It took the biscuit, but there was great toast

I've covered elections in France, Thailand, the former South Vietnam, Laos and my native United Kingdom, but reporting on the referendum here, which saw Britons record an unprecedented vote to quit the European Union, hit home for some reason.

I suppose the older I get, the more knowledge I acquire, and in the case of my own country, the more emotionally involved I become.

This one, as we say in English (at least in my part of London) took the biscuit.

It had everything in the lead-up to the vote. Two old friends from school and university - David Cameron and Boris Johnson - at odds with each other; a smirking presence in the person of Nigel Farage; and various current and former government ministers, assorted British stereotypes and the ubiquitous White Van Man, of whom more later.

It also, sadly, had a murder.

But let's start at the beginning.

Campaigning opened in a friendly enough fashion, but rapidly descended into acrimonious rhetoric and bombast, the last courtesy of Johnson, whose favored method of replying to a set of statistics offered as a reasoned argument would be to cry "piffle" and launch into a semi-comic response that somehow managed to address the issue at hand.

It's an act that grows very old, very quickly.

Cameron, I felt, came across as a decent bloke who somehow along the way realized he'd made a strategic error in calling the referendum.

The murder threatened to be a game-changer. Jo Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two and a member of Parliament was, by all accounts, an energetic defender of her constituents' rights and a keen supporter of the Remain camp. She was shot and stabbed to death in the street as she prepared to hold a routine meeting to hear people's problems.

Her attacker allegedly shouted "Britain First" as he attacked her. A man is now awaiting trial.

Sadly, from my own viewpoint, the debate simply developed into a shouting match. This played into the hands of Farage, often seen in a pub with a pint of beer in his hand and holding forth in terms that were music to the ear of White Van Man - the type of guy with little intelligence but plenty of mouth, also known as a Little Englander.

After all the campaigning, it was down to an overnight stay in the office - just me and my bureau chief, who makes great toast, by the way.

Between us we made sure our readers were kept up to date in English and Chinese. Because that, as reporters, is what we do.

Chris Peterson is managing editor, Europe, for China Daily. Contact him on chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com.

(China Daily 06/25/2016 page2)