Occasional readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) may recall me mentioning Simpson's Law, a principle most pithily summed up here in February in the following terms - "if the Luvvies are in favour of something it's likely to be wrong, and, moreover, almost certain not to prevail."
I wrote then that in the EU referendum this law faced its sternest test, since I believed that although Emma Thompson, Bob Geldof and Uncle Tarquin Cobley were in favour of staying in the EU, Remain was likely to win. But it seems there is no standing in the way of the Law, for as we now know, just as with Hacked Off and the Alternative Vote, the Luvvies lost.
Serendipitously just as this occurred to me the Times has published a magisterial article by (go on, guess) Libby Purves (yes, I know) entitled rather cruelly Hysterical lefties really need to grow up. It's here. With apologies to Mr Murdoch, here are some choice extracts.
The carry-on was beyond parody: anguished bunker-mentality tinged with patronising, generalising hauteur about those who voted Leave . . . This reached its apogee with the telly critic AA Gill decrying fuddy-duddy Britain as opposed to "the Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch". He concluded that the only people thinking of Brexit were "old philistine scared gits" (Mr Gill is 62 tomorrow. There's a lot of down-wid-da-kidzery in all this). . . Of all the culturati the only sharp pre-vote voice was our Richard Morrison: "The arts world prides itself on its diversity, inclusivity, open-mindedness and constant efforts to reach out to all. Yet at the very moment when Britain decides its future, hardly anyone in the arts seems to understand, let alone agree with, the opinion of at least half the population."
Once we had Orwell and Priestley: now, it is almost comic to watch the affluent metropolitan left being cross with the zero-hours strugglers of Sunderland for disrespecting the instructions of a Tory PM and big business. . . . The really shameful thing is for those who purport to be socialist humanitarians to demonise 17 1/2 million people: patronising them as stupidly "deceived", or writing them off as racist, bigoted malicious or just old . . .
Purves quotes Chesterton: "Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget/For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet". OK, they may have spoken wrong and plunged us into difficulties. But it is not fair to blame them more than the arrogant, incompetent Brussels institutions and the decades when governments neglected inequality.
Amen to all of that. There's a lot more swingeing stuff which is a pleasure to read and re-read. Libby Purves. Who knew? I'll never switch off You and Yours again.
Meanwhile, Simpson's Law rides off into the sunset, unvanquished.
