Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 we have had to put up with the angry rhetoric of nationalist Brexiteers lying their heads off in their quest for the UK’s ‘freedom and independence’. They wanted something they, wrongly, asserted they did not have.
Every misfortune in their lives was blamed upon the EU, and , much worse, they stoked a belief among those who were suffering real hardship, that somehow all that would end if we left the shackles of our membership of the greatest political union since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The horrors of our nation flooded with Turkish refugees, the notion that a trade deal with our former partners would be the easiest negotiation in history and that Boris had ready, oven ready, a deal which would propel us to sunlit uplands, were all tacky catch phrases in a morally bankrupt political adventure.
We now find ourselves on the brink of catastrophe, in which not a single one of these promises will be kept. This will trigger anger among the deceived. But it was also trigger a new anger. One much more menacing. It will come from the great silent majority who will discover, not just that something promised has not arrived, but that something, many things, dear and treasured, have been taken away.