genuinely. Now a familiar line, but even here, not mentioning emotions, not even the simple patriotism of the Northern pleb.

Remainers lost the argument with arch, eye-rolling negativity. In 2016 the pro-European case was made exclusively in terms of loss – forfeited growth, shrunken prestige, jettisoned jobs – while the leavers advertised gains....Johnson’s winning formula was to downgrade the promise of Brexit from reward to relief, which was easier to deliver and still sounded marvellous.[quite astute here]...Pro-Europeans got stuck in a quicksand of nostalgia, rosily tinting the epoch of unchallenged EU membership as a golden age of moderation.

On other (web)pages, a piece on culture wars:

The weird thing about Pullmangate [furore over the missing Oxford comma on the new 50p piece] is that it both divides and amplifies all the voices of Brexit at once, in a way that is both completely fascinating and utterly irrelevant, and most of all, absolutely, undeniably, embarrassingly British.

A bit self-congratulatory, perhaps? We Brit eccentrics, eh? The whole Brexit thing was just eccentric, undeniably, embarrassingly British.

Alastair Campbell tweeted, “I for one shall be asking shopkeepers for ‘two 20p pieces and a 10’ if they offer me a 50p coin pretending that Brexit is about ‘peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations’,” and you can imagine the former Blair attack dog directing a tired newsagent, who’s stoically watching a queue form behind him, to open a fresh bag of 20 pences and empty them into the till because Big Ali Campbell doesn’t like Brexit. These are the people who lost

But then a plague on both your houses for getting so worked up about nothing

...in getting sucked into a culture war over a coin, both Remainiacs and Brexiteers create the illusion of Brexit being “done” in a single moment on Friday, when, really, it isn’t....this is what Brexit boils down to: a grey week in January where we’re all waiting for an endless payday and getting furiously mad about a 50p. It is simply stunning that any country ever respected us.

Some quite promising bits, but still very parochial. The issue might be dividing the Guardian common room, but have any normal voters got worked up over the 50p wording? Perhaps they are just too nastily brutish and insensitive.Perhaps the npb require the Graun to set the agenda so they can line upon the right side?

We must see if el Gruno develops any further and ever manages to shake off that residual sneering cultural superiority stuff