You Brexit, You Buy It.

• Author: Gray, Freddy

On March 28, the day before Brexit officially began, a very British row broke out--about legs. It was about women's legs, to be more precise. Just hours before Theresa May invoked Article 50, formally triggering Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, the Daily Mail, an anti-EU tabloid, published on its front page a picture of May, sitting next to Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister. The two women were wearing knee-length dresses. "Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it?" barked the headline. The Mail's mild exercise in misogyny caused a furious storm among journalists and politicians. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party's leader, declared: "This sexism must be consigned to history." Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist, added,

it is indicative of what is happening in Brexit Britain.... For right-wing Brexiteers, this is a great national awakening... they want to turn this country into the drunk man, stumbling around yelling obscenities at everyone, leering at women and shouting racist abuse. If only that were the case, Brexit would be much more fun. What almost nobody wanted to admit was that the Daily Mail had done the rest of the press a favor. The Legsit brouhaha provided relief from the drudgery of Brexit news. It's much easier to be excited by sexism than it is to argue about trade tariffs, rebates and sovereign legal jurisdictions. Brexit is important--everybody knows that--but like all divorces, it is also disturbing and at times very boring.

The politics of Brexit are not dull: they are dramatic and disorienting. In Theresa May, Britain has an unpredictable leader. She is pushing ahead with a clean break from the EU ahead of all else, even though she was in favor of remaining. She also stressed, repeatedly, that she would not be calling a general election. Britain needed "a period of stability" following the political earthquake that was the vote to leave the EU, she said. Then, on April 18, she called a general election. "The country is coming together" behind her agenda, she explained, "but Westminster is not."

Everybody thought she would storm to victory. She didn't. Before the election on June 8, psephologists had talked about May winning the largest British parliamentary majority since the Second World War. But May proved to be an amazingly bad campaigner--grim-faced, robotic, disconnected. Though she won, just, her victory did nothing to give her the fresh mandate for Brexit she was looking for--quite the opposite. To form a majority government, she has had to enter a rather makeshift coalition with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist party. Having projected herself as the "strong and stable" candidate, she now looks weak and hapless. Even the most ardent "Brexiteers" on the right are now concerned that a woman who doesn't seem to know what she is doing is in charge of the most seismic political shift in Britain's postwar history.

Before the election, the Tories were enjoying a strange outbreak of unity. May, a Remainer who had embraced Brexit as the will of the people, seemed to represent a new settlement within the party over a question that had long torn it apart. Labour, meanwhile, seemed hopelessly divided, especially over Europe. Its power base in rich, metropolitan London was passionately Remain, yet the Old Labour heartlands were the most pro-Brexit areas of the country. Corbyn himself appeared desperately torn. He instinctively sympathized with the 35 percent or so of his party that had voted to leave the EU, but he didn't want his image as a lover of immigrants to be tainted by the nationalism that drove the anti-Europe vote. With his party hamstrung by Brexit, and Corbyn widely ridiculed anyway for being too far to the left of mainstream British opinion, bienpensant opinion figured Labour for a goner. The smaller, resolutely pro-Remain parties, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, looked destined to thrive. The Liberal Democrats could be the voice of the 48 percent who voted Remain. Meanwhile, the SNP, led by Sturgeon on her sturdy Caledonian calves, was demanding a second Scottish independence referendum--just two years after they narrowly lost the...