Richard North beyond redemption

A quick visit to Richard 'friendly fire' North's padded cell. There has been no improvement in the condition of the patient, in fact, it's getting worse. The most recent background is here and here, but a reminder of the psychiatric case notes may be useful:

He campaigned for many years for the UK to leave the EU. He wanted a Brexit referendum, but hated UKIP and particularly Nigel Farage. When UKIP forced a worried Cameron to call a referendum, North did everything he could to attack UKIP and to sabotage the arguments of the Leave campaign, offering much succour to their opponents. There could only be one C.O. in the Brexit campaign and that had to be Richard North.

His inability to compromise on anything that his titanic ego dreamed up and his skill at offending everyone – even former friends such as Owen Paterson MP – meant that no one in any position took him seriously. He made himself toxic. Those who didn't accept in its entirety his politically impossible plan to stay in the single market (=EU) became targets for venomous insults.

He produced a frequently updated plan running to many hundreds of pages that he called 'Flexcit' and further hundreds of pages in 'monographs'. He prides himself on the number of downloads Flexcit has had through all its versions. Perhaps the fact that it still had no impact despite all the downloads would suggest to a more thoughtful, reflective person that it was not a very good or popular plan.

Since the moment when, to his great surprise, Leave won the referendum, he has spent every waking hour sabotaging the Leave position, because… well, reasons ditto. From his point of view the UK needed to stay in the single market (=EU) for an unspecified amount of time in order to allow everyone time to synchronise clipboards.

He goes to remainers, remoaners, the EU and the European media for his information. He likes the idea that the skilled and cultured Europeans are looking down with contempt on their UK opposite numbers, for he believes that everyone on the UK side is a fool, an incompetent, a simple-minded ignoramus. The media and their commentators are mere children. No one listens to him, everyone is against him – in which belief he is correct.

Nearly every day he tosses up some tiny EU regulation that will lead to catastrophe if the British idiots ignore it: no food on shelves, no airline flights, no working customs posts, etc. He spits bile at the idiots who cannot see this. The only redeeming feature of his rants is the occasional inadvertent humour that arises from his total lack of self-awareness.

He recently took the Telegraph columnist Juliet Samuel to task for using the word 'bonkers': 'There is something ineffably[!] unserious about it, which betrays a like character in its user'. Well, if that is true, then what does the barrage of coarse abuse that North directs at Samuel tell us about his character?

For example: 'the egregious[sic] Juliet regales her smart dinner party guests', 'metropolitan clever-dicks', 'la Samuel is allowed to visit her ignorance upon us', 'sails over the head of la Samuel', 'This piece of stupidity', 'Stupid to the last', 'her ignorance, bound up with the arrogance that afflicts her type', 'a haughty indifference' – which makes 'bonkers' seem rather mild.

Juliet Samuel, for all her egregiousness[sic], gets a regular paid opinion column in the Telegraph. Richard North is shunned. I wonder why? You don't think this anger comes just from jealousy, do you? A reasoned response to Samuel's article might have got published somewhere and influenced someone, but vicious insults are part of the character that he betrays in everything he writes.

In a moment of despair recently he put up a piece about having posted articles day in and day out for years, all to no purpose, so he was going off to build Airfix models. Unfortunately he was back the next day.

He has no influence, so we should just ignore him here, but he really is a pain in the neck. Since he can't be the C.O. he is essentially firing from behind the trenches at the front lines of what is nominally his own side, supplying the remainers and remoaners with many specious arguments to use as ammunition and offering much comfort to the enemy. For years he has blocked commenters on his site who disagree with him, so his arguments and the way he presents them never get tested or contradicted by criticism or dissent.