I think you will spend 103 seconds reading this post
I went to bed early on Thursday to make sure that I could watch the coverage of the results towards the ‘business end’ of the count. At 4am I woke up, and upon looking at my phone, headed to the sitting room to watch the coverage on BBC News. Slowly but surely with a Lagavullin in my hand the ‘remain’ camp were not making any inroads into the ‘leave’ advantage.
As Dimbleby “called” the result as being in favour of “leave” I was calm, but numb. Just after 7:30, a journalist with whom I had met in mid-March mailed me for a statement. That statement written at 7:50 am is below.
The prophesied Boris moment that I had secretly always hoped for as pro-Remain didn’t materialise. To wake up on my birthday to the coverage of the referendum left me with a numbness that I have not experienced in a long time. I had felt like the London I visited last week was not the place I used to know. While Leave will claim the spoils, neither side can really take pride in the fact that the campaign was fought on fear and many of the policy areas were not addressed. It may have an effect of removing the EU’s complacency that no country would wish to leave – but like a slain hydra, every question answered also results in multiple new questions. It hurt me to have to be a bystander in the proceedings. We have to abide by the result – in terms of it being an indicator that the people in Wales and England appear to favour a Brexit – but it does make me appreciate the merit of the Austrian situation of constitutional provisions requiring a two-thirds rather than simple majority. I can quite understand why the Scots might push for a second independence vote. And I fear that Cameron’s position has become untenable – the referendum being a rod he made for his own back.
Some of the statement appeared in a piece in The Local’s Austrian edition.
