Since arriving in the UK, I have always been struck—and often unsettled—by the English obsession with the Second World War. Nowhere else in Europe is the memory of conflict so ritualised, or so suffused with moral self-congratulation. In Britain, commemoration frequently transforms into a celebration of national superiority, woven through with a peculiar nostalgia and self-pity for a lost era of imperial greatness. Self-criticism, by contrast, is rarely invited. In over twenty years here, I have seldom witnessed any public reckoning with the violence, brutality, or cruelty inflicted during Britain’s colonial adventures in India, Kenya, or South Africa.

It is precisely this phenomenon that Fintan O’Toole dissects so incisively in Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. O’Toole offers a penetrating diagnosis of the neurotic search for lost English identity as a driving force behind Brexit. Drawing on a wealth of anecdotes and cultural references—from war movies to tabloid headlines—he exposes the distinct “structure of feeling” at play, one oscillating between post-imperial grandiosity and wounded victimhood. As Alex Clark notes in the TLS, O’Toole deftly traces how World War II has become the backdrop for a national melodrama, providing a ready-made script for contemporary tales of martyrdom: a former imperial power now recasting itself as the besieged underdog, heroically resisting the imaginary “soft-Nazi” oppression of a European superstate, while at the same time flirting with delusions of a revived “Empire 2.0” in the Anglosphere.

Central to O’Toole’s thesis is the idea that the pinnacle of English heroism now lies in the stoic embrace of self-inflicted failure. He describes a sado-masochistic dynamic of dominance and submission, where England both craves recognition and cultivates a narrative of perpetual grievance: “they hate us because we saved them.” Brexit thus becomes a theater of “sadopopulism,” as Ivan Krastev calls it, where freedom is oddly intertwined with the ritual of national self-harm. The precise content of EU policy is almost irrelevant; what matters is the performance of moral superiority, even at the cost of real damage. The yawning gap between the myth of British liberty and the historical realities of empire is quietly ignored. In this climate, the call to “take back control” is less a program than a performance: a grand refusal to yield imagined moral ground, even if it means courting ruin. Hurt yourself if you truly love your country! Take back control! Driven by insidious racism and the reckless mendacity of a shameless political class, England defiantly embarks on a mission as rebellious as it is senseless—determined to salvage such grandiose symbols of national greatness as prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps.

O’Toole is clear-eyed about legitimate frustrations with the EU—he acknowledges that anger at bureaucracy is not a psychosis but a sign of political engagement. Yet, he masterfully reveals the deeper irony: a self-serving political elite stokes nationalism and grievance, all the while protecting themselves from the real-life consequences of the very policies they champion. As numerous critics have observed, the class most eager to tear up environmental and labour protections—the so-called “red tape”—is also the one most insulated from their removal. Brexit, O’Toole argues, was never meant to “work” in any practical sense. It was, at heart, a drama of protest and spectacle. Figures like Boris Johnson (“King Brexit”) wielded Brussels-bashing not to clarify or solve, but to stir up commotion for personal gain. As O’Toole puts it, Johnson’s very shamelessness is the point: his lies cannot simply be “exposed,” because exposure presumes a shared standard of shame that no longer applies. As Jonathan Coe observed in the Irish Times, O’Toole’s reading of Johnson as a performer—one whose jokes are not means to an end, but ends in themselves—remains both devastating and powerful.

But what, then, is the solution? As post-referendum surveys showed, it was “England without London”—the regions most deeply attached to English identity and most alienated from Whitehall and Westminster—that vented their fury on Brussels. Yet, as O’Toole points out, the “overthrow” of an imaginary EU tyranny was never going to result in genuine national liberation. England’s existential drama, performed with a kind of burlesque malice as a “crisis of belonging to Europe,” is, at root, a crisis of belonging full stop. Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, with their sharper post-imperial identities, are spectators to an English psychodrama. England, he suggests, “never got over winning the war”—and will only find peace when it finally does.

This is a delightful and at times wickedly funny book, but also a deeply sobering one. For those who suspected that Brexit was more than just political imbecility, O’Toole provides a compelling diagnosis: it is a psychological drama, rooted in myth, nostalgia, and grievance, that can only be resolved when England finally faces itself.

Critical perspectives:
Some critics—especially those sympathetic to Brexit or wary of cultural psychoanalysis—argue that O’Toole overstates the power of myth and underplays real material grievances, from economic dislocation to democratic deficit. Others, like Philip Collins in The Times, suggest that the book may comfort Remainers more than persuade Leavers, and warn of an occasionally patronising tone toward Englishness. These objections are not without merit; yet, in hindsight, O’Toole’s captured a real emotional grammar of Brexit—nostalgia weaponised as grievance—even if he left economic and regional complexities less explored. Tellingly, his warning that Brexit’s costs would fall heaviest on its most vulnerable supporters has only grown more prescient, as subsequent years have shown.

#Brexit #FintanOToole #EnglishIdentity #PoliticsOfPain #PostImperialNostalgia