Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

One solution to the idea of being simultaneously small and great, underdog and overdog, has been, in Linda Colley’s words, ‘a persistent inclination to pursue empire vicariously by clambering like a mouse on the American eagle’s head’.

a decadent and dilettante political elite for whom, as Edward St Aubyn puts it, ‘It was better if a person “could have been” Prime Minister than if he was Prime Minister: that would have shown vulgar ambition.’