Tuesday, 28 June 2016

Who is to blame for Brexit? It was Boris wot' done it.

There is a kind of odd symmetry about where the blame lies for the tragedy unfolding before our eyes.  A journalist, Martin Fletcher, has written a piece for the New York Times (HERE) suggesting that one man above all others is responsible and he is none other than Boris Johnson.

It was he, as Brussels correspondent for The Times, who began the trend for writing humorous pieces about the EU's love of what he thought were petty regulation.  No matter that it was actually needed to harmonise things across Europe, Boris found it amusing to write stuff that Mr Fletcher says was grotesquely exaggerated or totally wrong.  

He was sacked for making stuff up but The Telegraph loved it and took him on. More and more newspapers demanded the same until the British Press was feeding it's readers a daily diet of anti-EU nonsense that is not replicated anywhere else in Europe and why we have a uniquely distorted view of the EU.   Boris looks set to lead the battle against a wholly fictional "monster" that he was largely responsible for creating.  We will all be the worse for it. His reputation has reached a high point, from now on it will be all downhill.

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