Ultra-remainer hatred of Boris is bordering on the deranged

If you had high hopes of Boris Johnson’s latest speech on Brexit, what were you thinking? Boris doesn’t do detail. He never has. Instead the Foreign Secretary rides a wave of metaphor, wordplay and optimism, hoping to lift the spirits of whichever audience is being treated to his routine. It has been one of the most successful routines in post-War British politics, which may help explain why the most dedicated advocates of stopping Brexit seem to hate him so much. Boris beat them in the referendum, and helped change history, and he will never be forgiven for it.

Even so, the frightening intensity of the hatred of Boris on the ultra-Remain side is now bordering on the deranged. I didn’t watch the speech (I was travelling and saw clips and read the text) but the response on social media was surely out of proportion to the Foreign Secretary making a speech. The backlash started even before he had said anything, which in itself underlines that these set-piece speeches are a bust concept. Reasonable, intelligent people then adopted Trumpian techniques to bash ‎Boris. My timeline on Twitter was a flood of liberal metroplitan elite poor language and towering rage. Boris was called “a complete tosser” and lots of other much worse words I’d best not put in a respectable website such as this.

Some ultra-Remainers seem to have driven themselves round the twist, when we’re only leaving the European Union, a political organisation just 25 years old with 80% of our economy domestic. What terminology of condemnation do they reserve for murderers or dictators, or the Iranian regime, or whoever signed off on that new singing competition on BBC One?

The brilliant Ian Martin (the other and better one, of the Lancashire ‎liberal elite) is excluded from this criticism. Today he described Boris as a lot of unprintable words “in a Brian Jones wig.” That’s good. But he’s a professional. Insulting people with wit and rampant swearing is Ian Martin’s job, or one of his jobs. He was the swearing consultant on The Thick of It. I cherish the memory of being invited on to BBC Radio 4’s PM programme to discuss satire and, appropriately enough considering the subject, it only dawning on the presenter as the show went live on air that a researcher had booked me, and not Ian Martin.

Anyway, we all sometimes say stuff about politics we regret on Twitter. (Raises hand.) I am sorry for calling Nick Clegg a muppet over tuition fees, and in pointless arguments on social media I’m sure I’ve lashed out. But I don’t think I hate anyone – or hardly anyone – as much as those upset about Brexit seem to hate Boris.

‎The Foreign Secretary’s friends wonder if he will ever shake this off. I doubt it. When he tries, as he did today in a spirit of reconciliation, to move beyond the referendum he is dragged back. Round and round it goes. Boris lied and has failed to deliver the £350m for the NHS that he put on a side of a bus during the campaign, it said endlessly. No, we haven’t left yet. We’re still sending money (yes, less than £350m per week) to Brussels. A government of either major party would be mad not to announce that extra weekly amount for the NHS in 2020. But… We. Haven’t. Left. Yet

Oh what’s the point? The referendum was a traumatic event, involving the shattering of the worldview of the governing elite and much of this country’s middle class raised on the European idea. I get that, as a middle class person raised during the British food revolution of the 1970s and 1980s as travel and capitalism worked their magic. But the EU is not Europe. We are not leaving Europe.

No-ones mind will be changed by any of this, which is bad for Boris’s future, I suspect. For a large number of angry and hurt Britons, Boris is the symbol of the trauma – the main baddie. For a politician such as Boris used to being greeted with smiles, this must be quite the shock.