There is nothing I can write to better Sarah Vine’s heartfelt piece in the Mail this morning on the sundering of personal friendships by the iniquitous workings of politics:
It is a reminder (if ever we need a reminder) that the faces we see on the screen are the faces or real, flesh and blood people, doing a job, well or badly, but behind it all real people who may prefer to go home and sit with their families, go out on picnics in the summer, meet friends, with dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.
Then came the Brexit campaign.
I wrote yesterday about the sundering of society, and that it is not about the European Union. The breach is deeper. The incomprehension between two fellows otherwise fast friends can be an inherent difference and the incomprehension needs effort to comprehend and tolerate. Without both sides of the classical split, the nation falls apart, and there cannot be a single thriving society which does not have both working within it. Then come these sundering moments, and the differences appear a yawning chasm.
These are not caricatures but people, subject to the same frailties as are we all and broken-hearted at loss as anyone is.
