As the lies that drove Brexit unravel under the spotlight of actual fact, so the reasons bewildered Leave voters gave for supporting it seem increasingly tragic. My relative who wanted to get rid of Pakistanis and Indians, and other people from the far south-eastern region of the EU, finds they are still here, curing him, presenting the news and cooking delicious baltis.
The Welsh railway worker who Paul Mason overheard in July 2016 saying that he was voting out because “you can’t buy girls pink toys any more, they have to be grey” (while his colleague thought she should be allowed to say “gollywog”), has discovered there is no EU toy colour diktat. Toybox gender miscegenation will continue unabated, cloth rabbits and robot cars changing colour and sex at will, like gender-fluid frogs spawning in a filthy pond.
Those wooed, understandably, by the bus-borne “£350m a week for the NHS” bullshit now know it was just one of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Johnson’s many self-serving falsehoods. But even now it is being regurgitated by Theresa May, a horrible vomiting cormorant sicking up lies into the squawking beaks of the terminally and furiously disappointed, hoping that if their gullets are at least full of something, anything, however baseless, they will at last shut up.
Those who voted Leave as a protest, hoping to give the elite a scare, reluctantly admit they overplayed their hands somewhat. Even Michael Gove who, in the words of his Daily Mail wife, was “only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”, now chooses to attach himself, the limpet of regret, to the hulls of various blameless environmental causes, in an attempt to disassociate himself from the national catastrophe his pitiful vanity has initiated. Michael Gove hopes to be remembered, instead, as the Dian Fossey of Surrey’s hedgehogs. But Brexit is Michael Gove’s only legacy. And the shame of it will outlive all of his hedgehogs.
Only Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of our few conviction politicians, can still hold his head up high and say that he had a reason to leave the EU that remains not demonstrably untrue. For, in the early days of the Leave campaign, Rees-Mogg nailed his colours to the same mast of hope that he was again saluting last Monday morning, when he made the case for Hard Brexit once more to his familiar, Nick Ferrari, on LBC: the benefits of free trade focused through the lens of Cheaper Footwear.
It is true that in 2006, the shoe-producing EU nations slapped blocks on Asian shoe imports that drove up high street prices. But only a genius like Rees-Mogg could realise how emotive this footwear issue was for the Ukip/Brexit axis. Brexit supporters, it appears, get through a lot of shoes, after hurling them at the television whenever Gina Miller comes on Question Time.
And now, long since all other supposed good reasons for exiting the EU have been invalidated by facts, Rees-Mogg’s “cheaper footwear” gambit remains undiscredited. But this is largely, it must be said, because no one from the corrupt pro-EU elite thought it important enough to try and discredit, which just shows how out of touch they are with what ordinary people care about.
For many Brexit voters, the financial benefits of EU membership – investment in rural infrastructure, sharing of scientific research, work and education opportunities – remain tantalisingly abstract, and seem geared to the needs of the metropolitan liberal elite. But the cost of footwear is a tangible concrete concept, and it is this notion that Rees-Mogg harnessed to arouse the Europhobia of the British people.
After all, everyone has feet, or knows someone who has, whereas not everyone knows someone who has benefited from the work of the European Space Agency. And if it is trying to contact queue-jumping aliens, that is hardly likely to endear it to the Brexit voter.
But even Brexit supporters with no feet might want to buy a shoe, if only to hurl at the television in case Gina Miller comes on Question Time. And they would probably want that shoe to cost as little as possible. And they wouldn’t care if it was an Asian shoe, as long as it wasn’t jumping the shoe queue.
Rees-Mogg’s own two feet continue to fascinate all of us, and one can see why footwear would be of such importance to him. Rees-Mogg has always looked younger than 49, especially when he was a child, though he is finally beginning to decay. However, a swift internet image search will show that Rees-Mogg’s shoes have remained unchanged throughout Rees-Mogg’s life.
Either Rees-Mogg is wearing a new pair of shoes every day, in which case one could understand his obsession with footwear prices and their relationship with EU membership, or some more sinister factor is at play. Rees-Mogg’s shoes, always shiny, always bright, never scuff or age. I looked at 570 consecutive photographs of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s unchanged shoes online and then gave up, the horror seeming to tear at my throat.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, a man sells his soul to the devil or something, I expect, and there’s a drawing of him and it gets old and he stays the same. Brexit rots in front of our eyes, wilting on the vine. But Rees-Mogg’s shoes remain unchanged. And who is this “nanny” who has accompanied him since birth, guiding his political progress, steering us toward our doom? Whatever diabolical deal the footwear-obsessed free trade evangelist struck, I just hope it was worth it.
Stewart Lee is appearing with Liza Tarbuck in Comedians Sing the Christmas Hits!, a benefit for Action Duchenne, at the Bloomsbury theatre, London, on 4 December; with Mawaan Rizwan in Choose Laughs Festive Special (in aid of Help Refugees) at the Playhouse, London, on 9 December; and with Athena Kugblenu and Rosie Jones in A Belter for the Shelter at the Hackney Empire, London, on 19 February