Niall Ferguson regrets sacrificing his principles to help his friends stay in power:
The three words you are least likely to hear from an academic are “I was wrong.” Well, I was wrong to argue against “Brexit,” as I admitted in public last week. By this I do not mean to say “I wish I had backed the winning side.” Rather, I mean “I wish I had stuck to my principles.”
For years I have argued that Europe became the world’s most dynamic civilization after around 1500 partly because of political fragmentation and competition between multiple independent states. I have also argued that the rule of law — and specifically the English common law — was one of the “killer applications” of western civilization.
I was a staunch Thatcherite. I was a proud Eurosceptic. So what on earth, many old friends wondered, prompted me to take the side of “remain” in the referendum on EU membership?
A part of the answer is that I sincerely convinced myself that the costs of Brexit would outweigh the benefits. But I too readily trotted out the doom-laden projections of a post-Brexit recession from the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury, and others. I accused the proponents of Brexit of being “Angloonies” as opposed to Eurosceptics. My most desperate sally was to compare Brexit to a divorce — desperate not because the analogy is a bad one (it still fits rather well) but because I myself am divorced.
I linked to his divorce analogy at the time:
I suppose there are such things as amicable divorces. Mine wasn’t. Like the First World War, it was fought for more than four years, and ended with the Treaty of Versailles (by which I mean that it imposed territorial losses and the payment of annual reparations for a very long time).
Which brings me to Brexit, the ultimate divorce. Leave aside the arguments based on economics. Leave aside history, too. Instead, permit me to get personal. You want to get a divorce from Europe? Very well, let me explain what divorce is like.
Ouch.
