Miller chewed on them. Her tone drifted up nasally. Words were stuck in her sinuses. She tried a joke. “Status quo — Latin, some would say, for the mess we’re in.” It was a lawyer’s ventured joke. The product of a padlocked imagination.
Moaning about Britain’s low productivity, Miller said we lagged behind the US, France, and Germany. “In fact,” she grimaced, “we only just beat Italy in productivity terms.” Italy! This was British xenophobia so classically proportioned she might have been Roy Chubby Brown. Italy!
The tiny group of hacks began to look at their phones. Online someone had described True & Fair’s colourful circular logo as a “buffering rainbow sphincter of doom”. The internet learned what the rest of us knew: attendance was poor. It was awkward.
Miller crashed on about the empty rhetoric of politicians, while contributing nothing more than that herself. There were no ideas, not a single policy. She would later say that they were available on True & Fair’s website. The more she tried to flesh her party out, the thinner it seemed.
Finally, she mentioned it. “Brexit — yes, I’m daring to use the word apparently banned in Whitehall — is on course to cause a 5% contraction of Britain’s economy over the long term.” After all Miller’s boilerplate, hearing the word was sweeter than the sound of mandolins: something she cared about at last.
Forgetfulness is an essential part of survival. In one sarcastic aside, Miller revealed that she couldn’t let it go. Normal people do. They age, they forgive each other. Brexit is gone. In the long-run, technical arrangements will be made between groups of civil servants, who, although on opposite negotiating tables, believe the same things. The economic impact of the pandemic will make it impossible to tell if Brexit was “good” or “bad”. Lord Frost will publish his autobiography. FPBE Dads will continue to simp Marina Hyde on Twitter. Nothing will change that much — unless you’re Irish, and therefore invisible to the rest of Britain.
Miller can’t forget. The deep, banging conflicts of Brexit still jangle in her mind. So she’s launched a doomed political party, for herself. If she had wanted a loser’s revenge, she would have been better off starting a Substack, like Dom.
Instead she was here, lobbing vague slogans — “real solutions rather than empty rhetoric” — to a centre ground that ceased to exist years ago. “It’s time to demand change,” she said, caught in the delusion that the British voter crosses their ballot hopefully. The British voter usually turns out to release complex, resigned forms of disgust, not to change the country. If it were any different, new parties might be more successful.
So, she is a tragic figure. A Brexit leftover, surrounded by uneaten croissants. In the Long 2016 period she offered Britain a narrative, a high concept. The woman who never finished law school turning over May and Boris in the Supreme Court. She abseiled into the hearts of Remainers like an SAS soldier into an endangered embassy. Or, she was the elitist, doggedly thwarting the will of the people with her fancy lawyers. These were false stories imposed on the random and ambiguous truths of the era.
Still, back then Miller took her opportunities for performance well, and the press found a use for her. Yesterday, outside of Brexit’s high dramas, facing rows of unfilled chairs, she floundered. Miller sounded exactly like what she was railing against — a Status Quo politician. She tried to present herself as a prophet of change, but she looked like a familiar symptom of the times she wanted to transform. Out of touch and toothless, mouthing the same old platitudes about education and the economy you’ve heard a hundred times before. Shouldn’t she just be a Liberal Democrat?
The press were done with her now. Three journalists bothered to ask questions, before Gina Miller stormed off into a side room. Her speech was an end, not a beginning.
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