If ever we needed heroic rhetoric, it is now

To guide the nation safely through Brexit, Theresa May must not just lead but also inspire any doubters

Implementing Brexit is proving to be a herculean task at home as well as abroad. But the Prime Minister might help her cause by deploying some more heroic rhetoric than she has used so far to explain what exactly the Government is trying to achieve.

Asked about her message for Tory backbenchers as she navigates treacherous parliamentary waters this week, Theresa May went into full robot mode. Her goal, she said, was “to get the best possible deal” to enable a “smooth and orderly period”, by getting a “smooth and orderly exit”. Aside from the sphinxlike opacity of this language, it’s also about as inspiring as a “damp rag”, to paraphrase Nigel Farage’s famous phrase about the EU president. Generating the sense of mission that parliament and government need to get through the next few years demands more from our

Prime Minister.

The momentum in Brussels, where I have been for much of this week, is strikingly different. Unlike the UK’S gloomy political classes, the EU’S fans are feeling genuinely inspired by their task. One lawyer told me of feeling much more attached to a European identity than a German one, and remembered feeling so excited about the launch of the euro as a child that he started collecting brand new euro coins, hoping to amass one for each country. To many Britons, of course, this will be mystifying. Another, from southern Europe, said his identity was so much more European than national that, after six years in London, Brexit has left him feeling “homeless”. He is now trying to develop a love of France.

These people might be a tiny minority in Europe, but they are its ideological glue and instil the discipline required (at least for now). Mrs May, by contrast, expects us to get by on cynicism and ideological breadcrumbs. She might be running a government full of civil servants who voted Remain, but she and her ministers should still be capable of firing them up for this momentous national task. There is a job to do, as she is so fond of saying, but it needs to be about more than collecting a pay cheque each month. Mrs May’s job is to make that clear.

Walking around Brussels, I kept thinking that the Rhodes Must Fall mob would have a field day there. The whole place is stuffed with King Leopold II references, including a rather grand statue of the man looking out upon the city’s Congolese area.

By some estimates, King Leopold II was responsible for the death of 10 million people in the Congo, where he ran one of the most inhumane and devastating colonies in human history. His troops enslaved the region’s population to gather rubber while he gave speeches about being engaged in a glorious, philanthropic and civilising endeavour.

He did it all while perpetuating a giant fraud on the Belgians.

The colony wasn’t a state-run project; it was a secret, personal wealth-generating machine for the monarch, who donated so many grand buildings and monuments to boost his popularity with his ill-gotten wealth that he became known as the “builder King”.

In 2008, an artist climbed the Leopold II statue and poured red paint down it, simulating the blood of his many victims. But the statue remains in place. Other Belgian monuments to Leopold’s activities in the Congo have been similarly vandalised. One coastal statue glorifying the colony had a hand cut off in 2004, mirroring the colony’s standard punishment for any perceived misdemeanour by its unfortunate subjects. Rather than being repaired, the statue was left as is.

So what should Belgium do? Tear down the many statues and grand buildings that Leopold funded or that bear his name? This might, like Belgium’s “great forgetting” of the Congo, erase physical signs of the crime, but it won’t bring on a national reckoning with the country’s colonial history. A better alternative, there as here, would be to confront the past by further updating Brussels’ Royal Museum for Central Africa and adding other monuments that acknowledge the suffering in Leopold’s “Congo Free State”. This might actually achieve something positive, rather than simply removing a negative.

‘Unlike the UK’S gloomy political class, the EU’S fans are feeling genuinely inspired by their task’

Brussels has also so far evaded another type of Left-wing puritanical campaign: the war on vice. Bars have cigars on sale and smoking rooms, there are prostitutes around at night and the occasional condom machine on the street, and the smell of marijuana drifts frequently around its plazas. All of that, and it’s still almost impossible to get a decent cup of tea. Perhaps the causes of Brexit are simpler than we’ve been led to believe.