Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

By Fintan O'Toole

'A wildly entertaining but uncomfortable read... Pitilessly brilliant' JONATHAN COE.
'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR.

'A quite brilliant dissection of the cultural roots of the Brexit narrative' David Miliband.
'Hugely entertaining and engrossing' Roddy Doyle.
'Best book about the English that I've read for ages' Billy Bragg.

A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and engages in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism.

Trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact came to define the style of an entire political elite; a country that once had colonies redefined itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation.

Fintan O'Toole also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster. Now failure is no longer heroic – it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters.

A new afterword lays out the essential reforms that are urgently needed if England is to have a truly democratic future and stable relations with its nearest neighbours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789541007

Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole is the author of Heroic Failure, Ship of Fools, A Traitor's Kiss, White Savage and other acclaimed books. He is a columnist for the Irish Times and the Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University. He writes regularly for the Guardian, New York Review of Books, New York Times and other British and American journals.

Reviews for Heroic Failure

[arewenotben · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Probably the best writing I've read on Brexit; engaging, insightful and frequently laugh out loud funny. O'Toole breaks down notions of English identity and the Brexit ideology, often using examples from films and novels to dig into ideas of how we came to where we are now. Highly recommend.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is primarily a book about the rhetoric that was used in the referendum campaign by the proponents of "Leave", looking at the background and origin of the tropes used and the ways they worked with voters, as well as the reasons why the success of the campaign has been such an embarrassment to the Brexiteers, and why they can't possibly deliver whatever it was that the people voting for them were hoping for. O'Toole writes from the point of view of a critical outsider with a sharp eye for literary and cultural subtexts and a long experience of the newspaper world. He lays into Boris Johnson's lies with gusto and obvious enjoyment (but still manages to underestimate Johnson's capacity for bouncing back from deep disgrace into public life...), whilst drawing interesting parallels between Johnson's style and that of Enoch Powell. Whilst O'Toole is no enthusiast for the EU (he hasn't forgiven it for what it did to Greece, Ireland and Portugal after the financial crisis), he is clear that leaving it can be nothing other than a major act of self-harm for the UK. But intentional self-harm can be a very attractive thing in certain situations — he's at least half-serious when he draws a parallel with the popularity of Fifty shades of grey, and very serious when he argues that Brexit is the same kind of self-defeating rebellion as punk. When you feel powerless to change things, an act of self-harm puts you in a position to make yourself the centre of attention. And of course this links into the English cult of heroic failure, which he sees as a way for a dominant, colonising nation to appropriate the moral high-ground of the colonial victims — the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage, Michael Caine and the Zulus, etc. Johnson opportunistically took up "Leave" in the certainty that it would be a glorious flop and that his "selfless" engagement with it would earn him credit with a large section of the party. O'Toole quotes Sarah Vine's famous comment to her husband Michael Gove on the morning after the referendum: ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ — a line from The Italian job, a film whose relevance to Brexit O'Toole also has a lot of fun deconstructing. The book concludes with a warning that the Leave vote overwhelmingly came from people who self-identify as "English" rather than "British", and who feel the current political system in the UK doesn't take any account of that identity. O'Toole urges politicians on the left and centre to find a way to talk to those people and take English nationalism away from the exclusive province of the far right before it's too late. Presumably his next book will be about how Jeremy Corbyn failed to do that...

[antao-3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I’ve pointed out previously that main reason for Brexit is because Britain (or rather England) simply does not understand what the EU is about.Johnson’s jokes about the EU and, Germany’s, and his expansionist plans, captures the general sense of distrust in England. I think the obsession with centralised power is really at the heart of Brexit and the British misunderstanding about the EU. And the reason for this misunderstanding is that British people seem to see the EU the same way that they saw the British empire or other European colonial empires. The single biggest difference between the EU and the previous European colonial empires (of which the British was one) was the degree of centralisation. The way the European colonial empires were set up was that all of the orders came from London, Madrid, Brussels and Lisbon and all resources and powers were repatriated back there. Eventually this level of piss taking caught up with the European powers who ended up going to war with each other and with their colonies. Between the two world wars most of these colonial powers, particularly Germany, were forced to realise a new humility. That humility has under-pinned most of the European co-operation since. The British Empire, to its credit, never really got its comeuppance. Therefore, there was never really a period of reflection. It's noticeable that most English people, in addition to their ignorance about the recent history in Northern Ireland, are also seemingly blissfully unaware of the British Empire's role in the build up to WW1. For them it was "Just them Germans doing what they do". We the Portuguese know all about large empires. Britain on the other hand, the largest empire at the time, was enjoying "Splendid Isolation", and was not stepping on anyone's toes. Large empires never step on toes. Nobody can actually tell when the British Empire ended (I can tell you when the Portuguese Empire ended though). People cite WW2, the Suez Crisis and the return of Hong Kong to China. Indeed Brexit might be its end. Because of the empire went out with a whimper rather than a bang there was never really a moment to reflect on the good and the bad. Both are key. Brexit has shown up the lack of confidence some British people have in their own country and culture. When your national dish is curry then it's more difficult to identify what is that makes you British. And this complex has prevented Britain from taking a more active role in the EU. But the country that was the center of one of the greatest empires should be full of confidence. Equally however many British are completely unaware of the negative aspects of the empire and seem to think it was some kind benevolent conqueror rather than actively engaged in ethnic cleansings (like all empires).The result is this kind of uneasy arrogance. Like the school bully who is abused at home. Britain is about to get a good kicking thanks to people, mainly English, whose sense of superiority has not caught up with realpolitik.Johnson seeks to define Britain's relationship with the EU as a war. So for Tosser Johnson, the EU is the enemy and anyone who isn't on Johnson's side is a 'collaborator'. So, the English should get ready for food rationing. Johnson is a fucking idiot. I am proud to say I am a citizen of the world and a collaborator with the EU. Tosser Johnson does not speak for me. At the coming snap Brexit election, were I English, I’d vote for a party that would unambiguously support remaining in the EU. And so should all remainers.Johnson has no intention of getting a deal. The deal that is acceptable to the Brexiter cultists does not and cannot exist, and is impossible to achieve because they are still fully immersed in their cake-ist delusion. The only option left for Johnson is to go for broke with a GE win by blaming the EU for not giving the British the cake that they voted for. By creating and repeating the same massive, but carefully focused, lie that No Deal is the fault of the EU they hope to attract enough of Brexit votes to get a majority. And given how easily fooled the leave voting public are he might very well win unless the opposition sort themselves out and stop their petty in fighting.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't given the chance to vote in the historic referendum of 2016. I was living in Poland then, as I am now (but will I continue to live here if we leave with no deal? That's such a huge question...); had I been living in Britain in 2016 with my Polish wife back then, I'd have been given a vote, but my wife, as a European citizen, would not have been. In general, the way the referendum was set up was a complete mess, and we are living with that mess now and for the next few generations too, I imagine.Fintan O'Toole's fine book looks at that mess, and sets it in its correct historical place - Brexit, after all, did not emerge from nothing, but rather seems to have stemmed from something that is innate in Englishness. Note that I do not say Britishness - and O'Toole makes this the central point in his concluding chapters, suggesting that, in the way that Brexit marks the rewinding of colonial history, the time must surely be arriving when the English will embrace their nationality, instead of subsuming it within the larger, though indistinct, notion of Britain.Overall, a tremendously good book.