Don’t panic! Mr Mainwaring and his heroically untrendy troops
TO a church hall in soggy Westminster where, amid the faint smell of wet gundog, seven heroically untrendy Brexiteers explained why Theresa May’s ‘complete betrayal’ of an EU withdrawal agreement was so bad on customs procedures.
Their arguments became lost amid yelps from the press about their attempted ‘coup’ against Mrs May. A peachily bungled event – but no worse for that.
South American coups are led by berettopped hombres with soup-strainer moustaches and belts of machine-gun bullets round their chests. Here in Britain, we regard that sort of thing as a bit too enthusiastic. And so we had Jacob ‘Che’ Rees-Mogg (Con, NE Somerset), clean-shaven, double-breasted and impeccably pukka. Fidel Castro as Savile Row might have preferred him.
Jacob and his six compadres, square as sugar lumps, had gathered in the Upper Room of the Emmanuel evangelical centre near Church House.
At a central table, arranged almost as in a well-known painting by Michelangelo, sat David Davis, Lord (Peter) Lilley, Labour Brexiteer John Mills and Mr Rees-Mogg. Also: a Dutch customs expert, Hans Maessen, steel industrialist Simon Boyd and the head of Bristol Port, Sir David Ord. They ran through various ‘myths’ and ‘scare stories’ about leaving the EU customs union. Maessen, Boyd and Ord were perhaps the most interesting because they were the least political.
Sir David was asked if British ports would be able to cope with a no-deal Brexit. Yes, he said.
Maessen noted that Mrs May’s agreement with the EU talks about ‘wet stamps’ being required on documents at borders. Such things had not been used by customs officers since the early 1990s, he said. The technology was now much more advanced.
If this was revolution, word had not reached the streets. The audience comprised a few reporters and three or four Conservative MPs. Blairites would have laughed at how amateur the event felt. Find some microphones so that everyone can hear what is being said?
MIgHT have been a good idea. Stage management has never been a Eurosceptic forte. The diversity count, if that is your thing, was as low as Wrexham on a wet Friday night.
A BBC reporter suggested that Jacob’s ‘coup’ was like something from Dad’s Army. Mr Rees-Mogg, had he been sensi-
ble, would have ignored that. But Jacob feels a good-mannered obligation to cheer people up and at the end of his answer he added, in jocular fashion: ‘I’ve always admired Capt Mainwaring.’ Whoosh. George Osborne’s anti-Brexit London Evening Standard soon swooped to portray Mr Rees-Mogg as Mainwaring alongside the headline ‘Stupid Boys’.
Give me a droll, self-teasing Mainwaring any day rather than ARP Warden Hodges bossily telling us to remain in the EU.
Lord Lilley thought Whitehall was ‘over-interpreting’ customs rules. By ‘over-interpret’, polite Lilley probably meant ‘wilfully exaggerating the difficulties so that they can try to block Brexit’.
There was no Tarzan chest-beating about this event. They were (probably too) calm and reasonable, and, yes, they looked eccentric. In politics the most sound-bitey and sleek people are often the dangerous ones and the eccentric ones are often the soundest.
Someone returned to the allegation that Mr Rees-Mogg was trying to lead a ‘coup’. He replied that ‘coup’ was ‘a rather silly word’ for a legitimate attempt to stop a rotten policy. In Britain it was not yet compulsory to agree with your leader. Alleluia to that.
As for some ‘night of the long knives’ that possibly awaits Mrs May, he hoped such violently vivid terms could be avoided. ‘Let us be moderate in our language,’ he murmured. In Mrs May’s dictionary, alas, the words ‘reconsider’ and ‘listen’ are considered profanities.