Thread by @tony_nog

1) no honour amongst Brexiters?
Last night's "This Week" on BBC had an exchange between Neil & Portillo where the latter said (essentially) "My analysis 12 months ago was the EU would have issues with Italy, the Baltic states & elsewhere, which would lead them to fold on #Brexit"

2) (Portillo then went on to blame the government for not exploiting this eU weakness & of course Remainer Civil Servants for hindering Leave).

This idea of EU weakness was common amongst Brexit leaders.

Let's put it in context.

Say you have 3 friends Gerry, Euan & Una

3) Gerry, Euan & Una have all been in reasonably friendly Business partnership for 40 odd years.
However, Euan is going through a messy divorce & Una's mother is very ill. Euan & Una are therefore a bit distracted.
Gerry knows all this

4) Gerry decides to exploit Ryan's divorce & Una's distress by suddenly trying to force them to buy him out at a premium. He threatens to crash the whole business if they won't, his hope is that the other problems Euan & Una have will force them into a deal against their interest

5) if these people were your friends, you'd think Gerry was a bit of a shit quite frankly. And if Euan & Una rallied and said "tell you what, we'll just split the company, take most of the customers & you can go it alone with your bit" you'd think "fair play, serves Gerry right"

6) this is what Brexiters have brought us to, they made the UK Gerry the opportunistic shit, who tried (and failed) to exploit his 40 year partners whilst they had other issues.

Remainers don't want to be Gerry, #Brexit Leadership identify with him 100%

That's the issue

7) Remainers typically believe in collaboration, consensus, being part of something bigger. Many Leavers are happy to screw Euan & Una over, they're both Spanish so don't deserve the same treatment as Gerry. As they're foreigners, leavers are incensed that they are getting uppity

8) if you watch brexiters like Portillo (and Neil) it's fascinating to see the attitude. They see nothing wrong with the UK trying to leverage a better deal whilst the EU is on the ropes, to exploit problems
And they have no insight into how this makes us look to RoW

9) I'm not so naive as to think countries don't press for advantage in negotiations, of course they do.

It's just that few countries do it so openly, as part of a massive gamble, and few fail so spectacularly

The least brexiters could do is say "we're sorry, we got it wrong"