Don’t call Brexit a divorce, said Theresa May recently. “I prefer not to use the term of divorce from the European Union because very often when people get divorced they don’t have a very good relationship afterwards,” she explained to parliament. And indeed, in her subsequent passive-aggressive article 50 letter to European council president Donald Tusk, she insisted Britain was the EU’s “closest friend and neighbour”, albeit a friend who was storming out of the EU dinner party because he didn’t like the number of foreigners among the guests. At the same time, the friend was whining over his shoulder that he really wanted a “deep and special partnership” in the future – a phrase repeated in May’s letter an embarrassingly needy six times.
May’s comment, however, did not stop everyone and their dog from continuing to call Brexit a divorce. It would necessarily be a “painful” divorce after 40 years of marriage, though some said the marriage had always been “loveless” and others hoped its ending could still be “amicable”. But what exactly is the change in our status going to mean, romantically speaking? It would certainly be accounted odd if a married couple were to get divorced just so they could then enter into a “deep” and “special” civil partnership.
Other metaphors for Britain’s exit have been tried – it is a “tragedy”, suggested some, though a tragedy usually involves a noble person laid low by a fatal flaw, rather than a flouncing idiot committing pointless self-harm. Others pictured the EU as a cake, which we could not, it turns out, both have and eat. The constellation of divorce metaphors is, however, seemingly irresistible. Britain is, after all, leaving a “union”; and seeking a “settlement” with the EU, with “terms” ostensibly agreeable to both parties, though one is already chafing at the prospect of a hefty “divorce bill”, even if the lawyers, as usual, are licking their lips.
The language of romance, doomed or otherwise, has long been part of the rhetoric of both domestic politics and international relations. Politicians may make “overtures” to rival leaders, which if successful can lead to them being “in bed with” each other. They may experience tiffs and reconciliations – or, like a timid doormat with no self-respect, they may spend decades insisting that they have a “special relationship” with the more powerful partner. When such relationships go wrong it is a “split” or a “breakup”, in which countries who used to have hot sex together now sit around dolefully listening to 1970s acoustic singer-songwriters. The common resort to such imagery by the media is a synecdoche for the larger, endemic problem of political coverage in our time: its default mode is to treat politics as though it were a soap opera, voyeuristically focusing on personalities, armchair psychology and gossip, attacking reasonable changes of mind as “U-turns” or “humiliating climbdowns”, and in general portraying matters of state in the manner of cheap daytime TV drama, rather than doing the more difficult, and democratically responsible, job of analysing policy.
It is at least thankfully rare that the potential creepiness of “relationship” language in politics spills over into inappropriate physical contact between leaders, such as the moment when George W Bush decided to give Angela Merkel an unsolicited massage, or when Donald Trump grabbed Theresa May’s hand (because he is afraid either of stairs or of independent-minded women). But to mask the realities of power plays in realpolitik with the language of romantic relationships is at once weirdly infantilising and actively misleading. The few politicians who actually act in the erratic manner of lovers newly found or spurned – Trump, say, or Kim Jong-un – are the most dangerous. We might pay the rest the respect of thinking that they are considering the issues with a clear-eyed rationality, even if that is often just a fond wish: it is an ideal, at least, to which they should be held.
“We are leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe,” May assured Donald Tusk, which can only mean that she has soberly decided not to affix massive engines to the east coast of Britain and literally drive the whole island out into the middle of the Atlantic. So the separated parties, she hopes, will continue to live next door to each other and enjoy a deep and special partnership of the most meaningful kind. In which case, what exactly was the point of the divorce, again?
