British politics is still drunk on Brexit spirit, and Boris Johnson won’t call time | Rafael Behr
The prime minister seeks to game and inflame a state of mind that rejects complex reality in favour of symbols and fantasy
There is a simple reason why Boris Johnson and European leaders failed to find common ground over Brexit at last week’s G7 summit. They are not even talking about the same thing.
For the British prime minister, Brexit is a matter of national character that cannot be described in legal documents. For continental politicians, legal texts contain the true meaning of a project that only exists in the real world as a set of rules to be implemented. To Johnson, the withdrawal agreement was a single-use tool for levering himself out of a tight spot. For Brussels, it is the chamber into which Britain levered itself.
