After Brexit, I was abused for driving a car with French plates. Britain is on the verge of a nervous breakdown

The vote to Leave was a vote against London, not Brussels: a vote for 'identity' and 'control' and 'jobs' after decades of industrial decline. What had any of that to do with the EU?

John Lichfield attending his daughter's graduation ceremony

Symbolically, it was Durham “wot won it” .The Sunderland result – 61 per cent Leave, 39 per cent Remain – sent sterling into free fall on Brexit night. The country has been in a tail-spin ever since.

Four days after the vote, I found myself in Durham Cathedral, that great Norman-Roman edifice on a rocky bend in the river Wear, 18 miles upstream from Sunderland. I had travelled through England in a French-registered car to attend my daughter’s graduation at the University of Durham.

I found my country – and especially my own north country, solid, dependable and pragmatic – on the verge of a nervous breakdown. On three occasions in five days, I was abused because I was driving a French car. That has only ever happened to me once in my life before.

The local papers in the North-east carried interviews with Nissan car factory workers in Sunderland who had voted Leave and now feared for their jobs. On several occasions I met people who had voted Leave and regretted it. It was apparent that they not followed the campaign or understood what they were voting for.

One intelligent woman, the mother of another graduate, said she had voted Leave but was horrified to find that the country had agreed with her. Her daughter, who had studied in Europe under an EU Erasmus grant, was furious with her mum. What were her chances of finding a job now?

Anguished debate raged on the car radio about the European Union. I have covered the EU on and off for 35 years. I have rarely heard such a passionate and well-argued discussion about Brussels et al: how it really works; its failings; the dangers of leaving it. Too late.

At the graduation ceremony the Vice Chancellor of Durham University Professor Stuart Corbridge gave a pointed and moving speech. He must have given it a half dozen times as different groups of students graduated during the week.

He referred to Durham as a “tiny corner of north western Europe” that had played an important role in the “European enlightenment”. He referred to the many Durham graduates scattered throughout the EU. “We are very proud of them,” he said. “And nothing changes because of the events of last week.”

In front of me, there was local man in his 50s whose daughter was also graduating. Every time the Vice-Chancellor said “Europe”, his shoulders stiffened in anger.

First, I should declare my own interest: I was born in a city, Stoke-on-Trent, which voted overwhelmingly for Leave. I was trained as a journalist in a town, Bolton, which voted overwhelmingly for Leave. My father was Mancunian. My mother was Belgian. My wife is Irish. My three children, brought up largely in France, have British and Irish passports. They find to their surprise, now they are grown up, that they are rather French and definitely European.

They are like the “Yugoslavs”, the people who mourned their south Slav homeland when it broke up into national tribes in the 1990s. The four million Britons who have signed a petition calling for a second EU referendum are also “Yugoslavs”. Many of them, it seems, never considered themselves European until Britain, or just over half of Britain, decided to walk out on Europe.

From 1980 I was a freelance in Brussels working for Irish newspapers and The Daily Telegraph. One of my successors as Telegraph correspondent was Boris Johnson. I have never met Boris but heard many stories about his career in Brussels: the anti-EU stories that he invented or exaggerated beyond all reason or professional morality. I went to Brussels as a Eurosceptic (in Margaret Thatcher’s “money back” days) and left as a pragmatic, critical pro-European. It seemed to me – and still seems to me – that the EU is a muddled answer to a legitimate question, which cannot easily be answered in any other way.

If the Europeans were to invent the EU from scratch, it might take a somewhat different form but would end up with the same strengths and the same weaknesses. It is absurd to say. as the Brexiteers say, that the EU “cannot be reformed”. It has changed enormously since I was first there in the 1980s. The butter and wheat moutains are no more. The single market is a reality, not an aim. The eastern Europeans have been brought back into the democratic family of Europe.

All of these things were once British objectives. All have been delivered. Apart from the single currency – probably a mistake – the EU has been “reformed” to British design.

I have great sympathy for the many northern and midland towns, my own people, who voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. From conversations last week, it seems to me that this was not simply an anti-migrant vote.

It was a vote against London rather than Brussels: a vote for “identity” and “control” and “jobs” after decades of being hollowed out by industrial decline and neglected or patronised by British governments. What had any of that to do with the EU?

The manageress of a pub in Consett, just north of Durham city, said that the “overwhelming” bar-room opinion pre-referendum was “We want to be British again”. After the vote, she said, that the overwhelming opinion was “Oh bugger. We made a mistake. They (the Brexiteers) lied to us.”

After decades of vicious disinformation about the EU in the UK popular media, the result was perhaps inevitable. The Daily Mail said that the campaign was characterised by “vicious animosity, crass hyperbole and risible dishonesty”. In my experience, that describes perfectly the Mail coverage of the EU, not just in the referendum campaign but for the past 30 years.

What has been more surprising, and encouraging, has been the outpouring of pro-European passion from all those young British “Yugoslavs”.

Too late now, mes amis. Or is it? In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen says: “First the verdict and then the trial.” In Britain, it seemed, we had the vote and then we had the debate. For Sunderland, read Wonderland.