Brexiteer MPs are apparently borrowing terms from the KKK – could this be why?

When it was announced on Sunday that a beleaguered Theresa May had been joined at Chequers by a list of senior cabinet ministers including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson, it was hard not to notice that they were all old, white men from the Brexiteer hard right of the Tory party.

But as the narrative turns of Brexit take on increasingly ludicrous plot twists (not least Uri Geller threatening to stop Brexit with his mind) who – who! – could have foreseen the revelation by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that these esteemed gentlemen, some of Britain’s most senior parliamentarians, were reportedly “informally” nicknamed “The Grand Wizards”?

While some on Twitter seemed to think this was a reference to Tolkien (or possibly World of Warcraft), most of us know the term unambiguously applies to the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.

This comes on the heels of Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, commenting over the weekend that any Leavers at the Put It To The People march risked being lynched by the (peaceful) marchers who, she said in an ingeniously divisive and racially-inflected projection, view Leavers as “sub-human”.

Some years back, Gove was quoted as comparing himself to a Grand Wizard, so it would seem that both the form and function of the Ku Klux Klan constitutes a useful frame of reference for the Grand Brexiteers.

Now I have to admit having a somewhat personal stake in this plot twist. In the run up to the 2010 election in which Gordon Brown was replaced by David Cameron, a narrative emerged in the media about Cameron’s student days when he, along with BoJo, befriended a Jamaican bar owner in Oxford.

The story was used to promote a disingenuous narrative that Cameron was a “progressive” type: a Tory boy with the common touch. Well, that Jamaican bar owner was actually my dad, whom until then I’d never met; so I’ve always been somewhat grateful to the Bullingdon Boys for unwittingly unlocking my origin story.

But did I ever believe that this story was evidence of the Etonian common touch? That they genuinely believed they were not genetically superior to other members of their species? Of course not, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that some members of this circle could fantasise about being members – nay, leaders – of the KKK, especially when we consider how far to the right the Tory leadership has lurched since Cameron’s departure.

One could be forgiven for finding something comical in all this – not least because here in Britain the KKK has always been a distant, and more-than-faintly ridiculous, spectre. But putting hilarity to one side, there are lots of reasons why this is cause for serious reflection.

And racism is only one of those reasons – which is why everyone in Britain should take note.

The Ku Klux Klan formed in the latter part of the 19th century, not just as a bunch of unhinged racist loons but as an anti-democratic response to black suffrage after the Civil War. It was part of a highly effective strategy to suppress the black vote and maintain privilege for the white community after the abolition of slavery. This was engineered in no small part by deliberately setting poor whites against blacks, exploiting division and cementing privilege for those who already had power – that is to say, the rich whites.

If this is how the Brexiteers view themselves, it’s almost certainly not because they explicitly plan to lynch black people on their lawns (note I said “almost”) but because they recognise themselves as engineers of a deliberate strategy to exploit social division, gaslight the electorate and manipulate democracy for their own gain. Substitute “black people” for “immigrants” and “northern yankees” for “liberal elites” and you’ll see they’ve got this whole thing sewn up tight as a Klan sheet...

But at least now the hoods are off.

Victoria Anderson is author of ‘Wings’, a collaborative book with comic artist Wallis Eates and the men of HMP Wandsworth