“What she is offering people is the least worst of their nightmares,” said Mr. Stanley, who writes for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. “The tragedy is that when we leave next March, there won’t be fireworks or a parade. This should have been a revival of British democracy; it should have been a feeling like V-E Day, that we had triumphed over the Eurocrats. It’s sad that it won’t come, I think.”
He blamed some of this on Mrs. May, who, he said, “doesn’t do inspiration.”
“A Brexit run by a Remainer, it’s going to be downbeat, it’s going to be gloomy,” he said.
But gloom also seems to be part of a considered strategy on Mrs. May’s part. As they make the rounds of Parliament this week, her proxies have made a forceful case for letting go of unrealistic hopes — and the risks that go with them.
“It is time to shoot the unicorns,” one May ally told Matt Chorley, a politics writer for The Times of London.
On this, there is some evidence of success. The Conservative lawmaker Kenneth Clarke, a longtime and staunch opponent of leaving the European Union, told the BBC on Tuesday that Mrs. May’s deal was “a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” but that he would support it anyway to avoid the danger of exiting without a deal. Mrs. May also secured the backing of Nick Boles, a Brexiteer member of her party who has for weeks excoriated her proposed “implementation period” in favor of a three-year membership in the European Economic Area, a solution known as “Norway for now.”
In much of the country, the primary response to the events of last week was exhaustion. The standup comedian Bridget Christie said people she knew felt “embarrassed, confused, frustrated, cheated, betrayed, sad, upset, worried, anxious, disgusted, ashamed, impotent, powerless, depressed, baffled and desperate.”
Source : Nytimes
