Gove, Johnson & Hannan: Drinking the Potion

A few years ago, I discovered the Adam Curtis documentary The Living Dead, The Attic.

Mrs Thatcher’s former speechwriter Ronnie Millar features prominently in it.

Gove, Johnson, Hannan: I was a young Tory like them at university, and it explains to me the spell I got caught up in during the Thatcher years. It’s the mythology that they used in the Brexit campaign.

My work as a speechwriter has taught me why these ideas should be put in bottles and branded as harmful substances. I had hoped the referendum would condemn them to the oblivion they richly deserved. But I was wrong.

They have ‘subordinated reason to the heroic myth’. If you watch the Adam Curtis video, you’ll see, as Alan Clarke explains, they’ve ‘drunk the potion’.