European Union - March of the lemmings: Brexit in print and performance, 2016-2019

I always maintain that I take on a persona when writing columns for the Observer: that of an adopted man, from a relatively normal social background, who is an obvious victim of imposter syndrome. I dont so much write the columns as transcribe them. The adopted man stands at my shoulder, just out of sight, biting his nails and chewing the inside of his face, mumbling things into my ear, some of which I mishear. He simply cant believe he is being employed by a posh left-leaning newspaper that his own parents wouldnt have read, and knows there has been some mistake. Thus, he tries to compensate by employing over-finessed language and attempting to give a good account of himself, politically and intellectually, aware that he is being scrutinised by his betters.

Obviously, as this persona is the same as me, it is not a massive stretch to channel it, although I am surprised this other me hasnt been sacked. What is true of both the columnist and the stand-up characters of me is that over the period of producing work in the interregnum between the EU referendum, in June 2016, and the supposed activation of Article 50, in March 2019, both became increasingly angry, bitter and incoherent.

Similarly, the comments on the newspaper columns included here, from members of the public who uploaded their views to social media or the papers website, while often astute in identifying weaknesses in the work, also become more frenzied as the months pass, as if we are witnessing a collective national unravelling of sense. Many of them, it is increasingly clear, are also the work of anonymous agents, perhaps hired for the purpose, intent on advancing very specific disruptive processes on behalf of unnamed paymasters.

The only voice you can trust in this entire book is the one the footnotes are written in, which seems to be pursuing its own agenda: an autobiographical unburdening intent on setting various stories straight, as if the author, now suddenly finding himself in his fifties and watching the world he knows fall apart and decay as he himself in turn falls apart and decays, can sense death on the horizon and wants to leave his personal effects in order, to minimise the inconvenience caused to his family.

And this? This is this.

I was initially brought in to the Observers Sunday funnies slot to fill in for David Mitchells absences, not, as online commenters suggest, as a replacement for Frankie Boyle and his writing team, who produced weekly columns for the Sun until September 2013, and occasional ones for the Guardian since. With so many comedians producing newspaper column content, their minor-celebrity status driving traffic through a dead medium, it does get confusing. Mark Steel in the Independent is the best of the comedian columnists, and Marina Hyde is the best of the legitimate journalist-humourists. Even though I have gradually been promoted to a fiftyfifty share of the Observer column, like a divorced dad given greater access to the kids having conquered his drinking, in my mind I will always think of it as David Mitchells column and of myself as a kind of cat that does a smell in David Mitchells lovely garden and then goes back over the fence where it belongs. I couldnt cope with the responsibility of being a newspaper columnist otherwise. My whole professional life, it seems to me as I enter my sixth decade on this planet, has been an act of cowardly retreat from commitments and opportunities, deludedly disguised as legitimate moral objections, which accidentally coalesced into a successful career. I find myself with a beautiful spouse, with a beautiful life, and I ask myself, How did I get here? And I say to myself, Great Scott! What have I done?

Unless otherwise attributed, all the readers comments are from the online editions of the publication the pieces appeared in.