Why do the vicious Remain campaigners value emotion over reason? wonders James Delingpole about Brexit.

[There is] a marked difference in tone between the two camps — with the Remainers coming across as shrill, prickly and bitter, and the Brexiters surprisingly sunny, relaxed and optimistic. …

Really, it makes no sense. When you’re the odds-on favourite with the weight of the global elite behind you — Obama, Lagarde, Goldman Sachs, the BBC, Ed Balls — you ought to be able to afford to be magnanimous, jolly and decent. It’s the anti-EU rebels, the spoilers, the malcontents, you’d imagine would be most afflicted by rage, spite and peevishness. …

Just like global warming. The warmists are viscous and spread conspiracy theories (“deniers” are funded by Big Oil), trying to berate everyone into going along with their silly claims, to win by sneering.

I feel much the way towards the Remainers … : pity and sympathy, rather than hatred. But this generosity of spirit is not something I’ve seen much reciprocated towards Brexiters.

David Cameron set the tone right at the beginning, by making it clear to the Commons that the only possible reason Boris could have for voting Brexit was as a dirty, underhand means of becoming Prime Minister: an appeal to emotion, not reason. Since that moment we’ve had almost nothing but vicious negativity from the Remain camp: the scaremongering of Project Fear; the daily piling on of dire warnings from supposedly neutral authorities, such as the Governor of the Bank of England; the needling tweets and spiky, sneering articles from the kind of people one normally thinks of as affable and funny, such as Nicholas Soames and Ferdinand Mount. It’s as if the entire Remain camp has been infected with a virus which has sucked out all their joie-de-vivre, their sense of fair play and their lightness of touch.

They say the same thing about us, I know they do. But I think that’s more a case of what psychologists call ‘projection’.

hat-tip Stephen Neil