Why do we expect Theresa May to lie about Brexit?
Sometimes, even after the EU referendum and all its vaudevillian spin-offs – the spectre of Andrea Leadsom as prime minister, the actual, unbelievable reality of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, the fact that reality-based opinions are, when it comes to Brexit, considered unpatriotic – British political culture still surprises me.
Today I’m trying to get my head around the consensus that has formed in response to Theresa May’s answer to a question posed by Iain Dale. In a radio interview on Tuesday evening, he asked the prime minister: “Would you vote Brexit? Because you voted remain in the referendum. Have you changed your mind?” She refused to be drawn. “I could sit here and I could say, ‘Oh, I’d still vote remain’ or ‘I’d vote leave’, just to give you an answer to that question,” she said. “I’m being open and honest with you. What I did last time round was I looked at everything and came to a judgment and I’d do exactly the same this time round.”
It was a classic May hedge. She wasn’t really being open and honest, but attempting to sidestep what she correctly recognised to be a trap. It didn’t work. Since she failed to say she would now vote leave, May is being put through the wringer. “The PM refused to say if she’d back Brexit if the vote was rerun today. Four times. No wonder negotiations a mess. She has to go,” said my colleague Giles Fraser. “Agreed. She’s completely unsuited to her high office,” replied Tim Montgomerie. “FFS,” was Julia HartleyBrewer’s verdict. And, in the LBC slot following Iain Dale’s, Nigel Farage fumed: “All of us are left with the impression that she still believes remain was the right decision last year.”
Set aside the fact that it would be a shock if anyone who has seen the briefings she must have seen – on the Irish border, on customs, on the risks to supply chains, the recruitment crisis facing businesses and public services – would not desperately want to magic away the whole mess. And I realise that hard Brexiteers who were already gunning for May are going to take this opportunity to put the boot in. But much of the criticism seems to be based on the idea that her response was a terrible political miscalculation.
Is that really where we are now? That we think it’s unwise for politicians to avoid producing incredibly obvious lies? Common or garden spin, or evasion, or sophistry, is one thing. We all know that May voted remain on 23 June 2016 – she campaigned, albeit halfheartedly, to stay in the EU. Who would believe that the events of the past 16 months had convinced her she was wrong? A “hell, yes!” would have been utterly implausible. Any kind of “yes”, in fact. I cannot see how she could have done this without showing she takes us all for fools. Yet that is what some pundits are demanding.
Theresa May wants us to know that she is committed to delivering Brexit. I see no reason to doubt her. I don’t think she’s some kind of – what’s the word? – “saboteur”, intent on keeping us in the EU by stealth. I reckon she’s decided that the validation of democratic norms is more important, in the long run, than the disadvantages Brexit will pile upon us. We should be mature enough to accept that this is her position. But British politics in its current incarnation looks like the Lewis Carroll story that got rejected for being over the top. It demands a collective pantomime, whereby we ask the prime minister to declare with a flourish that she’s changed her mind, even though we know it’s a lie, we know she knows it’s a lie, and we know she
knows we know it’s a lie.
Iain Dale’s question did put Theresa May in a difficult position, and in one sense it was an ingenious piece of journalistic mischief. She’ll now be taunted with it until the end of her premiership (potentially not very long). But it is only difficult because of the alternate reality that Brexit has transported us to: where even what we all know to be true must be denied.
• David Shariatmadari is an editor and writer for the Guardian