In the weeks before an election – never mind the week after – it is normal for politicians and journalists to rush excitedly round the country to divine the mood of the populace … and discover it is one of total indifference.
Seven days after the referendum, I wandered into Manteli’s cafe in Kings Norton and asked the owner if her customers were still discussing it. Sharon Hind looked at me as if I were a visitor from a distant and not very clued-up planet. “All week,” she sighed. “You should have been here just now. There were four of them. Sitting there. At it.”
This is Birmingham, the 50-50 city, with a Leave majority of less than 4,000 out of 450,000 votes. And Kings Norton is thought of as a 50-50 kind of suburb – £600,000 houses on one side, the troubled Hawkesley estate on the other. It even has split-council representation: two Labour, one Conservative.
The centre does feel quite Tory: it’s all set around a lime tree-fringed green, and flanked by the city’s largest cluster of medieval buildings and a score of shops where people gather to chat. And this week there has only been one topic.
“The referendum’s all they ever talk about now,” said Lauren in the Hair Shop, a bit wistfully. “It’s usually where they’re going on holiday.” Sharon Ryan, in the newsagents, reported: “There was a brief break on Tuesday morning when people moaned about the football, but then it started again.”
Charlie Evans, in Evans estate agents, has had fewer inquirers than usual this week, but several had rung to call off or postpone deals; in one baffling case, she said, a potential seller wanted to take a house off the market because prices might fall. “Have you spoken to anyone who now regrets what they’ve brought about?” I asked. “My husband. And quite a few others.”
The eclipse of the football – never mind poor, forgotten Wimbledon – as a subject of conversation might seem bizarre, but then compared to the manoeuvrings of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jeremy Corbyn, England losing to Iceland belongs to an age when everything seemed rational and predictable.
There has never been a week like this. And it is hard to find any great national convulsion that might stand any kind of comparison: the aftermath of Diana’s death? The Suez crisis? The fall of Neville Chamberlain? The abdication of Edward VIII? … nothing quite works.
The House of Windsor wobbled on the weekend of Diana’s funeral, but it was a momentary tremor rather than a full-blown earthquake. Many of these events, just like the 2003 Iraq war, engendered enormous bitterness and sometimes lasting enmities between former friends. But the fallout was largely confined to the political class. Often very little information filtered outwards. On this occasion there has been information, of a kind, spewing forth 24 hours a day. But, as people in Kings Norton – and elsewhere – have complained, it was almost all confusing and bogus.
Hind summed it up: “Both sides lied, both sides spun.” And I certainly never found a straightforward digest of the arguments to present to my newly enfranchised 18-year-old: certainly not the government’s outrageous propaganda leaflet, nor even the Electoral Commission’s fair-minded but scant and ill-presented summary.
It is hardly surprising that, as the voters’ reasoning has emerged, it has turned out to be intensely personal and evanescent, more suited to a byelection than the most important public choice they will ever make. It may be the most important choice of all – certainly more consequential than buying a house; you might say second only to deciding who to marry – but, even if that turns out to be wrong, it is easier to escape from that jam than the one Britain has now created for itself.
Two of the shops round Kings Norton green are tattoo parlours. The older of the two, Eighty-Six, is owned by Natalie Farren. It’s a jolly kind of place, though, and there I found Farren’s friend Jason Fletcher, who had popped in (for a chat, not a tat) and was seriously repentant of his decision to vote Leave.
Fletcher, as his badges proclaim, is an animal rights activist, and he voted in protest against the EU record on the issue. “I’ve been getting really upset the past week. And if I voted again, I would go against my ethical principles. My first thought was about the animals. Now I’m thinking about people’s jobs.”
A couple of women came in, contemplating additions to their already extensive gallery of body art. So Farren showed them her catalogue, stressing that these were merely examples and they could make their own requests. Luckily perhaps, no one has yet asked to have Brexit etched into their forearm, since second thoughts on this subject seem to be coming rather fast. But Farren’s customers are talking about it, and she encourages that. It helps them relax, she says.
Thus Kings Norton’s businesses, even the most improbable, find themselves functioning as therapists for a community that, like thousands of others, finds itself disorientated and confused. The ward voted 60-40 to Leave, evidently because there is not a large student community, and the non-white and migrant population is below the city average. Regrets? Kings Norton has got a few. But not too few to mention.
Diagonally across the green from Eighty-Six is Kings Norton’s oldest place of resort in a crisis: St Nicolas’ Church, which has witnessed every national trauma since at least the reign of King John. The rector, Reverend Larry Wright, is new to the parish but not to Birmingham, having moved a few weeks ago from the inner city. Last Sunday, he said, many of his parishioners were very emotional. “One person told me he saw the vote as a betrayal of everything he stood for. We were heading to be not just Little England but Mean Little England.”
The rector was still working on this Sunday’s sermon: “I want to emphasise that there is something in the British character that is quite capable of being implacably non-conformist. But also that it moves back quite quickly to a moderate view of the world. There may have had to be a cathartic moment before we can move back to that. Something needed to break so we can face the future, wherever that takes us.”
I thought this was very shrewd. We have not spent much time examining what effect it might have had on the country if Cameron’s ploy succeeded and Remain had won narrowly. Britain was a pot that needed to boil over. Now it has.
I wandered back to the estate agent. “I’ve just had another call,” said Charlie Evans. “A buyer has pulled out saying there was a recession.” Then I returned to Manteli’s for the all-day breakfast. “Do you mind everyone banging on about politics?” I asked Hind. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m used to it. My daughter’s a politics graduate.”
