“I hadn’t intended to write a book about Brexit,” he says over Skype from his book-stacked office. “It doesn’t automatically lend itself to a book, you know, it’s an ongoing story and I’ve been writing about it all the time.” 'Maybe I was euphoric': Fintan O'Toole. Credit:Benson Russell But around this time last year he was on holiday, the weather was unusually nice for Ireland (“maybe I was euphoric”) and he came up with an idea that he hadn’t seen done. “There’s a sort of [Brexit] book that nobody in England is writing, which is the ‘WTF’ [What the F---] book. Everybody was kind of obsessed with the process, and the process is endlessly fascinating and all that. “But the question that occurred to me was how does this privileged, modern, Western European country imagine itself to be intolerably oppressed? How do you get to that stage? What kind of mechanisms might be at work – psychologically, I mean.”

So he put England on the couch and psychoanalysed it. What he found was a patient in the throes of a nervous breakdown. “I’m not dismissing the economic and social factors, which are obviously huge,” he says. “But you know you have to feed in these broader psychological, cultural factors into it.” He pitched it to his publisher in London and they wrote back saying “OK, we’re clearing the decks”. “Shit, they’re clearing the decks. And I haven’t written a word.” What emerged was Heroic Failure: Brexit and the politics of pain, the kind of book that reads like a scandalous biography rather than a chin-stroking historical text, that cloaks its rigorous research in metaphors and insights that genuinely make your eyebrows shoot up.

Take his extended argument that Brexit is punk reborn. Brexiteers “want to sever the last restraints on the very market forces that have caused the pain. They offer a jagged razor of incoherent English nationalism to distressed and excluded communities and say: ‘Go on, cut yourself, it feels good.’ It does feel good. It is exhilarating and empowering. It makes English hearts beat faster and the blood flow more quickly – even if it’s their own blood that’s flowing. An effigy of Theresa May during an anti-Brexit march in London, March 23. Credit:AP “Brexit is often explained as populism,” O’Toole wrote, but it is better understood as “sadopopulism, in which people are willing to inflict pain on themselves so long as they can believe that, in the same moment, they are making their enemies hurt more”. “Brexit is a strange hybrid – a genuine national revolution against a phony oppressor. It has the form of a moment of liberation without the content. The people get out of the Red Room of Pain only to find themselves in the Red, White and Blue Room of Pain. All that really changes is that it becomes less clear who is supposed to inflict the agony and who is supposed to suffer it.”

Brexit mirrors the psychopathology of the ruling classes, who learned it at their abusive boarding schools: “A whole history of sadomasochistic imperial education, the toughening-up of white children by savage cruelty in public schools so that they can in turn inflict themselves on lesser peoples.” Coupled with this is Britain’s “unfinished psychic business”, O’Toole argued. There is a narrative of post-imperial decline, the invaders now fearing invasion, the coloniser casting the EU as colonists, in a truly geographic-scale act of projection. A blimp depicting Boris Johnson floats past a statue of Winston Churchill in London last month. Credit:AP Another part of this mental picture is that “England never got over winning the war”. It has been surpassed by the losers, whom Britons try to convince themselves “hate us because we saved them”. He quoted Thatcher, musing after victory in the Falklands: “Why does it need a war to bring out our qualities and reassert our pride?” O’Toole says it feels like Brexiteers almost took this chapter of his book as a “how-to” guide. Since it was published they have become even more explicit in their war rhetoric, talking about Brexit as Agincourt, Crecy or Waterloo, promising to face up to “no-deal” consequences with the spirit of the Blitz or Dunkirk, summoning images of Churchill in his War Cabinet.

“Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted,” O’Toole wrote. “It does not greatly matter what the European Union is, or what it is doing – its function in the plot is to be a more insidious form of Nazism.” I could go on and on. The chapter on Brexit as a camp oral fixation, which reached apotheosis in the work of the young journalist Boris Johnson inventing a nanny-like EU crackdown on prawn cocktail-flavour crisps, is pure joy. Men dressed as British customs officers stop traffic during an Irish anti-Brexit spoof on the Old Dublin Road at Carrickarnon, near the border with Northern Ireland. Credit:AP O’Toole says he enjoyed writing the book, too. “[Brexit is] fascinating. It's extraordinary, it's surreal … there is room for some kind of sardonic humour.

“If you're Irish you know the whole history of the Irish being the sort of wild unpredictable irrational crowd, compared to Anglo-Saxon hard-headed managerialism. You know: ‘We do the serious stuff, mad Celtic bastards do all this crazy stuff about identity.’ So yeah, there is a kind of pleasure in the reversal of that. And it is a particularly Irish pleasure I suppose.” But there was also a “genuine sadness”, he says. A British flag flies above European Union flags during a demonstration in London. Credit:Bloomberg “Particularly if you're Irish because we've been stuck with this stuff for so long. You know these crises of identity on these two islands - I genuinely felt about five or six years ago it palpably felt like it was over. “There's a sadness thinking, 'Gosh it's not over, we're back with this stuff. And an anger … suddenly that you start thinking that there's a fixed amount of crazy national historical angst on the two islands and as it's gone down on one it's just kind of gone up on the other.”

At the time O'Toole was writing the book, Boris Johnson was just a backbench MP, the former leader of the Leave campaign. But he is a major figure in the narrative. Boris Johnson: 'he lacks compassion', says O'Toole. Credit:Bloomberg “You couldn't understand the whole thing without him,” says O’Toole. “He is a key figure in the campness of it.” He sees Johnson as a clown in the classic sense – not an idiot, but a smart man who has adopted a clowning persona. O’Toole hasn’t met Johnson but knows “some people who know him extremely well”, he says. “I think Boris is a psychologically damaged person. Absolutely in that he lacks compassion. He seems to lack the capacity. People who know [him] very well say that he has a sort of desperate hunger to be loved. It is sort of manic and insatiable - the sexual stuff is part of it but it's bigger than that.

Heroic Failure by Fintan O'Toole. “The biggest fear in the [British class] system is of being the oik, you know the person who is not one of ‘them’. He [fits in] by being more reckless than anybody else, because the badge of class or the real badge of privilege is you can afford to be reckless and somebody else will clean up. And I think he is an extreme expression of that.” And there is a relentless positivity that comes with it – a constant railing against the “gloomsters”, a need to deny insecurity with a “vacuous sense of greatness”. There are interesting parallels here to Trump’s “make America great again” and Morrison’s “how good is Australia”. But there is a difference, too, says O’Toole. “Boris is more haunted, you know? He’s haunted by knowing that this greatness is a thing of the past. The rhetorical need is to try to recapitulate something that they know is dead.