On the Record | Beware of Supposing Brexit’s Cause Is Won

Please see my January 27^th wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘Beware Of Supposing Brexit’s Cause Is Won’:

“Can we easily leave the remains of such a year as this? It is all still gold,” the diarist Horace Walpole wrote as Great Britain won conquest after conquest, at France’s expense, during the final months of the Seven Years’ War. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.”

Yet much to the disappointment of Brexiteers, “Big Ben,” which crowns that iron choir atop the Elizabeth Tower, will “not” sound out at 11 p.m. when the United Kingdom takes its leave of the European Union and regains independence.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly,” the Anglo-American revolutionary, Thomas Paine, wrote in the opening of “The Crisis.” “ ’Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.”

No one can claim that Brexiteers have had an easy time of it. Eurosceptics exposed the insidious nature of EU membership from the beginning. Prime Minister Thatcher marked the turning point with her “Bruges Speech” of September 1988, in which she famously declared: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

The ups and downs on the road to Brexit are too numerous to count. There was the successful June 2016 referendum to “take back control,” followed by the disastrous premiership of Theresa May, whose decision to go to the polls precipitously in June 2017 nearly ended Brexit. The resulting “Remainer Parliament” was perhaps its worst outcome — second only to Mrs. May’s compromised Withdrawal Agreement. Remainer MPs, meanwhile, kept the Tory Government tied up in knots and subject to the whims of Westminster.

In this dark hour for British independence, arises its paladin premier, Boris Johnson, who on the charge of “getting Brexit done” won electoral victory in December. The promise was that come January 31, the UK would be out of the EU. And so it is about to come to pass.

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.