When we were students, myself and the older brother went off to America to work for the summer.
He got a job in an Irish bar in Queens and made an absolute fortune – all the Americans loved the ‘little guy with the adorable Irish accent’ – and then came home and bought a car.
I worked as a security guard with a firm called Wackenhut out on Long Island and came home with just about enough to buy a ham sandwich.
But the story of the car turned out to be a bit of a saga, and it’s one I’ve told many times.
Awash with cash, the brother had toured the local garages and his quest ended when he absolutely fell in love with an Opel Manta.
Now it wasn’t a Porsche or a top of the range Mercedes, but back in the day it had a certain cache, a car not to be sneezed at.
And, of course, he had to have it. Love at first sight and all that.
So he scraped up every dollar he had saved from his four months in New York, borrowed a few more quid from our parents, and about 24 hours later a lovely red Opel Manta – “only one previous owner, a careful lady driver”, according to the salesman – was parked outside the door.
I recall that summer was a particularly good one and for about three weeks there wasn’t a drop of rain.
But then one night there came an absolute deluge and in the morning, when the brother got into his pride and joy to head to his new job, he found water swirling around where the pedals were.
You have heard of a ‘car well’, but this was ridiculous. This really was a well: there was so much water that when he pressed the clutch, half his leg got soaked.
Needless to say, he was not a happy camper.
Back he went to the salesman who told him it was a minor problem, that it was only a rubber seal on the door or something. They would fix it no bother.
To cut to the chase, this went on for months and there was no resolution.
Things came to a head when the salesman, previously a friend of the brother’s, suggested he was being overly fussy. So, there was ‘a wee bit of water’ in the well of the car… what was the big deal?
At that the brother totally lost it and blew a gasket: “If I had wanted a ******* boat, I’d have bought a ******* boat. I thought I was buying a car.”
I could have fired in a lot more expletives here but you get the gist of what was a heated conversation.
My brother bought a red Opel Manta with his earnings from the US (Luca Piccini Basile/Getty Images)
For analogy purposes, if you think of that Opel Manta as Brexit, we can expand on it no end. Stick with me here.
A week or so ago, I came across one of the arch-Brexiteers, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, on one of those morning television programmes where he was still trying to sell Brexit as an unqualified success. It had delivered economically, socially and politically, or so he claimed.
I was thinking to myself that wasn’t exactly the version Sir Keir Starmer and his government were peddling some weeks earlier.
Clearly the British PM doesn’t accept Sir Jacob’s thesis, arguing that Brexit has created significant trade barriers and serious additional costs for UK businesses.
His recent call for closer alignment with the EU suggests that these issues are of considerable concern in Downing Street.
A big driver too for closer ties recently has been global instability – wars, tensions with Russia, and uncertainty about the intentions of Donald Trump’s America. The much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ doesn’t seem that special any more, despite all the pomp and ceremony of King Charles’s visit to the US.
Just check what the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Turner, said about it, namely that the only special relationship the US has these days is with Israel.
Anyway, back to the brother’s car.
Brexit was like his Opel Manta. It looked so, so good in the showroom, promised much, but the reality was that it didn’t perform anywhere near as good as it looked.
And think too of Rees-Mogg as akin to the salesman. Downplay the major problems, but point out that the car still looks the part.
For me his claims are a denial of reality with knobs on.
There is now, seemingly, a majority in the UK which would vote to rejoin the EU but there is no political party with the guts to come out publicly and support this. It’s all about trying to make the current bad situation work better.
That’s political cowardice big time.
Over the past number of years I have met numerous British people and, irrespective of what the official polls say, almost 100% feel Brexit hasn’t delivered the economic benefits that were promised, especially around the cost of living.
Prices of just about everything in the shops have skyrocketed and it’s the least well off who are affected most.
And then there are all the small little niggly bits too.
One simple example I have seen on numerous occasions occurred again when I was in Spain a couple of weeks back.
There were a group of girls out from Belfast for a hen party. Four of them had Irish passports and at Alicante airport were sent through the quick exit channel.
The two with British ones were sent to join the long queue. One of them, believe me, let the airport official know in no uncertain terms she was not at all happy about that.
The big question that now remains for me is how long will it take the majority to realise they were conned by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg et al about Europe and about Brexit?
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