Who is to blame for Brexit? Bernard-Henri Lévy asked during a flamboyant performance at a Henry Jackson Society event at Westminster on Tuesday afternoon. Immaculate in his trademark unbuttoned white shirt and well-cut dark-grey suit, tanned and with his thick hair elaborately combed over, the French philosopher-journalist expressed “great concern and anxiety” about Brexit and the decline of Europe. His address was a lament and a sustained accusation. “Who is to blame?” he asked again and again. “Those who voted. Those who lied to the voters for sure. Those foreign leaders from the extreme right [he cited Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump] who encouraged it.” He never once mentioned David Cameron as one of the guilty men of Brexit but the former prime minister was implicated in much of what was said, all the same.
Lévy, or “BHL”, as he is known, also scourged the “excessive progressivism” of the European Union as well as those politicians and bureaucrats who with “eyes shut” were prepared to “sit quietly in the back seat of history” believing that “the European project was insinuated in the providential course of history”. BHL said that the leaders of the Remain campaign made, at best, only a merchant’s case for staying in the EU. They were never able to say that “Europe is great, because they did not feel it”. (At times, he conflated Europe and the EU; the UK of course remains of the former if for not much longer of the latter.) The Remainers suffered from a lack of soul, of ideas and of spirit. You might say that BHL suffers from a surfeit of all of these. “For Europe,” he said, “Brexit is worse than for the United Kingdom. I cannot imagine a Europe without the spirit, the participation, the involvement and the inspiration of the UK.” For now, he concluded sadly, we must wander in the “field of ruins” that is the European dream.
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