ABSTRACT
The referendum vote that led to Theresa May's Pauline conversion to the Brexit cause and to her uttering the phrase – a conversion that was coterminous with her becoming Prime Minister, without any election, on 11 July 2016 – took place in a particular and peculiar historical atmosphere. By contrast with the logic of Nuremberg, however, Brexit means abandoning commitment to that very international system of law, at least insofar as that is vested in the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Brexit vote was a vote against reason, against thinking, against everything intellectual because 'the people of this country have had enough of experts'; and it came close to being a celebration of violence, carrying eerie echoes of the language and politics of 1930s Europe. Sincerity and authenticity become measured by the deviation from the norms of political discourse, the distancing of the speaker from the game of rhetorical engagement.
