The vote to Leave: the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory
Why was everybody so glum on television in Britain today – even those who won and should have been celebrating? They looked shell-shocked. It’s because this is the classic, perfect illustration of a Pyrrhic victory.
A Pyrrhic victory is one which inflicts such devastation on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. The victor has won, yes – but the heavy toll negates any sense of achievement or gain.
There is a good piece about this in The Guardian.
(Boris Johnson) has everything he ever wanted. It’s just that somehow, as he fought his way through booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it didn’t really look that way.
One group of Tory remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather pale Johnson said leaving Europe needn’t mean pulling up the drawbridge; that this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow “take the wind out of the sails” of anyone playing politics with immigration. Too late for all that now, one said.
The scariest possibility, however, is that he actually meant it. That like most of Westminster, Johnson always imagined we’d grudgingly vote to stay in the end. That he too missed the anger bubbling beneath the surface, and is now as shocked as anyone else by what has happened.
“People talk about reluctant remainers, but I think there have been a lot of reluctant Brexiters around, people who voted leave thinking it wouldn’t happen but they’d be able to vent and to tell all their friends at dinner parties they’d done it,” said one Tory minister.
“He thought what all those reluctant Brexiters thought: it would be a vote for remain, he would be seen as having stood up for a principle.” After which leave’s newest martyr could simply have bided his time for a year or so before being triumphantly installed in Downing Street.
It’s perfectly possible, of course, that the Tories on both sides who suspect Johnson was never an outer in his bones are plain wrong, that the anonymous Labour MP who hotly accused him on Friday of jeopardising thousands of ordinary people’s jobs just to secure one for himself was doing him a terrible injustice.
Perhaps Johnson really did have a last-minute epiphany, declaring for leave in the sober realisation that this was always how it might end – Scotland demanding independence, Northern Ireland’s fragile political settlement at risk, Marine Le Pen jubilant, the Bank of England stumping up £250bn to stabilise the market. Perhaps he’s still convinced all will be fine eventually.
