On Loathing Rees-Mogg

17/02/2019, 6*55 PMNicholas Spice · On Loathing Rees-Mogg · LRB 21 February 2019
Page 1 of 6https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n04/nicholas-spice/on-loathing-rees-mogg
On Loathing Rees-Mogg
Nicholas Spice
As in double-entry bookkeeping credits are minus and debits plus, so in the
Brexit accounts leavers appear as Remainers and remainers as Leavers. I
voted Remain because I am, by temperament a leaver. My wife, who is
German, already has permanent right to remain (that’s to say, ‘leave to
remain’) and my son has dual nationality. I associate my Remain vote with
my tendency to claustrophobia: I like to know how I can get out. I give
sleeping bags a wide berth, potholing I try hard not to think about. I prefer
an aisle seat on the plane or in the theatre. I like open spaces and silence.
I left England for the first time in the summer of 1970 to wander about
Ireland with a friend; we hitch-hiked our way to Connemara and holed up
in a stone cottage on the edge of the ocean. Later that year, I went to Graz
to study music. Ever since, I have carried around with me a mental image
of the map of Europe which I find calming; it’s like a certificate of
insurance against getting trapped. What I loved about my two years as the
Northern European sales rep for a British publisher was the freedom it
gave me to head out and away and, above all, especially then, before email
or mobile phones, to be off the radar. For weeks at a time, no one could be
sure where precisely I was; no one would try and reach me, except by
telegram or telex. Bliss for me is to trundle across the Continent in a
sleeper. Hotels soothe me. Once I get over the initial resistance to the idea
of camping, I am never happier than in a little tent in the Scottish
mountains or beside the infinite sea. As a three-year-old, I got a special
pleasure from curling up in a ball on the landing halfway up the stairs – a
form of hiding in plain sight. It was the combination of the foetal position
with the openness of the landing that comforted me, and I recognise the
same pattern in the things that make me feel safe as an adult: tents, railway
sleeping-cars, hotel bedrooms. They all furnish an ideal blend of the

womb-like and the provisional; cosy, yet free and unconfined.
I have always liked the fact that Britain doesn’t have borders, just a
coastline: the perfect combination for me – open but cut off, safe from
incursion but not boxed in. For continental Europeans the border has been
a thing of dread. The closing of borders could spell death. ‘Die Grenze’ for
Germans, East or West, was dark matter. I feel sure that the European
attachment to Schengen is not just about economics: to be able to sail
across borders inside Europe without being asked for your papers must
seem – especially to the older generation – like a wonderful dream of
freedom. At some point in the last twenty years, the Home Office decided
the UK needed borders. ‘Keeping the UK Border Safe’ became the mission
statement of a new Border Force (restriction and coercion succinctly
combined). Where immigration officials used to dress in ordinary clothes,
they now acquired a semi-military uniform. Brexit will give us back control
of our borders. For the person who is temperamentally safer at home than
abroad, this makes sense and can only be good. But for me the UK Border
is a threat not a reassurance. Theresa May presumably felt a deep affinity
with the Border Force when she was home secretary. She’s someone who
likes things to be well defined. She has her red lines. She’s the exception to
the adage ‘Nomen est omen’: she should have been called Theresa Must.
Pace Robert Frost, something there is in me that doesn’t love a wall, that
wants it down, and I suppose many Remainers feel the same. For Leavers –
being remainers at heart, who find safety in permanence, who are perhaps
a little prone to agoraphobia – the more compelling thought is that good
fences make good neighbours. I’d like to think we could shake hands on
our differences and go our separate ways, but there’s too much at stake.
The Brexit referendum was a conceptual wall, forcing a brutal binary on a
matter that was far too complex to be decided that way.
Unlike borders, borderlands – liminal, transitional places that blur
distinctions – are a good image for the limitless gradations of identity

within a nation, the marbled and muddled attributes of people and their
cultures. The hand-wringing of politicians and commentators over the
division and discord that Brexit has already wrought puzzles me. As
though, until Brexit, Britain was a homogeneous and harmonious country
where everyone got along just fine. For me, being English has always been
an experience of bemusing social intricacy, England a place of fractures
and discontinuities so numerous that communication with other English
people has often been uneasy and tinged with mutual suspicion.
In common with most people in Britain, I suppose, my background was a
mixed and mottled affair. My mother came from Fleetwood, my father
from Sittingbourne – small, nondescript coastal towns at opposite ends of
the country. As a child, I saw this North-West to South-East diagonal
vividly in my mind’s eye. Though not a midpoint on this line, Liverpool –
where my parents met and married and where I was born and, for my first
seven years, grew up – represented for me the neutral territory that my
parents could agree on, and I have always imagined it the place they were
most happy. My father had travelled further socially and culturally (my
mother, who reckoned herself a cut above him, would jokingly call him a
Jutish peasant), but they had both made bold moves away from settled
family enclaves to dissolve their differences in the colourless medium of
academia.
When my father gave up his university career and took a job as head of the
chemistry department at Winchester College, it was a disaster for my
mother. For me and my siblings the change of scene – from the smoggy
suburban streets of Liverpool to a well-upholstered southern cathedral city
– was little short of a miracle. But for my mother it was an internal exile
from which she would never fully recover. Among the handful of
documents that she had kept for their special significance, I found, after
her death, a railway ticket, one way, from Mossley Hill to Euston, dated 6
July 1959.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the stuffiness, the fetid airlessness of Winchester
College in 1959. The period of public school glasnost was still five or six
years away and no one who had time-travelled there from the Edwardian
era would have found all that much to remark on. To be translated from a
community of progressive academics among whom she was beginning to
find her feet to this sump of unreconstructed upper-middle-class
entitlement was traumatic for my mother. Every advance from those nice
and not so nice people she read as condescension and slight. My father,
meanwhile, was oblivious. As for me, after touching down briefly in a tiny
C of E primary school, I found myself a day boy at the Pilgrim’s School, the
feeder prep school for Winchester College, where I undertook a crash
course in social identity change. Everything followed from that.
By my mid-teens I was indistinguishable from a toff, my origins betrayed
only by the occasional fossil vowel sound. Winchester furnished me with a
new set of identity papers, my passport to the delightful and exclusive
world of the English metropolitan elite, so viscerally disliked by readers of
the Daily Mail. I learned early to pass myself off effortlessly, so that I have
long since ceased to notice my habits and reflexes of concealment, how I
keep my head down, hat pulled over my eyes, hugging the wall, hoping to
slip by unnoticed in environments where, as soon as I open my mouth to
speak, I will be resented, and keeping my counsel in the company of the
upper-middle and upper classes.
I’ve always thought of the family I came from as in transit and I relate this
to the strain of nomadism in my disposition. I don’t feel I definitively
belong anywhere. The nearest to home for me is the North-West of
England: my mood lightens as I head up the M6. But it would be
affectation to claim Liverpool as my home town: so much of what I have
become cuts me off from it. As to Winchester, for all that I was happy
there, it’s just not me.
I get my sensitivity to class from my mother. That it was possible not to

concern oneself with class I could see from my father, who had no time for
the category. But my mother was a fierce polemicist and the chief family
ideologue and, identifying strongly with her, I ended up thoroughly
indoctrinated. So I cannot help seeing Brexit as an epiphenomenon of class
struggle. I’d direct sceptics to the first episode of Seven Up!, the
astonishing Granada TV production of 1964, which brought together 20
seven-year-olds from representative sections of English society at the time,
interviewed them and filmed them interacting. The resulting forty minutes
give as succinct an explanation as one could hope for of our present
travails. The world that first edition of Seven Up! depicts seems at first
conclusively to belong to a now distant past, until it dawns on one that the
seven-year-olds of 1964 are still in their early sixties and continue to shape
our world.
I have taken to wondering whether my parents would have voted Leave.
Neither of them had much idea about Europe. They never went there on
holiday. My father’s first trip to Europe was to a conference in Austria,
when he was 38. After that, he visited Europe at most six more times. My
mother only left the UK twice in her life: once (when she was 48) to visit
me in Graz and once (when she was 65) for my wedding in Solingen, near
Cologne. Her injunctions to us against marrying a German or a Japanese
were largely ineffective: three of us married foreign nationals. In 2016, my
parents would have been in their mid-nineties, so in the top decile of those
who voted. Perhaps their lack of European experience was not typical – I
have no idea.
My father was always delphic about his politics. He had a touching faith in
the position of the Times, regardless of its editorial regime. My mother
accused him of voting Tory, but he would never let on. Sittingbourne voted
Leave and, if I had to bet, I’d probably put my money on him having done
so too, though he might well have regretted it. As to my mother, whatever
her insularity, I think Boris and Jacob would have inoculated her against
the Leave cause. She would have loathed Rees-Mogg. I loathe him too and I

recognise the violence of my feelings about him as cognate with how I
imagine my mother’s. If there are many others like us, then the
perpetrators of Brexit have underestimated the forces they are at risk of
unleashing.

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