A few weeks ago a prominent hedge fund boss, whom I know slightly, invited me to a glitzy weekend. After declining, I mused on his gambit. He is an avowed Brexiteer who has committed millions to the cause, and asserts that Boris Johnson should rightfully be prime minister. He anticipates increasing his fortune by shorting Britain.
My hunch is that he offered the invitation in hopes of precipitating a collapse of my principled resistance to everything he represents. This was unflattering, but made his proposal easy to reject.
Yet many of us face more difficult social dilemmas. The political crisis has created tensions between old friends, and within families, such as few of us have ever experienced. Professor Sir Michael Howard, who was born in 1922, vividly recalls the Suez precedent, but suggests that today’s predicament is worse: “Suez happened, and was appallingly divisive, but then was over. Brexit will go on and on.”
It is a commonplace of civilised discourse that we should be able to meet people who hold different views from ourselves without coming to fisticuffs. In 1911, when Winston Churchill and FE Smith founded the Other Club, then comprising a mingled Liberal and Conservative membership, they wrote a line into its charter which is still read aloud at every dinner: “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics”.
Yet the 1912-14 crisis, in which the Liberals sought to impose Irish Home Rule while the Conservatives resisted to the point of supporting Protestant Ulster’s preparations for armed revolt, strained Britain’s social and political fabric in a fashion that offers the nearest parallel to today’s misery.
Margot Asquith, feisty wife of the Liberal prime minister, wrote a cross letter to her Conservative friend Lord Curzon, complaining about the exclusion of herself and her husband from the Curzons’ summer ball. She received an icy response, saying that it was unthinkable the Asquiths should be received at such a moment, given the government’s Ulster policy.
Tories perceived in Home Rule a threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom, which might in turn signal the beginnings of an unravelling of the British Empire. The matter in dispute today is less profound only because Britain is a much less important place. American friends often urge me to stop bleating about its plight, because our plan to hurl ourselves off a cliff — as they see it — does not matter much, alongside the enormities racking the United States.
To those of us who live here, however, what is taking place seems so serious that it is hard to sit across a table even with friends of long standing who welcome Brexit. Social life is incomparably less stressful among friends on the same side.
Michael Heseltine urges the alternative course: “Lunch and dine with every Brexiteer you can seek out! Convert them!” The elder statesman, however, possesses the advantage that his fellow-guests are more likely to endure a harangue from him than from me. Matthew Parris was surely correct when he wrote here a couple of months ago that the Brexit and Remain tribes are so deeply entrenched that few of either’s members can bring themselves to admit to having been wrong about something so big and important.
It is nonetheless impossible to be less than deeply unhappy about the fracturing of Britain’s middle class that has taken place. My wife and I recently met in Oxford that fine historian Professor Avi Shlaim and his wife, who consider Brexit a graver strategic disaster than was Suez. We asked the Shlaims how they cope with the strains of meeting friends of contrary views. They responded innocently that they do not have any.
Yet deep in the countryside where we live, more than a few people view the leading Brexiteers as gods, prospective deliverers of our nation from the heathen across the Channel. I cannot imagine what arguments we might advance that would change their minds. They consider it worth accepting any financial burden short of selling the horses to escape the thraldom of Brussels. The prospect of bearing their share of the £1,000 a year financial loss facing every family in Britain as the minimum price of Brexit causes them much less alarm than it might and should inspire among, say, Nissan employees in Sunderland.
I doubt that we are the only couple who lie awake at night agonising about all this. We talk about the possibilities of meeting friends of differing views and merely discussing Trollope, or our children. Yet although not ourselves politicians, we are political animals. For decades I lived and worked among the people who ran the country. Now that we face the most important national decision since 1945, as some of us believe this to be, it is almost impossible to pass an evening in company without addressing it.
Maybe old relationships can be resumed once the break with Europe has taken place. Yet I doubt this, because the economic and political fallout, and thus the recriminations, will persist indefinitely. I dislike making historical comparisons which imbue modern events with spurious melodrama. Nonetheless, because I am a student of the English Civil War my head rings with phrases from one of the greatest letters ever written. In July 1643 Roundhead general Sir William Waller addressed Sir Ralph Hopton, declining the suggestion of a parley from his old friend turned Cavalier opponent:
“Certainly my affections to you are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve ... Where my conscience is interested, all other obligations are swallowed up ... That great God, which is the searcher of my heart, knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy ... We are both upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy.”
The crisis facing today’s Britain is bloodless, thank the Lord. Unlike Waller and Hopton, most of us are mere spectators rather than actors. A rural friend, baffled by the intensity of the Hastings family’s feelings, asked us wonderingly: “Why do you care so much?” I answered that though we may well lose this battle, some of us are determined that our children and grandchildren will never have cause to say that we wavered in venting opposition to a course that promises only national frustration, loneliness and relative impoverishment.
Max Hastings