Sarah Vine wants out of Britain

Things are pretty gloomy in the UK at the moment. The weather’s miserable, the government’s collapsing, the nation is rolling out the red carpet for an obnoxious US president and there’s a Spinal Tap sequel literally nobody asked for. Still, there’s one upside: Sarah Vine wants out!

The rentagob Daily Mail scribe and erstwhile Mrs Gove used her column on Wednesday to tell readers how, from the vantage point of her Italian holiday, she is looking at what her employer now routinely refers to as “Starmer’s socialist utopia” and has decided she doesn’t want to come back.

Back in the 1970s when she was living in Italy, she wistfully reminisces, she was constantly yearning for Albion. “I missed England,” she says. “I was homesick. I missed the cool, grey skies and Listen With Mother. I missed Jackanory and Bagpuss and splashing in puddles in yellow wellies.” (This allowed the Mail to illustrate the piece with a massive picture of Bagpuss, the creation of Oliver Postgate, whose anti-capitalist views were somewhat to the left of Starmer).

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Not now though! “It’s a total mess. Arguably, a worse mess than when my parents first fled more than half a century ago,” writes Vine.

“A government of corrupt, venal hypocrites; a politicised police force obsessed with thought crime instead of real crime; a taxation system that punishes savers and grafters, stifles enterprise and hands people’s hard-earned money to the lazy and undeserving; and a welfare system that facilitates scroungers and fails the truly needy.”

For the first time in her life, Vine doesn’t want to come home any more, she laments. “As I pack up my kaftans and bathing costumes, I know that when I finally step on the plane back to Gatwick, I will not feel that once-familiar excitement and sense of relief, but a deep-seated melancholy. And a strong, sad desire to be somewhere – anywhere – else.”

Alas for Vine, she can’t stay in Italy forever, not least due to rules limiting non-EU citizens to a maximum of 90 days in the country within any 180-day period following Brexit, which Vine supported so enthusiastically. Still, if she can find a way around that, Rats in a Sack is happy to launch a fundraiser to keep her there. Who’s in?