“Brexit from the Campus”: Jonathan Coe’s Middle England

The title of my article bears a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to a group of Conservative politicians around Boris Johnson who studied at Oxford University in the eighties and who are identified in Jonathan Coe’s novel as the engineers behind the Brexit; on the other hand, Coe’s novel portrays a fictional group of scholars who are more or less frustrated and dissatisfied with the university for various reasons and turn their backs on academia to find their luck elsewhere. In the first case, Oxford colleges such as Balliol where people are nostalgically hankering after England’s glorious past and dream of regaining England’s former glory, play a role as seedbed of Brexit; in the second case, we are dealing with a more private ‘exit’ of a group of talented academicians who no longer believe in the university as a place of self-realization. While nostalgia is a driving force of the first group, the second has a clear-eyed view of the growing hostility of their environment. Historically speaking, the existence of nostalgia here and the lack of nostalgia there are two sides of the same medal: they point to the heritage of the Thatcher era and the deep-reaching ‘reformation’ of British society whose effects can still be felt today. They also point to loss: the loss of social consensus in the first case, and the loss of what the university and a university career once stood for.