Now it gets very personal...

N Cohen of the Observer appeals to older readers with this today:

Stab-in-the-back: the nasty old myth that Brexiters are exploiting to explain away the disaster

He explains the allusion to Nazi excuses for the loss of World War I, perhaps to set up the astonishing character assassination of Lord Frost and all Brexiteers that follows.

The mediocrity of Lord “Frosty” Frost isn’t ordinary. There is an epic quality to his failings. The parochialism of his nationalism and irresponsibility of his conspiracy theories have allowed one paunchy man to embody the entire collapse of modern conservatism into know-nothing paranoia.

Without visible benefits from Brexit, betrayal narratives are all the leaders of the Brexit right have to hold the movement together.  ... You were betrayed – we were all betrayed! – by saboteurs who turned victory into defeat....Brexiters do not accept their defeat. They imply rather than acknowledge failure by shifting responsibility to others. And no one shifts as reliably as Lord Frost. He is as regular as a bowel movement....Don’t blame us, blame the civil servants, he courageously declared last week....The emasculating consequences of subcontracting decision-making to the EU meant British officials could not draw up “genuine proposals for liberalisation and change” now we were out

The emasculating consequences of subcontracting decision-making to the EU meant British officials could not draw up “genuine proposals for liberalisation and change” now we were out...Niall Ferguson, a historian himself, apparently, said the referendum had taught him that the public was ready “to pay a significant amount” to divorce from the EU. He forgot, I suspect because he had to forget to stay in with the right, that the Leave campaign of 2016 dismissed warnings of significant costs to the public as “project fear” and that the Conservative government of 2022 is so scared of revealing the true price that it won’t publish an economic assessment of the damage....The refusal of the civil service to give Brexit its “wholehearted support” explains why Brexit Britain has failed to turn the UK into what it calls “a leading voice for civilisation”.

The Trumpian special pleading and Orwellian denial of reality go unremarked because too many people, including too many on the left, fear the loneliness of breaking with the tribe and the vituperation that will follow. [Or perhaps only paranoids can see it?]

The career of Frosty the Strawman makes my point for me. By 2016 he had left the diplomatic service behind after a characteristically unimpressive career in the Foreign Office, to work for the Scotch Whisky Association. He opposed leaving the EU, as David Cameron, Liz Truss and most of the Tory mainstream did, and warned audiences with surprising prescience that Brexit would cost each citizen about £1,500 a year.

When the Tory mainstream charged right, Frost charged with them, scrambling over the bodies of his comrades to get out in front. As he rose without trace, his Brexit boosterism earned him commissions from the Telegraph, a seat in Johnson’s cabinet and a peerage in less than four years.

The refusal of British Conservatives to accept responsibility predicts a future in which they go all out to destroy the independent institutions that failed to make Tory dreams come true. Lord Frost has already resigned from Johnson’s cabinet so he can urge Conservatives to go further and faster to the right. He may be an unscrupulous mediocrity, but that does not stop him clearly seeing the Conservative party’s final terminus.

 

My God, Cohen is bitter! And so personal!  He is another candidate for a fit of the vapours caused by Brexit if he is not careful, like that other poor Guardian columnist. He just must be tired of waiting for chaos in the streets, outbreaks of scurvy and people walking round with no Italian trousers. He will end up shouting at the traffic. What a sad decline of a once-excellent journalist.