“This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU.”
