NOW BREXIT, BELIEF & INTIMACY
What It Must Feel Like Being Married to a Brexiteer
A vote happened on one day. The state of mind it created has lasted a decade.
There is an old saying: never kiss a Tory.
I did.
His name was Alex.
But I did not marry him.
I married my husband, and we are both Remainers. We are both lefties too. Not the imaginary “far left” that newspapers summon whenever somebody suggests taxing wealth or funding public services properly. Just the fairly ordinary British left: we believe in a free NHS, a functioning state, decent public services and the principle that society should not abandon people who need help.
On plenty of issues, my husband is further left than I am—somewhere around Corbyn territory. We disagree, obviously. We are married, not manufactured on the same production line. But underneath those disagreements is a broadly shared understanding of what society is for and, more importantly, a shared relationship with reality.
That matters.
Because I genuinely do not understand how people remain married across a political divide that is no longer merely political.
This is not about one person wanting income tax at 40 per cent and the other preferring 42. It is not a technical disagreement over the size of the state. It is waking up beside somebody who consumes a different reality, distrusts different facts, identifies different enemies and interprets every national failure through an entirely different story.
That must be a constant mindfuck.
I Have Never Required Political Purity
I have slept with all kinds of people. Seriously. Different backgrounds, different politics, different ways of looking at the world. I have never needed somebody to complete an ideological questionnaire before getting into bed with them.
Alex was a right-wing Scottish man. The Scottish part somehow made the Tory worship feel even more perverse. He loved kissing the Tory arse and orbiting Westminster as though proximity to power made him part of it.
At the time, I did not fully clock what I was hearing. He would go on about George Soros and repeat the familiar fragments that now travel openly through the conspiratorial right. Back then, the references sounded like scattered political obsessions.
Looking back, I think: my God.
The warning signs were already there. The rabbit hole had already opened.
I no longer speak to Alex. It has been about three years.
That was not because he once voted differently from me. I can cope with disagreement. What I could no longer take was the bullshit: the Brexit bollocks, the recycled explanations and the complete inability to concede the point even when the claim had plainly fallen apart.
There is only so long you can debate somebody who treats being wrong as an invitation to invent another reason they were secretly right.
Eventually, you stop discussing politics. Then you stop discussing anything of substance. Finally, you stop speaking altogether.
That is why this is personal for me. I have watched a political opinion harden into a personality structure.
And I only dated it.
I did not have to build a home inside it.
Love Does Not Abolish Reality
People like to romanticise couples who cross political divides. Look at them, we are told: proof that love can conquer everything. One votes left, the other votes right, and somehow they still make it work.
Perhaps some do. But plenty do not.
They argue, separate, divorce, meet somebody else and marry again. Then everyone acts surprised, as though the political divide was merely an eccentric taste in music rather than a disagreement about morality, power, truth and whose suffering counts.
Of course, no couple agrees on everything. That would be unbearable in its own way. But there is a difference between disagreement within a shared world and two people trying to conduct a marriage from separate realities.
How do you discuss money when one person thinks poverty is structural and the other thinks poor people simply lack discipline?
How do you discuss immigration when one person sees human beings and the other sees an invading mass?
How do you discuss the NHS when one person sees a public inheritance and the other sees an inefficient market waiting to be opened?
How do you talk about your gay, Black, foreign or working-class friends when the person beside you repeatedly votes for people who turn those lives into political targets?
At some point, “agreeing to disagree” becomes a polite name for avoiding what your partner actually believes.
You can postpone that confrontation. You can ban politics from the dinner table, turn off the news and learn which subjects cause an explosion.
But that is not harmony.
It is domestic border control.
Soon the relationship has its own customs posts. Safe subjects pass freely. Dangerous ones are delayed, inspected or turned back. Both people learn which parts of themselves are permitted into the room.
That is not love conquering politics. It is two people building an emotional protocol around an incompatibility neither can resolve.
It Was Never Only a Vote
There is an important distinction between voting Leave and becoming a Brexiteer.
A vote was something that happened on one day in 2016. People voted Leave for all sorts of reasons: immigration, sovereignty, anger, neglect, party loyalty, protest or simply the desire to give the political establishment a bloody nose.
But Brexiteerism became something else.
It became a state of mind—almost a psychological posture.
Once you enter that state of mind, every piece of contrary evidence becomes further proof that you were right.
If trade becomes more difficult, it is because Europe is punishing us. If investment falls, it is because businesses lack confidence in the government. If food, labour or transport becomes more expensive, it is because of Covid, Ukraine, energy prices, global markets or somebody in Whitehall.
Everything is connected to Brexit until the moment the connection becomes inconvenient.
Then nothing is connected to Brexit at all.
You cannot simply switch that off because it no longer operates like an ordinary political opinion. I am not diagnosing millions of people with a mental illness. I am saying that the belief becomes mentally self-protecting. It becomes part of the machinery through which reality is processed.
That is why, ten years later, we are still having the same bloody conversation.
Ten Years Is the Answer
“It would have been worse otherwise.”
“It is not because of Brexit.”
“We just need more time.”
More time?
Ten years is the answer.
A decade is long enough to compare the promise with the product. It is long enough to ask where the frictionless trade went, where the great deals went, where the cheaper food went, where the stronger borders went and when “Global Britain” is finally supposed to open for business.
Yet Brexit is permanently protected from examination. Every failure has another explanation. Every consequence belongs to somebody else. Every missing benefit is waiting just beyond the horizon.
The argument can never finish because the conclusion is never allowed to exist.
They sold the country a transformation. The transformation did not arrive. Then many of the same people turned around and demanded that everybody else prove the failure to a standard they never applied to the original promise.
Brexit required little more than a slogan to be sold. Its failure apparently requires a laboratory, a control group and a signed confession from Boris Johnson.
Brexiteer 101
This is Brexiteer 101: avoid the substance and argue about the framing.
Deflect. Simplify. Dismiss.
If the evidence becomes uncomfortable, attack the source. If the numbers are clear, find another number. If somebody points to a pattern, demand a single cause. If they provide a single cause, accuse them of oversimplifying.
The objective is not to establish what happened. The objective is to prevent the conversation from arriving anywhere.
Lane is part of that wider type. It is the confidence that makes it extraordinary—the certainty with which somebody can repeat a claim, ignore the contradiction sitting directly in front of them and then behave as though everyone else has failed to understand.
We hear that millionaires are leaving Britain as if the last billionaire is currently switching off the lights at Heathrow.
They have supposedly been fleeing in a permanent emergency for years, yet Britain never seems to run out of millionaires to flee. People arrive, leave, relocate their tax affairs, change residence and reorganise their businesses. But every departure is presented as the final warning that Britain has gone too far.
No proportion.
No denominator.
No serious attempt to distinguish movement from exodus.
Only the story.
And the story survives because it feels right to the people who already believe it.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Once somebody has travelled far enough down that rabbit hole, coming back is difficult.
Admitting that Brexit failed would not mean changing a view on customs paperwork. It could mean admitting that the politicians you trusted were charlatans, that the newspapers you read manipulated you and that the people you dismissed may have understood the consequences better than you did.
It might mean accepting that years of arguments, posts and conversations were built on something that was never going to happen.
That is not a small correction.
It is an injury to identity.
So the mind protects itself.
The expert becomes bogus. The account becomes a bot. The research becomes propaganda. Russia is somehow involved. The establishment sabotaged Brexit. The Civil Service blocked it. The wrong Conservatives implemented it. The Europeans behaved unfairly. Remainers talked the country down.
Everybody failed Brexit except Brexit.
Donald Trump once said that he loved the poorly educated. Brutal wording, but politically revealing.
People can be persuaded to vote against their own material interests if you give them a stronger emotional reward: somebody to blame, something to fear and a story in which they remain the hero.
That is not an argument that every Leave voter was stupid. It is an argument about how political machines exploit insecurity, limited information and justified anger. People living with declining services, insecure employment and disappearing opportunity were offered sovereignty as compensation.
The people who hollowed out their communities then persuaded them that Brussels, migrants and metropolitan liberals were responsible for the damage.
The trick was not merely getting people to vote Leave.
The trick was teaching them how to defend it forever.
Doubt is useful when it opens the mind. It becomes cowardice when it is deployed only to protect an existing belief.
There comes a point when scepticism stops being intellectual curiosity and becomes emotional armour. Nothing can penetrate it because accepting the evidence would mean accepting responsibility.
The LBC Machine
This is also why I find LBC increasingly difficult to listen to.
It presents itself as a national conversation, but a conversation is not necessarily an informed one. Fifty-two per cent of voters chose Leave, and many now believe that the vote itself made every instinct behind it authoritative.
They voted, therefore they know.
But opinion is not understanding. Confidence is not knowledge. Being given a telephone number and five minutes on national radio does not turn a feeling into a fact.
LBC is not really an information machine.
It is an argument machine.
The argument is the product.
The presenter sets the question. The producer screens the calls. One furious caller collides with another. The temperature rises. Clips are created. Outrage travels. Advertising is sold. Tomorrow, the same disagreement returns wearing a slightly different coat.
The purpose is not resolution. Resolution would be commercially useless.
If everybody agreed that Brexit had imposed costs and failed to deliver its central promises, what would fill the next three hours?
Far better to stage the national psychodrama again: one caller says Brexit was betrayed, another says it was always madness, and the presenter sits in the middle selling the friction.
That does not mean every presenter or caller is dishonest. It means the machine rewards heat more reliably than light.
It gives uninformed certainty the same theatrical weight as informed analysis, then congratulates itself for hearing both sides.
“We Got It Wrong”
I am not demanding an elaborate act of national humiliation.
Just say it:
We got it wrong.
Not everything wrong with Britain was caused by Brexit. Britain was already suffering from deindustrialisation, poor housing, decaying infrastructure, regional inequality, weak productivity and decades of short-term government.
Brexit did not create the disease. It was one of its symptoms.
But it also made parts of that disease harder to treat. It placed new barriers between Britain and its largest trading partners while politicians promised frictionless commerce, global opportunity and effortless growth.
When those promises failed to materialise, the politicians simply moved on.
Growth, growth, growth.
Always coming.
Never quite arriving.
And the people who demanded that we take back control somehow never seem responsible for what happened after they got it.
Living With the Argument
This is where a national argument enters the home.
It stops being about customs arrangements, migration statistics or economic forecasts. It becomes the same conversation on repeat. The facts change, the promises disappear and the defence quietly rearranges itself.
You can disagree with someone you love.
What is harder is loving someone who will not quite meet you in the truth.
That can feel a little lonely—not because you expect your partner to share every political conclusion, but because intimacy depends upon both people being able to recognise the same world.
What I imagine must be unsettling about being married to a Brexiteer is not simply that somebody voted differently from you. It is watching what happens when one political choice becomes too emotionally expensive for the person beside you to reconsider.
You start by discussing what Brexit has done to the country.
Before long, you are discussing whether consequences are real, whether evidence can be trusted and whether failure is allowed to have a name.
That is no longer an argument about the European Union.
It is an argument about reality.
The Country Cannot Move On by Pretending
Britain is repeatedly told that it must move on from Brexit.
But moving on is not the same as looking away.
You cannot learn from a decision while refusing to examine it. You cannot repair relationships with Europe while treating honesty as betrayal. You cannot prepare the country for future trade-offs while maintaining that the last enormous trade-off had no consequences.
And you cannot simply turn Brexiteerism off after spending a decade feeding it.
It has become a political reflex: distrust expertise, reward certainty, mistake anger for insight and treat compromise as surrender. Brexit may have happened at the ballot box, but the mentality it licensed escaped far beyond it.
That is the real inheritance.
Not merely a different trading relationship.
A country trained to believe that wanting something intensely is the same as making it possible—and that when reality refuses to cooperate, reality must be part of the conspiracy.
And the balls on these people, ten years later, to act as though the rest of us are still the ones who need to explain ourselves.
My husband and I do not agree about everything, but we are both Remainers and we begin from recognisable common ground. Marriage does not require political surrender, and love does not demand ideological uniformity.
But both politics and marriage require a shared foundation.
Not common opinions.
Common reality.
Because if we cannot agree on what has already happened, we have very little chance of deciding honestly what should happen now.