Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

For people who feel anxious about the threat of losing their status, self-pity is attractive because it combines righteous anger with reassurance. You are reassured because you know you deserve a great deal, righteously angry because for some reason you have not been getting what you so obviously deserve.

general, the far-right doesn’t do irony. Its standard pose is of the utmost seriousness: everything is going to hell and only we (or more usually only I, the strongman) can save it. But this is not the pose of the decadent ruling class whose modes of discourse would shape Brexit’s politics of magnified grievance. Patrick Melrose in Edward St Aubyn’s dissection of that class finds himself ‘desperate to escape the self-subversion of irony and say what he really meant, but really meaning what only irony could convey’.