When will Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers take responsibility for the dangerous emotions they've unleashed?

Living in the world's tiniest echo chamber doesn't absolve the Tory loony brigade of the racist consequences of their Brussels neurosis

Nigel Farage leads the fourth biggest popular force in Britain, with more than 4 million voters. Credit: Getty.

Welcome to the summer of hate. There’s blood on the streets, and now it’s time for the most brutal war of them all: echo chamber war.

In the blue echo chamber, The Sun tells the red echo chamber not to listen to its echo chamber that “goads them to pour bile on the dispossessed working class they once claimed to care about”.

Half the rest of the Leave camp write lengthy op-eds about how Remain must “accept the verdict of the British people”, “must be magnanimous in defeat”, “it’s called democracy”.

Now, Thursday was a long night. Strange things happened, but I’m still close to 100 per cent confident that just before midnight I was standing two yards away from Nigel Farage when, having thought himself defeated, he turned to the throng of cameras and said: “The Eurosceptic genie is out of the bottle. Win or lose this battle tonight, we will win this war. We will get our country back. We will get our independence back and we will get our borders back.”

It has been the most potent example of the tyranny of the majority ever thrust upon a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies are meant to guard against such things. It has been, very clearly, a failure of democracy, yet another failure from which there will be consequences.

Anyway, in the red echo chamber, the hand wringing has begun. “Hug a Brexiteer,” writes one. “We must come together to defeat racism,” says another, before throwing her hands up in the air about her half-trashed future and quietly going back to life as was before.

Somewhere, wandering dazed and angry around No Man’s Land, is a third, small army, which I might call Remainers From The Real World. We are the ones who don’t know how to execute the instructions we are being given from both sides.

We are the ones who saw with blinding clarity, because it was so searingly obvious, that this would be a referendum won and lost on racism, because it was allowed to be fought on immigration. We don’t know how to answer these pleas for unity now that the racist genie is out the bottle, his prejudices vindicated by a man who seeks to be Prime Minister and who studiously turned a blind eye to racism in the long months in which it was to his advantage to do so.

“It is said that those who voted Leave were mainly driven by anxieties about immigration,” wrote Boris Johnson earlier this week, finally. “I do not believe that is so.”

Well, Arron Banks, the millionaire businessman who funded the Farage side of the campaign and was the only man whose private polling got the result exactly right, doesn’t agree. “We analysed this to death,” he said. “Labour voters’ number one concern was immigration.”

Now, you don’t have to be racist to be concerned about immigration, pledge four on the Edstone was meant to tell you that, but it certainly helps.

I, an apparent member of both the Remain echo chamber and the Westminster bubble, also grew up in Havering, the east London borough that voted 70 per cent Leave. I have seen people I know personally absolutely invigorated by this referendum. Seen their passing interest in the Britain First Facebook page transform into a near obsession. Seen them sharing every 15 minutes, the latest Islamophobic video, the latest crazy propaganda, its logic twisted beyond a breaking point that they can’t see.

I am hearing dozens of stories of 30- and 40-somethings, incandescent with rage at their elderly parents on behalf of their junior school children. “My mum voted out because of the way the Afrikaners behave in her hospital,” said one. “My dad, King Brexiteer, who ‘would just like to have an English waiter for once’, now telling me I should apply for an Irish passport,” says another.

Another one, lifelong family friends, the dad “got his country back, Yesss!” – but his son, who works in financial services in Canary Wharf and is dependent on processing transactions made in euros using the EU “passporting” system, already expects to lose his job. The dad is now semi-permanently in tears. He was warned.

Yes, for a tiny cabal of neurotic Tories whose life’s work was to inflict this misery upon us, it was about something different. They will tell you that it was about such matters as the Maastricht Treaty, the primacy of European Court of Justice, the transferral of sovereignty to the European Commission. But merely because they are the proud dwellers of the very tiniest bubble of all, not so much a bubble as an underground bunker with no entry or exit hatch other than a dumb waiter to bring down the sherry, they are not absolved of the entirely eminently foreseeable consequences of their actions.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the most strongly afflicted by Brussels neurosis, is a thoroughly decent human being. Last year I went canvassing with him in his Somerset constituency before the general election, when a man walking his dog waved the picture of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean on the front page of the newspaper under his nose and proudly announced: “I’m glad they’re drowning. I’m glad they’re drowning. Otherwise they’d be coming over here.” Rees-Mogg, of course, told him it was an “appalling thing to say”, but these are the forces now unleashed with full validation.

These were the conflicting values incumbent upon everyone to consider before making their binary choice. This is precisely the reason a number of undecideds claimed finally to have had their minds made up by the now infamous “Breaking Point” poster. Clearly, it should have been more.

How many people quite rightly queued up to condemn the Labour Party and its anti-Semitism problem earlier this year, quite rightly dismissing out of hand the defence that these were a handful of people on its lunatic fringes, and yet did not pause for a second to think in this case whether it was worth lining up on the same side as Britain First, the BNP and, yes, Ukip, just to indulge their own luxurious grievances with the perceived erosion of sovereignty.

Last month, Chris Grayling, a Cabinet minister no less, stood on a stage in Stoke-on-Trent chanting, “We want our country back! We want our country back!” A member of the cabinet! You do not get to do that and wander away from its results.

Unity then? But how. There is one echo chamber now that has never been louder, and that’s the far right one. Go and have a look at it. You can do it in three clicks. And these are people that don’t just talk, they act. Their rage is already ten times what it was a week ago. And it will grow yet further.

Of all the inconceivably vast prices that were not worth paying for all this, this is right up there with the biggest, tough though it is to calibrate in such unprecedentedly dreadful times. You’ve got the best part of a week to write your next column, Boris. You should use it to take some responsibility. Surprise us.