Chapter 5: Valkenburg
Simon Kwagga Njala (interviewer): “Why are you gay?”
Pepe Julian Onziema (guest): “Who says I am gay?”
Simon Kwagga Njala: “You are gay…you are a transgender.”
Morning Breeze, Ugandan television show, 2021
*
“They want us to be holidaying in campsites manned by naked hippies with pubic weaves speaking in Esperanto. Not a fuck!”
@alfredtoshlines, Twitter, 2019
On a Friday morning in April 2017 I sat a table seat on the bottom level of a Euro train awaiting departure from Amsterdam Centraal. I was in The Netherlands for a currency conference and I’d crawled into bed at 3am that morning and was suffering a vicious hangover courtesy of a party hosted by a Russian bank the night before. I’d arrived on the Wednesday; on the Thursday, I’d taken a map of the city and decided to go for a run - as it was a smart hotel, the red light district wasn’t featured, but I followed a route that took me smack bang into the middle of it. I’d stopped running to notice one of the display boxes where hookers lure their punters; an elderly man was standing with a heavy-set woman wearing suspenders and a g-string. He was pointing at the floor, she was holding a mop in a bucket.
I’d buddied up to one of the Russian bank’s founders who invited me to the party. Just after midnight the party swelled - it appeared as though every single hooker in Amsterdam had clocked out of her display booth to join it. The Russian had caught me trying to leave twice - on the Sunday I was going to meet the woman who would later become my wife in Paris - and each time he’d made me drink a tumbler of Stolichnaya with him.
For some reason, the conference had been split between Amsterdam and a southwestern town called Valkenburg. The only Valkenburg I’d ever known before was Valkenberg, the mental asylum in Mowbray, Cape Town, where some of my teachers warned me I’d one day end up. But the locations made sense in the general weirdness; with the exception of a Dutch girl I’d dated in Cape Town, I wasn’t certain about swamp Germans - the Dutch - too close to Belgium, too much hoarse throat-grinding, general lacking of the refinement of Afrikaners. Couple that to the weirdness of independent currency traders, and you have one of the most curious spectacles imaginable.
I was leaning my head back against the seat trying to close my eyes when someone I knew boarded. He was known as Fat Gianni, a trader from Luxembourg (which, like Belgium, isn’t actually a country) I knew and worked a bit with in London, who hadn’t been invited to the party but could immediately see I was struggling, and proceeded to explain that he’d eaten two breakfasts already. “Hey,” he said, “good mind thinks alikes hey?” I noticed what he meant; he and I had identical brown leather briefcases. He placed his on the table next to mine then sat down opposite me, staring at the two side by side, almost proud of his work. I checked out immediately: “At the risk of sounding anti-social, I’m going to try and sleep.” The Valkenburg conference began at midday. “No worry,” Fat Gianni replied, “I’m getting away few stops before to seeing some cujinz (cousins).”
Unfortunately because of a visa issue (I’d paid an Indian travel agent based in Hackney £200 to secure a fast visa from the Indian-owned VFS visa intermediary scam), I’d booked late. There were a limited number of hotels in Valkenburg and all were booked for the conference, leaving me with only a room in a guest house owned by one Alfie Vlaadering and his wife Maritjie.
I woke up sweating and nauseous about 10 minutes outside of Valkenburg. Fat Gianni and his briefcase weren’t there anymore. I decided to send a message to my future wife telling her I was about to arrive, so I opened the briefcase and in doing so immediately felt a little wave of sick. It wasn’t my bag. “Fucking fat doos (c***),” I swore as the train began to slow. My wallet, phone and passport were all in the briefcase.
Fortunately there was a tourism office at the train station that hadn’t closed. The lady behind the counter handed me a local directory of all bread and breakfasts; on the second page I found Alfie and Maritjie’s address. I asked if there were any taxis and she shrugged: “Only cycling in here”. She gave me a little map of the town and marked out the route: “About 20 minutes.”
About 5 minutes into the walk a riptide of nausea overcame me. I found a patch of grass near the road, put my bag down, sat cross-legged and attempted the Wim Hof hangover breathing routine. When I opened my eyes 20 minutes later a Muslim woman dressed in full gear pushing a pram was standing watching me. Feeling better, I said hello to her, (she didn’t respond), picked up the bag and carried on walking. Soon I was at the top of the cul-de-sac in which the house was located. I reached the front door and pressed the bell.
I heard some shuffling inside and after a few moments, a man opened. He was probably in his late 50s, short and portly - in his left arm he held a brown cat - but then I noticed something unusual: there was a thin, transparent plastic packet filled with what looked like smoked sausages tied around his belt, near to the buckle. I didn’t want to look as though I was calculating something, but it occurred to me - staring not at his face but as his waist - that he was probably carrying the cat and the packet, or eating out of it, when I’d pressed the doorbell; realizing that he couldn’t hold the packet of sausages near to the cat and open the door at the same time, he had looped the top of the packet around his belt in a knot. “Yez? Yous are British yez?” With his now completely free hand he made a playful fist, like a boxer. “Erm…no, um, I’m sorry…Alfie right?” “Yez…where’s you from?” “I live in…listen I’m sorry but I have to email someone urgently…would it be possible to use your computer please?” “Komputa cos exsh-tra,” he said with a wink before waving me in. “Koem,” he said. “Thanksfullys yous not British.” His sausage packet was still on his belt.
I walked into the house. “Your room left, Maritjie and me right,” he said from behind me, “komputa also right.” I walked into an open room. A blonde woman, just a bit chubbier than Alfie and possibly also in her late 50s, was sitting back on what appeared to be a tan-colored leather remote recliner, the control dangling on the side, watching television. Another cat appeared at her feet. “Hello,” I greeted her. “Oooh hullo,” she replied, before going back to a live audience show. “Komputa,” Alfie said, pointing to a table with a screen and a keyboard.
It was clear Alfie and his wife were hoarders. The room was packed to the rafters with dolls, plastic windmills, flags of the EU, puzzles, footballs, musical instruments, clothes, cat boxes and cat food, magazines. Had I not been so poorly on the way I probably would have collapsed in spasms.
I sat at the computer. There was a screensaver of the flag of the EU, and pictures of flowers and canals that moved around the screen. My finger touched the mouse, and suddenly the screen exploded with two black men having sex with a white woman. The speakers then took over, and on full volume the sound of grunting and moaning flooded the room. “Sssshhh,” Maritjie giggled as I tried urgently to correct the situation. “Pawshj,” Alfie muttered across from his chair. I looked back at the carnage unfolding in front of me, where the participants occasionally shouted in a foreign language, (Flemish, if I were to guess) looking for the volume on the player or the screen, feeling blood that I’d lost on the walk came rushing back to my cheeks, “Pawshj,” Alfie shouted again, “PRESH PAWSHJ!” He was now irritated: “Godverdomme,” I heard him say as I desperately searched for the volume button on the video’s perimeter. “Oh…pause,” I said out loud, my hands shaking. I found the button and quickly minimized the depravity, before logging into Gmail to send a message to Fat Gianni. As I typed I couldn’t help but review what had just happened. Alfie wasn’t embarrassed; he was annoyed. I caught a glimpse of him sitting staring at the ceiling rocking back and forth, the plastic packet still there. He mentioned something to Maritijie and shook his head. She clicked her tongue in disapproval of whatever was just said: “Jis relax Alfred,” she said in English, “don’t put a shit on me.”
Fat Gianni had obviously been on his phone just as I mailed him, so his reply was near instant: “Come 2 venue”. I then calculated that it was a 10 minute walk from the house and explained to Alfie what I was going to do, and requested keys. He looked both dejected and annoyed as he handed me a set: a stranger had invaded his space and cost him 10 or so seconds of porno time. Maritjie was still watching the television; I noticed on my way past her that she was eating something that looked like a calzone, and, captivated by swamp German television, was oblivious to the fact that as she ate and watched, another cat was licking her bare toes.
Walking to the venue, the adrenaline shock of what had just happened appeared to have expelled the squatting Russian from me. I was now tired only, looking forward to making it through evening, wrapping the weirdo thing up the following day then making it to France for Sunday.
At the close of the conference at 5pm, Fat Gianni and his coin-collecting friends announced they had organized a party in a small town called Bocholtz roughly twenty minutes away by car. He insisted I join. “I can leave when I want?” I asked him. “Yesh yesh, just come the sushi.” I hadn’t eaten anything the entire day. so I figured I’d go, stay 3o minutes for dinner, then take a taxi back. We piled into a bus he’d arranged and set out for the party.
At 11pm I was little more than a corpse. The group that had arrived before us had eaten all the sushi, and the sight of Fat Gianni and his friends lighting Champagne sparklers on bottles in a shit club - in a shit village - was depressing and annoying. Maybe you get away with that in August in the south of France if your father has just smuggled a nuclear weapon to the Pakistani army. Not in Holland in April.
I reached across the table to Gianni and shouted: “How do I leave?!” “Oh, bus only coming in 2 hours. 1am!” “What?! You told me I could leave when I wanted to?!” Swamp German techno was now blaring and people were dancing around the tables. “No man, you could leave early, earlier, but no taxis now.” I felt a rush of blood to the head that could have resulted - if I’d stayed near his person - in me ripping Fat Gianni a new one. “Hev drinks!” I found a waitress: “Please could you call a taxi?” “No taxi, no Uber” she said, “taxi finish 10pm.” “So how do I get back to Valkenburg?” “Sometimes taxi coming back later from Akerweg side. Bus come too. Just walk left, then left again, then down road. Akerweg. Toward big wind machine.”
I walked out, followed her directions and saw the wind turbine and walked toward it. The road decreased in size, and soon I became uncomfortable; it was now more a country road, and there were no cars let alone taxis and certainly no buses. I walked - further and further but still no cars - only a sign on the side of the road. Something looked odd about it, so I looked closer: “Eínbahnstraße” (one way street). I stopped and thought about what I was seeing. It wasn’t swamp German. I felt a spike of nausea for the first time since the afternoon. Actual, real German. So I got out my phone and looked at the map. The waitress had told me to walk in the opposite direction of where I actually needed to be. I’d followed her instructions, and I’d wandered into fucking western Germany.
*
Turnout for the Brexit referendum vote of the 23rd June 2016 was impressive with 77% of the population descending upon voting stations. In the lead-up, initially announced by former Prime Minister David Cameron in the plush new Bloomberg offices shortly after his own landslide victory in 2015’s UK general election, the overwhelming consensus - and subsequent instruction - was: you should - must - vote against leaving. At times, so confident was this appeal that it lent itself to complacency: many considered the vote a spectacle only to appease Eurosceptic Conservative backbenchers increasingly disillusioned with the power Brussels was persistently trying to acquire for itself. David himself believed that remaining was the only option and caveated it with the word “reform”. In February 2016, he had traveled to Brussels with a list of items - namely, an emergency brake, child benefits, stronger protection for non-eurozone countries (stalling of new regulations) and language that clearly articulated that the UK was not included in the EU’s motto of “ever closer union”. He managed to snatch the language bit out of them - but everything else was a failure. Critics dismissed his attempts as “half-hearted” - after all, he had once declared himself “the heir to Blair” - and one of Tony Blair’s most obvious features was that he was deeply into the EU project.
The creep of complacency was unable to disguise itself in the media coverage. Analysts and commentators were all but convinced: it simply could not happen. There was some agitation when Nigel Farage, who had successfully led his party UKIP to victory in the UK’s EU parliamentary elections of 2014, stood in front of a giant poster featuring a caravan of migrants (Romani Slovaks for the politically correct, or just Gypsies), warning the United Kingdom that remaining in the EU would bring it the prize of unfettered immigration - the kind seen in places like Germany, who had volunteered itself to the plight of Syrians in 2015. In 2006 David Cameron had accused UKIP of being “closet racists” and “fruitcakes”; in 2013, a year before the UK EU parliamentary elections, “conservative” Kenneth Clarke had described UKIP’s supporters as “clowns”. UKIP’s triumph in 2014 resulted in Farage quoting Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 hit: “Send in the clowns”.
In the early hours of the 24th of June 2014, a stony-faced David Dimbleby, himself something of a knight of the liberal media realm, announced the referendum’s result on BBC 1: “The results are in, the country has spoken, and we’re out.” Roughly 51% of the country had voted to leave - 49% had opted to stay.
Complicating the atmosphere of despair was a question: where to? And this involved the profiles who had led the push to leave the EU from within the Conservatives. Chief amongst these were Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, two opportunists who had found their ways to the leave group. In Johnson’s case, he had simply composed two articles: one in favour of remaining, and the other of leaving. The latter was published by the Sunday Times - the former was leaked to the Telegraph, Johnson had absentmindedly sent it to a friend. In it he claimed: “This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms. The membership fee seems rather small for all that access. Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?” When confronted later, his excuse was that he was trying to see the vote from both sides - wrestling, he claimed, with the same quandaries and complexities of the electorate.
*
There was a compelling reason for South Africans to moan about the result. Ordinarily, after a period living and working and paying taxes in the UK you would be all but guaranteed of the Indefinite Leave to Remain status, which then led into citizenship and finally, a passport - a passport to avoid paying unscrupulous middlemen and consulate intermediaries to secure Schengen visas for traveling the continent. For some South Africans, the years of shitty people and shitty and lazy colleagues and crappy weather and endless queuing had been wasted, and they were furious. The only problem was: it wasn’t their country to be furious with. Needless to say, many of these white, middle-class South Africans were already supporters of the Liberal Democrats - a fervently pro-EU party.
The same level of outrage was not present in South Africa when corruption at the Department of Home Affairs resulted in the country being exposed as a transit point for some of the world’s most wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists. Between 2005 and 2009, under the watch of the current ANC Speaker, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula (then Minister of Home Affairs), the department turned into a cesspit of forgery: in 2011, the website Defenceweb quoted the DA Shadow Minister of Home Affairs, Annette Lovemore, discussing the previous examples of terrorists using South African passports: “In 2004, a Tunisian al-Qaeda suspect, Ihsan Garnaoui, told German investigators that he had a number of South African passports. British-born Haroon Rashid Aswat, supposed ringleader of the 2005 London bus bombings, lived in South Africa and travelled to the United Kingdom on a South African passport. In 2006, Mohammed Gulzar entered Britain with a fake South African passport under the name Altaf Ravat, allegedly with the intent of blowing up transatlantic airliners in mid-flight.”
The result of an incompetent Minister, and a subsequently inept department, forced all South Africans - a commonwealth member nation - into the process of visa application. Yet for some reason, the ANC escaped wholesale condemnation from where it could have mattered, like the UN, the EU and even the Liberal Democrats. Of course they did.
*
In 2015 I was invited to a breakfast hosted by a think-tank to at which information about Brexit would be presented by Conservative politicians. Seated next to me was a glamorous blonde American divorcee in her 60s called Jennifer. Shortly after our first meeting, she would explain how her divorce settlement had included, amongst other things, a townhouse in Belgravia, other residences in Paris and New York, and cash that she lavished upon initiatives and think tanks (“good for my post-divorce confidence,” she explained). We were the only outsiders there, got along well and so decided to start an amateur Brexit interest group which saw us meeting for dinner once a week at her house, alongside any other interesting guests we’d agreed to invite. It was a fantastic idea; the problem was we all got so drunk on Jennifer’s seemingly endless supply of St. Julien that by the morning we’d forgotten anything remotely interesting.
Toward the end of fall 2015 Jennifer left to spend December, January and February with friends in Palm Beach. At her annual Thanksgiving dinner party, she handed me the names of two people she wanted me to meet. “One of them is a shit,” she said, “the other is very old”.
It was immediately clear at our first meeting that Roland Rudd was the former. He was a multimillionaire, Oxford educated founder of a financial public relations firm. He was brash and fast, counting some of Tony Blair’s proteges amongst his closest friends. He was also the sister of Amber Rudd, the “Conservative” MP formerly married to the late food critic AA Gill who would become Home Secretary under Theresa May before being forced to resign. In 1998 the sibling’s father, Tony Rudd, was the subject of a report compiled by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) concerning his company, that concluded he was “unfit to run any company…either private or public.” Amber would not only face questions about her commercial relationship with Tony after the DTI’s declaration but also about being a director of two companies listed in the Bahamas tax haven.
Rudd got me invited to a party he was attending, and spent all of 15 seconds congratulating himself for coming up with the name of the organisation lobbying to remain in the following year’s referendum: “Britain Stronger in Europe”. Then he left and I never saw him again. Admittedly there were probably better, more important things to do, like watching his sister move their father’s money around. Then I met the other recommendation. This man did look old.We sat down in a little pub in Kinnerton Street close to where I lived and for the next 3 hours, he spoke. I’m still convinced today there was something magical about him. I didn’t think a man could think so deeply but as I learned, the following year’s referendum was something of a life’s work.
He did not even vaguely hint at his own politics or involvement in any official campaign related to Brexit. Instead for those 3 hours, he spoke about identity, history and belonging, tariffs, fishing, human rights law and free movement. I can’t remember him saying “um” once, or even stopping for breath. Facts, numbers, dates and the names of individuals rolled off his tongue; there were moments in those three hours where he even looked slightly awkward, as if he had spent years around people questioning, like I was, how such an unassuming, softly spoken man with kind eyes could possess such a wealth of information. At the close of those three hours, I asked him about his life starting with where he lived. He stopped me short: “I live alone,” he said. Politely, he thanked me for his tea and left.
*
After June 2016’s vote I started again, and the quest to hear both sides became northing short of an extra-curriculum degree, requiring time, planning and patience. Jennifer had returned, and for August we were on the wagon together. What was happening deserved, at the very least, to be absorbed whilst sober - we had both underestimated the profound effect the vote had. Jennifer’s dinner parties the previous year had plummeted into farce, so we decided to go back to the start and look at everything again.
We reverted to those compelling economic reasons to remain, then moved onto the equally compelling economic reasons to leave. In the former we located the view of farmers, who were beneficiaries of handsome EU subsidies. Divorce meant that the UK was free to develop its own schemes to support agriculture, but doing so would be fraught with delays, and leave the small farmer in limbo. For those who believed that remaining was only the preserve of metropolitan elite, this was an uncomfortable truth. In addition, there were other areas of benefits few spoke of: many salaries of blue-collar factory jobs, particularly in towns north and southwest of London, were said to be paid in part by the EU. In some cases these workers appeared unaware of this arrangement and had voted to leave.
The concept of free movement in the UK had bought with it an impressive tide of highly skilled Polish and other Eastern European artisans: for a lower-to-middle income family, the possibility of being able to refurb the room of a house, one that still required substantial savings for, had become more available. Comparatively, using UK tradesmen was prohibitively expensive. The absence of these people since Brexit is noticeable: then, no route home after work was complete without the sight of four of five of these men, all wearing backpacks standing on a curb, drinking cans of lager purchased from an off-licence, smoking vapes and muttering to each other. Many of them shared living quarters on the edges of London’s M25 to ease rental costs: they worked exceptionally hard, were very good at their craft - and most sent money home each month.
Politically, the most sweeping of reasons to remain I encountered involved a claim about the EU’s origins: “it was established to avert the possibility of another war on the continent”, the managing director of US bank in the UK told us. Although this was nonsense - it was originally a trade bloc - I suspected it too was attractive a reason to resist, that just attempting to unravel it would give the party attempting to unravel the air of belligerence, or xenophobia.
Tempering this, on the other side, were some worrying evaluations of the EU’s behaviour in recent years, bought to light in an excellent documentary by Martin Durkin, entitled “Brexit: The Movie”, where he traveled to Brussels to expose the subsidised decadence made available to EU Members of Parliament (MEPs). From champagne and nail bars, to school fees and house-moving services, it was clear that the job of MEPs was one of the most extravagant in the world. From this it was also clear why so many British MPs sought careers in Brussels, not because they believed in all of its objectives, or governing principles, but because a much higher standard of life could be obtained - so to hell with the idea of public service, or even ambition. Durkin’s revelations prompted the same question asked of investment bankers following 2008’s global financial crisis: what is it exactly that you do? This majority of responses to this question were “protecting shared values” and “enhancing democracy”. But we were told that asking this question amounted to a fool’s errand: most of the time, MEPs themselves didn’t know what they were doing - the organization was so big, and so encompassing, that it prompted a natural default to the pursuit of simplicity in its members; they knew when they were expected to vote, they turned up, then they left - and everything else was simply beyond their grasp or knowledge. So reverting to broad answers was all that could be done.
Then there was Peter Lilley’s observations. Lilley was a formidable Conservative thinker; from 1997 to 2o17 he was MP for Hitchin and Harpenden. At a debate at the University of Hertfordshire on the 22nd May 2016, Lilley swung an audience from being 75% pro remain at the start to 55% pro leave at the end. Many of the students and businesses attending were nearly overwhelmed by his grasp of economics, philosophy and law. Then there was the philosopher Roger Scruton, the professorial research fellow at The University of Buckinghamshire and author Simon Heffer and the Adam Smith Insitute’s Eamonn Butler - all whose arguments in favour of leaving were persuasive. There were also the predictions to consider retrospectively: the global forecaster David Murrin has made a small fortune from being right - his analysis in 2016 posed the result, likening Brexit to a “civil war” of the mind. “The right-brained thought process of the Brexiteers would inevitably win,” he claimed in summary of the result, “this included Boris Johnson becoming PM, as he was the only candidate demonstrating the energy that resonated with this profound change.”
Following the shock result, Sutenbastud got to work - in the media and in the groups appalled by what had happened. To them the idea that “nothing could be done, results are in” could not be further from the truth. Following the revelations of Boris Johnson’s odd post-Brexit behaviour, and some infighting between him and Michael Gove as to who would succeed the recently resigned David Cameron, Theresa May was elected. Having voted to remain, she was immediately treated with suspicion, and it never left - not even when she was forced into resigning. But it was clear: status quo forces splintered or bruised by the result were back and eager to drive what they considered a momentarily out-of-control vehicle.
May was hopeless, no match for an outraged Brussels and an outraged Sutenbastud - both of whom she obviously felt an affinity with. Brussels had appointed appointed a suave French politician, Michel Barnier, as its chief negotiator. Barnier wore silk Hermes ties and effortlessly shifted between English and French. Theresa’s appointed equivalent, David Davis, was raised by a single mother in York, did not speak French and look shagged out most of the time. Worse for Davis, accompanying Barnier was the intimidating presence of a man called Martin Selmayr. Selmayr was known as the ‘Monster of the Berlaymont’, a nod to his term as Chief of Staff for European Commission’s President, Jean-Claude Juncker. According the website Politico, diplomats referred to Selmayr as “Voldemort - he who cannot be spoken of”.
Allegedly Selmayr managed Juncker’s diary like an illegal mining operation. He was accused of of being over-controlling and denying access. But perhaps that’s because Juncker was, for the period he served, drunk most of the time - cognac being his poison. He was also a fan of the techno saxophone and like, Joe Biden, enjoyed sniffing the hair of women, or playing with it - all of this leading to the appearance of parallels in the manner Selmayr managed Juncker, and the way Joe’s handlers, or remote controllers, manage him.
By contrast, May had tasked a UK civil servant called Olly Robbins with the job of being Davis’ Selmayr. But Olly was no match for the ruthless and cunning Selmayr: shortly after founding the Brexit Party in November 2018 (which would land a devastating blow to May the UK’s European Parliamentary elections the following year), Nigel Farage said of Selmayr: “I want Martin Selmayr to become the most famous person in the whole of Europe. I want every voter across all the member states to understand how this place operates.” In 2019, a Belgian filmmaker produced the documentary “Brexit: Behind Closed Doors”, which illustrated parts of the negotiation periods and was picked up for distribution by the BBC. In the course of it, it was revealed that Olly requested a Belgian passport “when this is all over”. This statement shined on the role of the UK civil service, fiercely pro EU, and its avatar Olly, not wanting to go 12 rounds with Selmayr in the first place, accepting being beaten - then joining the opposition.
But of all the profiles Brussels appointed to the negotiations, none was more helpful in the impeding of them than the preposterous Guy Verhoefstadt, the curtain-haired Belgian maniac who can fit a human thumb in the chasm between his two front teeth. He was venomous, vindictive and hell bent on mission creep - to the point where he started lobbying for the one thing that the EU should, in theory and consistency with its origins not have - an armed force. He was content to visit London, knowing full well Brexiteers who resided in the city would unlikely admit their allegiance publicly for fear of reprisals and would openly accuse them of bigotry and hatred. “An unwillingness to progress to initiatives like renewable energy” was one of his favourite taunts.
On one October night in 2016, Jennifer and I invited the old-looking man to a dry dinner. He hardly spoke as we gave an account of our research. Toward the end of the dinner, Jennifer spoke frankly - about her upbringing in a small town in California and the people she’d met in Washington during her marriage. “All of this stuff we’re now seeing,” she said, “the allegations about Russia interfering, the accusations of racism in the media, people being spoken to as if they’re stupid…is it not the reason why people voted to leave in the first place?” “Exactly,” the man replied, “ordinary people don’t hate Brussels, and the fact that they don’t understand what goes on there is actually irrelevant.” The man then shifted effortlessly into the precision gears I had seen the year before. He spoke about the things that had happened since - the efforts to portray economic calamity, job losses and continental isolation leading to global obscurity. “If you ever want an example of interference,” he said, “look at what Barack Obama did when he came to London at the beginning of the year.”
Perhaps the referendum result was only important in that it revealed enduring fault lines, this time with real consequences. You could trawl the list of these, but perhaps the most depressing is the ordinary person’s hatred of what their capital city today represents. At no point in recent history was the broken mechanics of the logic, the “message” so exposed. And yes, it was indeed window dressing - you’re not meant to impart democratic instruments such as referendums and in the unlikely event you do, you need to ensure the result is in your favour. This speaks to the stupidity and the arrogance of David Cameron: he hated those less progressive, and in his hatred, he completely underestimated the response. He and his friends were hated back.
Still the sneering continues. Just last year, in the now South African-heavy village of Weybridge outside London, a particularly messy South African businessman addressed a group of Liberal Democrats. “I remain adamant,” he sniffed, “not all Brexiteers are racist - but all racists voted for Brexit”. Assuming you base that statement from coverage, you could argue that, in the US, not all democrats are pedos, but all pedos vote democrat. The prevailing logic only accepts one version.
*
In Valkenburg I arrived back at Alfie and Maritjie’s after 1am. My room was just as cluttered as their lounge - with a trace of cat in the air, so I looked around the room and caught the fucker under the bed.
The following day the conference officially closed, and the organiser who I’d briefly shaken hands with in Amsterdam got up to speak to the hall. “Colleghes,” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air, “cash money traders of Europe, unite!” People clapped. “You know,” he continued, “we were dealt a blow with this Brexit, and I know many of you are still wondering why these people did this. But I must tell you this conference will continue to hold the values of Europe. Look, this centre, all the roads here - all hotels - all EU. We must protect. Goodbye!”
I thought back to the old-looking man in London. Then I saw Alfie in the hall, looking around some of the display stands. He was wearing shorts with black socks and sandals. He had a cat on a leash.
*Coming next: Chapter 6: uSquidge