Bookmark Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. After Brexit, Britain and the European Union face the Gore Vidal trap. That waspish American writer said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” There is now a powerful political logic pushing both sides to make the relative failure of the other the measure of their own success. We have seen it already over COVID-19 vaccinations, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson boasting that Britain has done more than all the rest of Europe together. Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education minister, took it to a juvenile extreme, claiming this is because “we’re a much better country than every single one of them.” But Vidalism is baked into the Brexiters’ project. After all, the whole point of the exercise is supposed to be that Britain will be “better off out.”