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The Victoria Delusion
From the start, the campaign to end Britain’s membership in the European Union has been based not just on lies, but on a carefully constructed mythology of the country’s imperial past. But as history itself shows, nostalgic nationalism is and always has been a recipe for disaster.
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MILAN – Most of the hardcore Brexiteers in the British Parliament are oddballs, but Jacob Rees-Mogg is probably the most eccentric of them all. The son of a journalist, with aristocratic affectations and bespoke (yet still ill-fitting) double-breasted suits, he is a walking caricature of Englishness. While The Economist has described him as “the blue passport in human form, the red telephone box made flesh, the Royal Yacht Britannia in a pinstripe suit,” others, borrowing a line from John le Carré’s Call for the Dead, have mocked him as “a barmaid’s dream of a gentleman.”