Remainer anger has displaced all the decencies

“Humiliation” was the word universally employed by the media to describe the Prime Minister’s experience – or, more accurately, non-experience – during his courtesy (the irony of the term is extravagant) visit to Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. The same headlines blared in concert across the European media: “Johnson humiliated at Luxembourg press conference”.

In reality, nothing of the sort happened. How could it? Boris was not present to be humiliated. When his staff discovered Bettel was proposing to place him at a lectern just a few yards away from a howling mob of protesters they requested that the proposed press conference be moved indoors, as would have been normal practice. Luxembourger officials insisted there was not sufficient room indoors, so Boris very sensibly refused to attend.

This incident was the most vulgar gesture perpetrated in recent diplomatic history. The Prime Minister of Luxembourg had hospitably prepared a trap for his guest, in the hope of subjecting him to frenzied barracking in front of the world’s media, with no chance of his words being heard. How would that have looked, leading the television news? Humiliating, is the answer.

In contrast, there was nothing in the least humiliating about Boris Johnson declining to submit to such a charade and leaving his ambushers disappointed. The blatant lies told by Bettel and his officials aggravated the insult to Britain. Apparently the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is so Lilliputian a nation that there is not one room in its Ministry of State building large enough to accommodate one hundred journalists. This feeble fiction was discredited on the spot by a journalist who had attended a press conference there a year ago.

We have reached the stage where our liberal media have become divorced from objective reality: they no longer report what has happened but what was supposed to happen. A trap was prepared to humiliate the Prime Minister, but he recognized the snare and declined to walk into it. That did not inhibit journalists from reporting his “humiliation”, at an event he did not attend, just as if the ploy had succeeded.

Beyond that, they even contrived to represent the non-event as some kind of triumph for the ludicrous Bettel, as this buffoon postured absurdly beside his imaginary friend and prosed on about the Belfast Agreement. His audience was a crowd of Brit expatriates who had come to shout down the UK prime minister. As is well known, Luxembourg-based Britons are among the disinherited of the earth, but they had weakly dragged themselves from their sleeping bags in shop doorways to heckle Boris.

Bettel’s fifteen minutes of fame did serve a useful purpose: it showed the boundless arrogance and contempt of EU governments towards Britain. In its naked loathing and crudity it exposed the impossibility of this country remaining, on any terms whatsoever, within the European Union.

Remainer derangement has now reached an intensity that has rendered public discourse in Britain wholly irrational. The wounded sense of entitlement of Remainers has driven them insane. The spectacle of a party with the twin titles “Liberal” and “Democrat” pledging to annul the result of the largest democratic vote in British history signals that the liberal establishment has definitively abandoned the pretence of democracy.

This is not, as many imagine, a sea change but simply an unmasking. The “liberal” elite’s instincts were always intolerant, but this core characteristic remained concealed for so long as it dominated society unchallenged, clad in the harlequin costume of pseudo-democracy. Its defeat in the Brexit referendum, closely followed by the election of Donald Trump changed all that. The Entitled Ones cannot endure even a temporary exclusion from power.

The panegyric on electoral democracy preached by Jo Swinson at the Liberal Democrat conference was not the only rabidly totalitarian rhetoric on display there. Guy Verhofstadt, Britain’s inveterate enemy and detractor, told the heirs of Gladstone: “The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order based on empires.”

So, tomorrow the world. It is interesting, though, that Brexit has flushed out the unhealthy ambitions of politicians and institutions that formerly posed as democratic and dismissed those who denounced their concealed agenda as conspiracy theorists.

The rage of the liberal establishment at being defied by the lumpen-electorate has generated a climate not just of incivility but of downright hatred. This is reflected in the public use of abusive language that would not previously have been tolerated, but has become normalized. This week Aidan O’Neill, QC, referring to the Prime Minister in the Supreme Court, spoke of the “mother of parliaments being shut down by the father of lies”, without rebuke from the bench.

The Guardian, a newspaper that has always postured as the champion of all disadvantaged people, in an editorial disparaged David Cameron’s grief over the death of his disabled son as “privileged pain”. In more prosperous times for progressive causes it disguised its class hatred and ideological bigotry in a more disciplined fashion.

This regression in civilization is not an exclusively Brexit-related phenomenon. In America the daily torrent of bile and death wishes against their opponents from the “woke” fanatics who have captured the Democratic Party and the media – the same zealots whose obsession against “hate speech” has seriously eroded legitimate freedom of expression – has reached intolerable levels.

Hypocrisy and a complete lack of self-awareness are key characteristics of the left. That is why supporters of an elitist oligarchy bent on suppressing the voices of 17.4 million voters are cavorting outside Parliament and the courts with gags taped over their mouths, brandishing notices proclaiming themselves “silenced”.

This flushing out of the liberal establishment in all its nastiness is the consequence of three years of anti-Brexit warfare that has produced a startling change in the presentation of our so-called elites. It began with Julian and Samantha taking little Jason and India to the park for a Sunday protest picnic of hummus and other healthful delicacies prepared by the undocumented Filipino help. This was complemented in television studios by well-trousered Remainers, occasionally of Churchillian descent, deploring with patrician distaste the excesses of an untutored electorate.

Now, in the last stage of Remain’s Gotterdammerung, the absurd spectacle of members of the House of Commons on prorogation night raucously singing partisan songs and Rentamob seeking to drown out the Prime Minister abroad, as well as anyone else, anywhere, who dares to speak up for that most despised of entities, an electoral majority.

We live now in an age of aspiring referendum reversal and Liberal Democrat imperialists. We should be grateful to Verhofstadt and his confederate Bettel for further highlighting the awfulness of the EU empire from which we must escape, do or die.

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