Who are you and what have you done to my friend Britain? This is what the country’s one-time admirers from abroad — I am one — are asking as we watch it descend into increasingly vituperative politics and a policy course akin to self-sabotage.
The UK, after all, has always seemed a sensible country more interested in practical questions than grand visions. Against overblown rhetoric on the continent, it offered plain speaking. Its establishment could consistently be counted on to disarm ideological flights of fancy — whether the totalitarianism of right and left or schemes for European federalism — with a bemusement that was equal parts dull and droll.
In short, by its temperament and its political practice, Britain provided temperance in a part of the world too prone to extremes. So what happened? If that temperance has now evaporated, we who count ourselves friends of Britain (as we thought we knew it) should ask whether we were mistaken all along.