How blessed we are that Brexit’s enemies are such a deluded, comical rabble
NEW YEAR political predictions are normally guesswork dressed up as expert forecasts. But there are some developments we can anticipate with near-certainty. For example, it is clear there will be a concerted push by the die-hard opponents of Brexit to de-legitimise the result of the 2016 EU referendum. Indeed, as Theresa May works her way towards some sort of post-membership deal with Brussels, their efforts to block Brexit will become ever more frenetic.
We have had a glimpse of what is to come in the past week, with Michael Heseltine once again setting out his determination to ‘stop Brexit’ and Andrew Adonis resigning as head of the National Infrastructure Commission, to — as he put it — ‘oppose the European Union Withdrawal Bill relentlessly from the Labour benches’.
Those benches are in the House of Lords. Like Heseltine, Adonis is not a democratically elected politician but an appointed Life Peer. Not the least farcical aspect of the anti-Brexit campaign is that it seeks to overturn the biggest exercise in democracy ever undertaken in the UK, led entirely by men who either have tired of the need to win support at the ballot box, or never bothered in the first place.
So, who did the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain choose last month to be their figurehead? Lord Malloch-Brown, that’s who. Malloch-Brown, who called Brexit ‘a betrayal of our country’, is a consultant-cum-lobbyist on an epic scale, which includes membership of The Guardian’s ‘global advisory panel’. But, as that newspaper’s own columnist Matthew D’Ancona pertinently observed, Malloch-Brown is ‘the very incarnation of what made people vote Leave in the first place’.
Revelation
This lack of self-awareness on the part of the stop Brexit brigade is almost comically exemplified by Lord Adonis’s interview in yesterday’s Observer. He revealed that he was in a church in the Austrian village of Alpbach on Christmas Day, when: ‘I decided in the middle of mass that I was going to resign. When I was skiing the following day, I started writing the letter of resignation in my mind while looking out over the Austrian Alps.’
Can you imagine the predominantly working class Labour voters whom Adonis needs to persuade to back his campaign to block Brexit saying: ‘Oh, now we know Lord Adonis has had a revelation while attending Mass in an Austrian church on his skiing holiday, we realise we were wrong to vote to leave the EU’? Nor do I think his remark in the letter he composed while contemplating the Alps — that ‘Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm’ — will persuade a single human being who voted Leave that they had been mistaken. Condemning people for being ‘populist and nationalist’ can only have the result that they respond: yes, and what’s your problem?
Speaking of masses, Adonis is actually Tony Blair’s vicar on earth: he was the former PM’s policy advisor at 10 Downing Street and the two continue to be in close contact. Blair, characteristically, has said he feels a ‘sense of mission’ to block Brexit. Though even that supremely articulate political salesman was reduced to embarrassed incoherence on a platform last May, when challenged by Matthew Elliott (former chief executive of Vote Leave).
For your edification, here is the encounter in full. Elliott: ‘You have to start accepting the basic principles of what the public has said, and what they said in the referendum.’
Blair: ‘I mean . . . I think . . . you know . . . whether that is right or wrong, for the moment . . . I think . . . Brexit is obviously a very big issue in many different ways . . . although . . . you know . . . I understand completely what you are saying . . . you may be right in what you are saying.’
We’ll take that as a yes. The biggest problem for Blair, Heseltine and Adonis — all of whom, not coincidentally, still believe the UK should abandon the Pound and adopt the euro — is that in campaigning to reverse the referendum result they represent a very small minority.
Most of those who voted to remain in the EU respect the result and just want the Government to get on with it. The pollsters YouGov track this on a regular basis, and most recently found that only 15 per cent thought that Brexit should be stopped and that we should remain in the EU. That is not only because most Britons respect the democratic process, even when it delivers the opposite of what they wanted. And I am not just talking about the Referendum: in last year’s General Election, both Labour and Conservative manifestos committed to leaving the EU, and also leaving the European Single Market (of which freedom of movement is an inseparable part).
But it is the facts on the ground that have made the stop-Brexit campaign look especially foolish. We have witnessed the demolition of the claims of the Remain campaign that the very fact of a Leave vote would precipitate an economic disaster. (The then Chancellor George Osborne declared that ‘ immediately following a vote to leave the EU’ there would be a recession and the loss of at least 500,000 jobs.)
Bitter
What actually followed in the year after the vote to leave was continued growth in employment, an increase in the proportion of the workforce in full-time jobs and the lowest recorded figure for the proportion of unemployed among the working age population since 1975. And it now seems that the economy grew by 1.7 per cent in 2017, better than nearly every forecast.
This must have come as a bitter disappointment to those wanting to overturn the referendum, who, as Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore observed last week, are guilty of ‘reverse Micawberism: waiting for something to turn down’.
The same goes for the newly knighted Nick Clegg, who has just published a book titled How to Stop Brexit. Hilariously, Clegg was in fact the first mainstream party leader to call for an in-or-out referendum on the EU, in 2008.
Of course, he thought Remain would win such a vote, and can’t get over the fact he was wrong about that.
Sir Nick Clegg, Lord Heseltine, Lord Adonis, Lord Malloch-Brown, Tony Blair. Truly, Brexit is blessed in its enemies.