There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad.
I gather that the Minister for Finding the Benefits of Brexit rather failed in his mission, but if I were an EU Commissioner for Finding the Benefits of Brexit I would credit the outgoing regime on at least three counts. First, thanks to Brexit, the EU at last has the wonderfully named European Peace Facility – an EU defence budget, of course – which the UK consistently vetoed. Most of its €7 billion has been allocated to arms for Ukraine although disbursement is still being vetoed by Hungary. Second, Brexit has finally settled the argument as to whether member states lose sovereignty. I was born in communist Poland: if we had tried to leave the Warsaw Pact, as Imre Nagy did in 1956, we would have been invaded by Soviet tanks. That’s what lack of sovereignty looks like. Britain, on the other hand, left the EU by its own decision and nobody tried to stop you. You were sovereign all along. Third, there used to be more than a million Poles in the UK, but the latest estimate is around 700,000.