That an author appearing at a book festival has written something worth reading is usually taken for granted. Whether they can hold a large audience is another question.

Anthony Seldon, the historian, commentator and educator, gave a consummate performance built around his new edited collection, The Brexit Effect, 2016-2026, which brings together essays from a range of contributors on the referendum and its consequences. The veteran BBC journalist Brian Taylor, steered the conversation with a light touch. Both men remarked on the ‘tremendous turnout’ in the Courtyard Theatre, and the goodwill lasted throughout the hour, which passed quickly despite the heat in the tent and heavy rain battering the canvas outside.

A warm reception, despite the rain

Throughout, Seldon embraced the Festival atmosphere, leaning into comic asides and references, with timing better than several comedians I saw during the Fringe. He opened by joking that he was glad to be in Glasgow, before describing Edinburgh as his ‘favourite city in Europe’. He was hardly short of goodwill in the room. 

Reading the audience

One of his worst experiences as a public speaker, he said, came in Henley, Boris Johnson’s former constituency. He had failed to notice that almost everyone in the room was a committed Brexiteer with little patience for his sceptical and reasoned position. In Edinburgh, Seldon repeatedly tested the room with show-of-hands questions about Brexit and soon established that most of those in front of him were Remain voters, many of whom would like to see the UK rejoin the EU as soon as possible. When he later asked how many wanted the UK to rejoin, around 95 per cent of hands went up.

That reading of the audience shaped the discussion. Seldon felt he needed to explain why Brexit had happened in the first place, while also making the point that a book festival audience is not representative of the country as a whole. He returned more than once to people who felt ‘left out’ of the centres of power and influence, and to the resentment he said the Leave campaign had exploited with considerable skill.Though weaponised, these resentments were genuine and justified. 

Why Brexit still divides

Seldon argued that Brexit had been ‘deeply divisive’ in 2016 and had remained so ever since. He described it as the most significant political event in Britain since 1945. People remain ‘so invested’ in their view of Brexit that the position they take has become part of their identity, making it difficult to reach an honest judgement about whether Brexit has succeeded or failed. He also argued that the debate had been dominated by the ‘predominance of emotion’ rather than reasoned argument.

Part of the difficulty, in his view, is that Brexit sits awkwardly with the overlapping identities most people actually have. He mentioned his own Scottish and Ukrainian ancestry as an example of an identity that does not fit easily into the binary politics of a yes/ no referendum. Aware that he was speaking largely to a Remain audience, Seldon was careful to say that ’emotion was on both sides’. It was not simply a matter of reason versus emotion. He argued that Remain’s leadership had been arrogant and out of touch with the ‘deep hurt’ felt by people who believed decisions were being imposed on them by remote institutions such as the EU. Immigration and the aftermath of the financial crisis had fed that resentment. He also believed the EU had made a serious mistake by not offering David Cameron’s government more concessions before the vote. A greater willingness to respect views different from one’s own, he suggested, might have changed the result and lowered the temperature of what followed. 

Ten lost years

Taylor and Seldon then moved through specific areas of policy. On the economy, Seldon said it was ‘almost impossible’ to regard Brexit as an economic success, pointing to the damage experienced by small businesses and by the ‘most vulnerable’ members of society. He linked this to what he called ’10 lost years’ in British politics, which he said could be seen in crumbling public infrastructure and a wider sense of national decline. On immigration, he said border security had become much more prominent in political debate, while it was difficult to identify a clear benefit that Brexit had actually delivered. Yet, he noted, Brexiteers had largely escaped blame for that failure.

A referendum without rules

For Seldon, the deeper problem lay in the ‘catastrophic way’ the whole process had been handled. Leave campaigners were never required to set out a detailed plan for what Brexit would actually mean. The term therefore remained remarkably flexible, capable of meaning different things to different audiences. Seldon described this as a ‘big error’ that worked heavily in Leave’s favour.

During the Q&A, an audience member asked whether the referendum should have included a minimum percentage of the electorate threshold, as happened with the 1979 Scottish devolution vote. Seldon thought it would have helped and used the question to make a wider point: there is ‘no agreed structure’ for referendums in the British system, which he described as still basically ‘alien to our system’. Cameron, he argued, avoided discussing thresholds because he wanted to ‘force it through’ without delay. Seldon described the referendum itself as ‘ill conceived’ and ‘amateurish’.

He was equally critical of the campaign. Remain’s effort, he said, had been ‘terrible’. Cameron, Seldon argued, was too frightened of the Conservative press to make a positive case for EU membership and had never been particularly interested in the issue in the first place. Seldon suggested that Cameron had hoped that dealing with Scottish independence and EU membership in quick succession would allow him to get back to what he really wanted to do, ‘the important stuff’, including his Big Society agenda. Brexit instead became ‘a distraction’ from which he never recovered. Seldon showed little sympathy for him on this point.

He was also critical of Labour’s role, arguing that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership weakened the Remain case (Corbyn came from the Eurosceptic Bennite faction). A more capable and clearly pro-EU figure such as Gordon Brown, whom Seldon believes history will judge kindly, might have produced a different campaign and perhaps a different result.

A dangerous age, and the worst prime ministers

Asked whether the UK might one day rejoin the EU, Seldon thought it unlikely for at least 20 years, despite the overwhelming show of hands in the room. His preference would instead be for closer ties with the rest of Europe, which he saw as a defence against what he called a ‘dangerous, sinister age’. He cited Russian influence, the rise of autocracy and what he described as democracy being ‘in recession’, including in established democracies such as the United States. He compared the current situation with George Orwell’s 1984, with large power blocs competing for control; a return to the 1930s. 

Seldon has long followed the fortunes of the Conservative Party, co-editing Conservative Century, which examined ‘the dominant force in twentieth-century British politics’. This dominance seems very much under threat, manifested in Seldon’s book on the most recent Conservative Prime Minister, Sunak At 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister? In order to avoid marginalisation as an electoral force, Seldon urged the Conservative Party to ‘hug the centre’ rather than move further right. Kemi Badenoch, he said, remained ‘still in hock’ to the Brexiteer hard right wing of the party. 

A lot of murky stuff

While Seldon conceded that the strand of thinking represented by Reform was a significant one, he was unconvinced of its viability as a potential party of government. He described ‘a lot of murky stuff’ surrounding Reform and the Vote Leave campaign and accused much of the media of being ‘poisonously anti-EU’. The BBC, he said, had ‘remained a voice of reason’ despite the attacks it had faced. For Seldon, this was part of a wider assault on truth. He drew a parallel with the 1930s, describing ‘fear and apprehension’ in many countries and a ‘lack of empathy’ in politics, alongside large numbers of people feeling excluded and unheard.

Seldon has written extensively about British prime ministers, so a question about the worst of them was inevitable. His answer was Boris Johnson. He argued that Johnson had no real plan for implementing Brexit and that his slapdash approach had ‘discredited the integrity of the office’.

Seldon ended on a more hopeful note, returning to his work as an educator. In an age shaped by division, extremism and forces such as artificial intelligence, he argued, it matters more than ever that young people are introduced to ‘truth and beauty’. It felt like the perfect place to wrap up; the tent echoed with the warm, sustained applause that every performer in Edinburgh during August longs for. 

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