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A horrible history of break-ups bodes ill for Brexit Britain

Across an abyss of time that turns out to be less than four years ago, Theresa May stood up in the House of Commons as prime minister to lecture mps on a point borrowed from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language is not passive: it can shape the events it is used to describe. “I prefer not to use the term of divorce from the European Union,” she said, “because very often when people get divorced they don’t have a very good relationship afterwards.”

Those guys took her tip. Jacob Rees-Mogg started talking about surrender, slave states and King John’s agreement to recognise French suzerainty over the continental lands of the Angevin Empire. David Davis referred to appeasement before the second world war. Boris Johnson, much of whose career has involved riding a metaphor towards an oncoming deadline, didn’t need to be told. He was already urging the eu not to “administer punishment beatings…in the manner of some world-war-two movie”.

Divorce, not war, fits the present picture. Imagine a middle-aged businessman who has spent the night before his decree-nisi hearing on a half-remembered sojourn in Spearmint Rhino. Then look at a photograph of Boris Johnson standing next to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. You’re not thinking about the Battle of Britain, are you?

“Honourable members”, said Theresa May on that fateful day, “need to stop looking at this as simply coming out of the European Union and see the opportunity for building a new relationship with the European Union – and that’s what we will be doing.” Yet something that is so hard to describe in ordinary language has little chance of life in metaphor.

Fast forward a few years and you can see a Britain divided between those who think that the nation is about to shake out its hair and put the Soup Dragons’ “Free to Do What I Want” on the stereo, and those who think that it has just bought a Lamborghini and discovered that the chicks it dreamed would sit on the back seat never actually existed. Better to imagine the end of a marriage than the beginning of a war, and let that shape the results. We have to think of the children.

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England divorces Europe, Part I Henry VIII 1527
The Great Man theory of history is deeply unfashionable, but if Henry VIII had remained on posset-sharing terms with Catherine of Aragon, then the Reformation might have been averted and Britons would still be saying their Hail Marys in churches busy with unsmashed icons.

In the early 16th century there were no powerful forces pushing for a break between England and Rome. In different circumstances, Pope Clement VII might have agreed to a quiet annulment of the royal marriage: popes were often happy to do a favour to a dynasty in need of an extension. But in 1527, the year that Henry decided to dump his first wife in favour of her gorgeous eleven-fingered lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, Clement was distracted.

The mutinous troops of the Holy Roman Emperor – Catherine’s Uncle Charles – had sacked Rome, forcing the pontiff to flee through a secret tunnel and take refuge in a nearby castle. His responses to Henry were uncompromising. But perhaps Henry had no appetite to discuss divorce in detail. Like Tammy Wynette, he preferred not to say the word aloud. “The Great matter” was his euphemism of choice. And for monastic England, that spelt H-E-double-L.

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Once more unto the breach Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson 1936
It’s the second act that always gets attention – the abdication speech, the Caribbean years, the sieg-heiling and tea at the Berghof. You don’t hear so much about Wallis Simpson’s origins story, the exes who made her a radioactive prospect for a royal marriage.

Her Mr Simpson was Ernest Aldrich Simpson, a shipbroker whom she divorced over his adulterous liaison at the Hotel de Paris at Bray on Thames, with Mary Raffray, her childhood friend. Raffray signed the register as Butterfly Kennedy. She left her French aviator husband, got hitched to Ernest and remained Mrs Simpson until her death in 1941 (Mr Simpson then married a fourth time).

Wallis’s first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer (Win), a naval lieutenant in the Bureau of Aeronautics, was the real villain of the biography, an alcoholic sadist who once kept her locked in the bathroom out of jealousy. Win was an even greater enthusiast for the institution of marriage: after Wallis he acquired three more wives, mainly heiresses whom he drunkenly mistreated – and whose existence would, of course, have also prevented him from marrying into the British monarchy.

He received elevation elsewhere, however. In 1936 Mussolini made him a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy. His former wife would not have regarded this as grounds for divorce: by the end of their relationship, a fondness for Fascists was one of the few things they had in common.

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The great Bavarian shoe-off The Dassler brothers (Puma v Adidas) 1948
The quarrel between Adi and Rudi Dassler, two cobbling brothers from Herzogenaurach in Bavaria, split their family and split their town. Their business began modestly at the end of the first world war. Bicycle-powered machinery processed leather salvaged from army helmets. By 1927 Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik – Geda for short – employed 12 people. The 1936 Olympics, however, allowed them to reach a sprint. American athlete Jesse Owens endorsed their spiked running shoes. (So did the Hitler Youth.)

The war wrecked this prosperity and their relationship. The factory was turned over to the production of the Panzerschrek, a shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket. Rudi was an enthusiastic Nazi, Adi less so, but both were punished by the post-war authorities.

Their squabble resulted in the bifurcation of the business into two entities. In 1948 Rudi set up in the Geda facility south of the town’s river. (His firm, Ruda, soon became Puma.) The following year Adi established Adidas on Geda’s more northerly site. The Bavarian town now had two big employers with two separate workforces, with different shops, bars and football teams. Like Montagues and Capulets, Puma and Adidas families tended not to intermarry. The Dasslers maintained this segregation unto death. They were buried at opposite ends of the town cemetery.

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Most likely to secede “Passport to Pimlico” 1949
“Passport to Pimlico” begins with an academic judgment from the anglerfish jaw of Margaret Rutherford’s Professor Hatton-Jones. A vellum charter unearthed in a Pimlico cellar reveals that in 1477, Edward IV ceded the entire area to the Dukes of Burgundy. (“Blimey, I’m a foreigner!” exclaims the local policeman.)

The separation enacted in this 1949 Ealing Studios comedy is between a small patch of London and Britain’s post-war consensus – austerity, rationing, the nhs, the welfare state. Independence brings something miraculous: a sudden heatwave and continental café society on the streets behind Victoria station. It also brings spivs and black marketeers, free to trade beyond the jurisdiction of the Attlee government.

This is fantasy with a hard edge. The British side breaks off negotiations and disconnects Pimlico from the water system. Soon the starved secessionists are reduced to catching food parcels hurled over a barbed-wire fence. The imagery looks as though it was culled from a newsreel – a Berlin Blockade by the Thames. Project fear? Maybe. But the ending is instructive. The Burgundians renounce their foreignness but they are not humiliated. And as the heatwave breaks, the rain soaks everyone equally.

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Who’s afraid of the divorce courts? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor 1964 and 1975
The relationship between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor struck a chord with the public because, despite the diamonds and the beach houses, its gin-swashed Sturm und Drang was a fairly relatable way of conducting a 1960s marriage. (Though few other couples made a habit of booking hotel rooms above and below because they knew the sound of drunken yelling would carry.)

In 1973 both had roles in a tv movie with a prescient title – “Divorce His, Divorce Hers” – and violent scenes for which their marriage had given them a decade’s rehearsal. (“Oh my darling, I’m so sorry,” breathes Burton, after smashing Taylor down on the living room carpet.)

They split the following year and briefly remarried, in Botswana in 1975, but their identity as a couple refused to dissipate. It added a frisson to an on-stage reunion in 1983 – a revival of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives”, in which divorcees find themselves honeymooning with new spouses in adjoining suites.

The reviews were dreadful. Taylor took time off due to illness (she had recently divorced for a seventh time, and it was another decade before her eighth, and final, wedding). During her absence, Burton married his fourth wife, Sally Hay. None of this depressed the ticket sales. Audiences wanted to stay in on the argument.

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Czech mates Czech Republic and Slovakia 1992
Some divorces are rough. This one was velvet: a smooth, warm nickname borrowed from the revolution that saw communism decommissioned with a flower stuck in the barrel of its rifle. Vaclav Havel was the leading man of both events: the first president of the new Czechoslovakia resigned his post in July 1992 when parliament voted to split the country into two, but not in half. A two-thirds to one-third principle was applied, based on the proportion of territory to population.

This was not partition by referendum. Polls suggested that the split was a minority enthusiasm on both sides. But there has been no serious attempt to reverse the decision, in recognition, perhaps, of the pragmatic and imposed nature of the original arrangement.

In 1919 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye summoned Czechoslovakia into existence as a way of reducing the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a collection of small unthreatening states. (Modernising it too: goodbye, the Kingdom of Bohemia.) The cold war made socialism its unifying principle. No secessionist voices ever troubled the airwaves of Radio Praha. And maybe we should not underestimate the power of that unwieldy portmanteau name. Since 1992 Slovaks have not had to wince hearing Western journalists refer to Alexander Dubček as a Czech politician, or to Slovak athletes as if they were from Prague.

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The fire in your heart is out (a wonder-brawl) The Gallagher brothers 1994
Some sibling rivalry is set cold for decades. Hollywood actors Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine couldn’t bear to be on the same continent, and maintained 40 years of armed and icy transatlantic relations. Noel and Liam Gallagher, the Britpop brothers at the heart of Oasis, have engaged in a hotter form of war.

Their main battles can be summarised briefly. Liam hit Noel with a tambourine; Noel hit Liam with a cricket bat; Liam sued Noel for saying that he missed a gig from being hungover; Noel quit the band and declared his brother “a man with a fork in a world of soup”.

The fighting didn’t stop when Oasis evaporated in 2009. Liam opened up a new front online, comparing his brother to Ronnie Corbett, Gary Barlow and Hitler, and tweeting photographs of Noel beneath the single word, “potato”. In revenge, perhaps, Noel claimed that during their touring years, he exploited Liam’s fear of supernatural phenomena by shifting objects around his hotel room and encouraging him to believe that a poltergeist was responsible.

The main difference from the de Havilland sisters is that the Gallaghers don’t do frosty silence. They can’t shut up about each other. And they are very funny. Is their endless feud a clever bit of theatre to amplify the excitement of a future reunion? Give it a decade. You can book a stadium for a wrestling match as well as a rock concert.

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Thanks for sharing Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin 2014
Gwyneth Paltrow’s business empire, Goop, the Sears of wellness bafflegab, has generated so much snarky copy that it now seems unfair to mock it. That’s certainly the view of its chief executive. In August 2020 Paltrow wrote an essay for Vogue expressing her dismay at how her divorce had become part of this circuit of derision.

The trigger-phrase was “conscious uncoupling”, a neologism employed in 2014 by Paltrow and her ex, Coldplay frontman and accomplished hat-wearer Chris Martin, to describe their experience of becoming substantially less married. (If this summons the image of Martin shunted down a siding, like one of the less charismatic characters in “Thomas the Tank Engine”, then you’re part of the problem.)

Paltrow’s piece was earnest, heartfelt and sensitive. Unless of course, it was pretentious, self-regarding and smug. If the Eng Lit grad student heroine she played in “Possession” was in the seminar, she might have put a margin note beside Paltrow’s description of the couple’s therapist as “the man who helped us architect our new future”. She might also observe that the link below the piece on the British version of the Vogue site sends you straight to a less-than-deferent account of Paltrow’s “this smells like my orgasm” range of scented candles.

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Fear and loathing Amber Heard and Johnny Depp 2016
How do we know when a relationship is over? For Johnny Depp the moment came when his housekeeper sent him a photograph of a substantial whorl of excrement piped on the marital linen. “My wife left a whooper poo on my bed,” he texted. Not very Oscar Wilde – unlike the trial that revealed this epigram to the world. When the Sun newspaper claimed that Depp had assaulted his spouse, Amber Heard, the actor sued.

As Wilde discovered, a libel action can be a costly way to air your dirty laundry in public. Heard told the judge that Depp had headbutted her, throttled her, pushed her into a ping-pong table and threatened to microwave her teacup terrier. Depp countered that his wife had also been violent towards him. (The Daily Mail obtained audio of her admitting to having pelted him with kitchenware.) But the case was Depp versus the Sun, not Depp versus Heard, and the judge ruled in the newspaper’s favour.

The phrase “wifebeater and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ star Johnny Depp” can now be safely used in any article about the wifebeater and “Pirates of the Caribbean” star Johnny Depp. Oscar got hard labour in Reading jail. No such cruel fate for Johnny: he was expelled from the “Fantastic Beasts” films but kept his place as the face of Dior’s Sauvage cologne, which should satisfy anyone eager to inhale the odour of domestic violence.

IMAGES: GETTY, BRIDGEMAN ARCHIVE, ALAMY

By Matthew Sweet/The Economist