I’m sick of explaining the real Brexit story to ill-informed foreigners

Vanishingly few outside these islands have ever been exposed to the Leave point of view.

“You Brits are crazy!” I’d only been in America for half an hour, but the conversation with my cab driver had already turned to Brexit. “Why do you say that?”, I asked, genuinely curious. He paused for a few seconds, obviously thinking hard. And then, finally, he gave me his answer: “Well, that’s what I read”.

It’s a privilege to travel a lot for work, and it seems spoiled to complain. But wherever I go – from the Middle East, to the US, Asia and, of course, throughout the EU – people overwhelmingly parrot the narrative peddled by Remainers: that Brexit is a catastrophic own goal, that Boris Johnson is an "Anglo-Trump", that Britain is somehow “withdrawing from the world”.

And some make the lazy – or rather, ignorant and insulting – assumption that Leave voters are far-right, nativist, uneducated racists.

I suppose I should be flattered that they then assume that I must be a Remainer. Their shock when I tell them that I voted Leave is palpable, like they’re thinking “Wow, you don’t look like a fascist, but maybe you’re just hiding it well”.

Why do they think this way? Perhaps few of them have visited the UK recently, or spoken to many British people? No, their own media are feeding this hysteria and pessimism about Brexit. A one-sided Remain narrative has wormed its way across borders and oceans, like some hideous EU directive, to become received wisdom around the world. Vanishingly few outside these islands have ever been exposed to the Leave point of view.

Take France. Rarely do the French media look for British commentators to provide a Brexit explanation. Much of the discussion involves one French pontificator versus another, talking in circles, with Boris Johnson almost unanimously written off as a pathetic clown. The indecision in London proves to the French, in the words of the American journalist, Anglophile and Bordeaux resident, Michael Johnson, “that the British are an egotistical, unhinged, indecisive, even childish people suffering from island fever, and who must be made to pay for three years of selfish posturing.”

This is a global trend. The New York Times, too, has been responsible for a raft of petty and ignorant reports on Brexit Britain, with tales of panicking citizens hoarding candles and loo roll en masse and even the bizarre claim that the British culinary palate only recently evolved beyond "porridge and boiled mutton". The Prime Minister, who, as Leavers understand all too well, is merely striving to uphold the democratic choice of the British people, is, in the eyes of nearly every non-Brit I talk to, responsible for a coup. (I wonder where they got that from?)

Johnson is also, according to one Eastern European acquaintance, a far-right, illiberal authoritarian, whose obvious soul-mate is Donald Trump. How he squares that with Johnson’s liberal, pro-immigration, pro-LGBT sentiments is beyond me. And the mere act of voting Leave is, I’m told, causing unprecedented and catastrophic economic self-harm. (Oh really? The last time I checked, our economy was ticking along just nicely).

So, as a dutiful Leave-supporting Brit, I make it my business to put these people right on a few things. I point out, for example, that 17.4 million people voted Leave in the biggest democratic exercise in British history, drawn from all parts of society, regions and age groups. Amazingly, many foreign nationals seem shocked by this.

I explain that three and a half years after taking the decision to leave the EU, Britain’s Remain elite has prevented it from happening. Far from withdrawing from the international stage, I say, we are as keen as mustard to sign trade agreements with countries all over the world. Brexit isn’t about insularity, but a demonstration of our desire to do business globally, unencumbered by the lumbering bureaucracy of the EU. I point out that just about the only thing Boris and Donald have in common is hair colour.

Then I come to the punchline – that Brexit is, at its core, about who makes the laws under which we live. Should it be our elected government, or a pseudo-democracy, accountable to the powerful and not the people?

“Oh, okay, I didn’t know that side of it”, people typically say, with a sheepish look.

That other countries have such a one-sided, blinkered view of Brexit shows the power of the Remain establishment. Its influence has spread all over the world, ramping up the pressure on the PM and giving succour to those in the EU determined to make Britain reverse its democratic choice or pay mightily for its sheer nerve in choosing out.

In fact, in my recent experience, only non-EU Switzerland seems properly to understand the Leave agenda. As a client in Zurich remarked to me just a few weeks ago: “The key thing about the EU is never to join in the first place”.