Well, the Tory leaders of the Leave campaign were former London mayor Boris Johnson (a man so posh that his full name, we shit you not, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson)
.. To recap: One old university friend pushed the country to a constitutional and economic crisis to gain power from another old university friend, but got stabbed in the back by a third old university friend, at which point he decided not to bother after all.
.. This is all made more fun by the possibility that whoever does become the next prime minister might call an election immediately, which would in effect be a referendum on the aftermath of the referendum... Yes, he is absolutely 100% a British version of Bernie Sanders, except with a beard and a fondness for root vegetables. Oh, and he actually won... Also, they basically hate him, and lots of them think that he secretly wanted Leave to win even though the Labour party officially supported Remain... The idea was that this would force Corbyn to step down himself. Except he didn’t. He just kept appointing his increasingly small band of loyalists to the shadow cabinet and insisting he was going to tough it out... So now Labour MPs are in open warfare with their leader and are probably going to force another leadership election, while Corbyn does his best to carry on like nothing’s happening... And since Labour party members voted heavily for Corbyn last time, he could well win again. Either way, it all might end up splitting the century-old party in two... In conclusion: The UK voted to leave the EU. The economy kind of melted. Nobody has a plan for what to do and everybody wants someone else to take responsibility – but the governing party is too busy stabbing each other in the back, while the opposition party is too busy being at war with itself. The UK might split up entirely. And we might have to vote on all this again in a few months’ time.
Luck Runs Out for a Leader of ‘Brexit’ Campaign
On Thursday, the anger at Mr. Johnson was palpable, replacing last week’s anger at Prime Minister David Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place. The sense that Mr. Johnson had presided over the Brexit campaign without a plan for what to do if it won — and then walked away without cleaning up his mess — was particularly enraging.
“He’s like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees the battleground abandons it,” Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC. “I have never seen anything like it. He ripped the Tory party apart. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in peacetime in my life.”
.. With his air of disarrayed befuddlement, his crazy coiffure, his idiosyncratically imaginative P.G. Wodehousian locution, his habit of slipping into Latin and Greek, his foot-in-the-mouth self-deprecation and his obvious delight in himself, he oozes a charm rarely seen in politicians.
He cycles to work and carries his things in a backpack. He looks as if he’s slept in his clothes and just gotten out of bed. He has the privileged demeanor of an old Etonian (he went to school there), but a Bill Clintonesque way with crowds and an appeal that transcends class.
.. It was a boring assignment, but Mr. Johnson found a way of livening it: He made things up. His great talent was to take tiny grains of information in reports and proposals, repackage them as official European policy and present them as part of a broad narrative about Brussels’s risibility. His stories were full of wrong-sized condoms, fishermen forced to wear hairnets and international disputes over cheese policy.
While his stories became increasingly influential in the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and in many ways set the tone for the British papers’ coverage of Europe ever since, Mr. Johnson tends to treat his approach as great fun.
.. “We had eight frustrating years where we’d ask detailed policy questions, and what we’d get back in response was bluster and grandiose claims,” said Joanne McCartney, a Labour Assembly member who is now deputy mayor. “If he didn’t know the answer to the question, which was a regular occurrence, he’d use bluster and wit to avoid answering.”
.. Mr. Johnson tried his normal humorous approach. Asked, for instance, about his assertion that the European Union has a law saying that balloons cannot be blown up by children under 8 (it doesn’t), he deflected the question, saying, “In my household, only children under 8 are allowed to blow up balloons.”
Why Brexit Might not happen at All
One possibility being floated by some pro-E.U. campaigners is a vote in the House of Commons against invoking Article 50. During the weekend, a number of constitutional experts pointed out that, under the British system, sovereignty rests in Parliament, and so the Leave vote was purely advisory.
.. A more likely outcome is a general election, a second referendum, or both. In 2011, Britain switched to a system of five-year fixed-term Parliaments, and under that system the next election isn’t due until 2020. But the Brexit crisis has already generated calls for the fixed term to be junked.
.. Most of the British politicians and commentators I’ve been in touch with in the past few days think that Johnson will be the next Prime Minister. But it’s far from certain that he could deliver what he has been promising: a break from the E.U. that preserves Britain’s full access to the single market. Several European officials have already said that the price of such a deal would be Britain agreeing to free movement of labor
.. If Johnson couldn’t guarantee British firms access to the huge European market, would he still support leaving the E.U.?
.. All indications are that Cameron’s resignation caught Johnson unprepared. Should he move into 10 Downing Street, he would face dissident backbenchers in his own party, and cries for an early election would be hard to resist. If one were called, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, which by then may well have a new and more credible leader to replace Jeremy Corbyn, would probably campaign on a platform that promised another referendum. The opposition parties would get a good deal of support in this from the U.K. business community, and from the dissident Tories.
The world’s losers are revolting, and Brexit is only the beginning
From Mexico to Argentina, Thailand to South Korea, Hong Kong to Indonesia, and, eventually, the United States to southern Europe, these capital flows magnified the economy’s boom-bust cycle, with an emphasis on the bust.
.. They warned that Turkey is about to join the E.U. — it’s not — and flood the country with immigrants. They said that Europe’s refugee crisis has pushed them to a “breaking point” in a poster reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. And they promised to earmark the funds now being sent to the E.U. for what they claim is the overburdened-by-immigrants National Health Services instead. Never mind that they overstated how much money that’d be by a factor of two. Their basic argument was that Britain could only stop this influx of immigrants if it ditched the E.U. and its rules mandating the free movement of people and that the elites had failed the people by forgetting there was a Britain outside of London.
.. First, they’d have to change all the money in their economy, and, second, every other euro country would worry that they’d be next. That, in turn, would set off a slow-motion bank run across Southern Europe as people tried to get ahold of their euros before they could be turned into, say, liras that wouldn’t be worth anywhere near as much. It’d be the mother-of-all financial crises. Which is why German, French, Spanish and Italian stock markets all fell much further than Britain’s did after it voted to leave. Indeed, those markets dropped 6.8, 8.0, 12.4 and 12.5 percent, respectively, on Friday, while Britain’s “only” declined 3.2 percent.
.. Brexit, it turns out, is more about Europe than it is about Britain.
.. Brexit really might be the end of the E.U. if France and Italy follow Britain out the door; it might also be the end of the U.K. if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide they’d rather be part of the E.U. (or what’s left of it); and it might even be the end of our era of economic integration if it helps propel populists to power across the continent who only care about putting their people “first.”
.. Its second one was ignoring the evidence that things were indeed going bad just as predicted, and blaming irresponsible governments instead. And its last one was all but blackmailing governments into slashing their budgets out of the misguided belief that this would get their sputtering economies growing again. It didn’t. It was the economic equivalent of tossing a drowning person an anchor instead of a lifeline, because you thought they needed to get stronger and not bailed out.
.. The liberal international order isn’t working for too many people, but, on balance, most economists would say it’s still worth fighting for. After all, there are much worse alternatives.