Andy Bodle here. Remember me?
It would be wrong to say we were close at university, except in the strictly geometric sense. You were my neighbour on Staircase 9 in Exeter College in 1991/2 – my fourth year, your first. We didn’t hang out much, because you didn’t really hang out with anyone, but on the occasional Sundays you would invite me into your room for a glass of port and a game of chess. I think I managed a draw with you once.
But as this was the extent of our social interaction, we didn’t exchange details when I graduated, and we lost touch.
So it came as quite a pleasant surprise when, about 14 years ago, you turned up in my office as the guest speaker at our morning meeting (I believe you were an adviser to Michael Gove as education secretary at the time). We exchanged brief pleasantries and I think we might even have mooted meeting for a drink one day. We didn’t.
It was a rather less pleasant surprise when, four years after that, you appeared again, at the forefront of the insane clown posse that was Vote Leave, the official campaign group advocating the UK’s exit from the European Union. And to widespread surprise, you won.
In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s why I’m reaching out after all this time.
Initially, I was angry – very, very angry, to the point that I found out where you lived with the firm intention of knocking on your door and punching you in the face. Nine years on, I’m still extremely angry – because my life is no less ruined by Brexit, and the nation no less fucked – but since it’s neither healthy nor physiologically possible to sustain that level of hatred for more than a few years, I’ve now calmed down enough to address you with what I hope is some measure of restraint.
So here’s my question. Why? Why were you so determined to drag the UK out of the EU?
Millions of businesses, millions of livelihoods, hundreds of thousands of relationships, 4% of GDP, the fishing industry, the NHS, social care, UK farming, household budgets, Jo Cox, Makram Ali, Duncan Keating, Arek Jozwik, the freedom of movement of 68 million people across 30 countries, were all acceptable casualties in the pursuit of what, exactly?
For most of the Brexit cabal, the answer is not hard to fathom. They’re racists, they’re nostalgia-driven Thatcher loyalists, they’re business leaders looking to slash costs by slashing workers’ rights, they’re grifters, they’re short sellers, they’re Hayek/Friedman free-market loons, they’re idiots.
You, though, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, are none of the above. You have no employees to strip rights from, no CEO bonus to swell, no colossal hedge fund likely to be further inflated by relaxed regulations, no willingness to spout populist bollocks born of a burning desire to be in the public eye, and your college room was relatively light on Nazi memorabilia.
You have offered us a few nuggets over the years, most notably the arguments you put on buses and full-page newspaper adverts – £350m a week for the NHS, Turkey joining, etc – but as half of us knew then and most of us know now, they were bullshit.
There have also been some possible pointers in your public statements, usually in evidence to various parliamentary committees, and I’ll touch on those as they come up, but none of them really stand up to any sort of scrutiny either.
There’s probably something buried in one of your interminable screeds on Substack, but first, I don’t have enough time left on this earth to be trawling through a quintillion words of vicious, poorly structured, self-aggrandizing jabber, and second, I don’t see why I or anyone else should have to find out why you made us poorer by parting with yet more cash.
So I wondered if, as a courtesy to an old acquaintance, whether you might for once in your life, with minimal evasion, divagation and tu quoque, provide a succinct and direct answer to my question?
I realise that a life spent on the extreme fringe of rightwing politics, in the company of (by your own admission) charlatans, fools and professional propagandists, will have caused irreparable damage to your relationship with the truth. But for once in your life, Dom, please try to include at least a smattering of it in your reply. Because I really, really want to know why you did this.
One of your guiding principles seems to be that the end justifies the means; that any amount of collateral damage is acceptable in pursuit of your goals; that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Which raises the question: how fucking big and delicious is this omelette to merit the violent destruction of so many millions of eggs? And where the fuck is it?*
This was originally intended to be a single blogpost, but I don’t believe modern attention spans will relish everything I have to say at once.
So over the coming weeks, I’ll list, in more or less reverse order, all the explanations I’ve been able to conceive of: the ideological, the cultural, the economic, the personal. Some are more plausible than others, but literally none of them, as far as I can tell, seems valid enough to justify the massive historic damage you’ve inflicted on your country.
*Sorry. I did warn you there was still some residual anger. But courtesy and diplomacy have never really been your thing anyway, have they?
Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a Nazi?
