In a crowded field, I think it was the flag that was the killer. The absolute state of that flag. Nigel Farage’s desktop Union Jack, with its little sucker pad leeching obnoxiously on to the unlovely beech of the European parliament chamber. Part of the genius of the TV series The Office was its ability to distil all human life down to a series of recognisable archetypes most people had encountered at work. To see Farage there with his desktop flag was to suddenly and irrevocably understand it: the UK is the Gareth Keenan of Europe. This is how we must look to those still condemned to share continent-space with us: petty, unlovable, essentially terrified, our workplace set up in a show of cod-martial defiance, which in fact only flags up our raging insecurity.
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