No one will listen to the Tories until they deliver Brexit
Having made such a hash of things, the party has to earn the right to address the public on other issues
Even the Brexiteers are getting sick of Brexit. Some of them are angry and tired of it. Some are just tired. They can sense what the country is feeling: it is time to move on. And yet we are stuck.
Brexit, after all, was meant to be a means to an end. The end remains amorphously undefined, awaiting a leader with a bit of vision, charm and strategic skill, who could use Brexit as the catalyst for something inspiring and new. The current Prime Minister is forlornly incapable of this task, yet removing her provides no clear path out of the woods.
Every path runs into a new obstacle. The current makeup of Parliament is both making it impossible to leave without a deal and acting as a block on passing the deal on offer. The only way to change Parliament and obtain a fresh mandate to get on with Brexit is with a general election. But no one, and especially not the Tories, can currently win an election on the basis of their Brexit policy. Even in 2017, that strategy didn’t work.
Broadly, there are two views in the party about how to approach the situation. Most of the Cabinet and Tory MPS want to keep on trying to pass the Withdrawal Agreement and think it can be done. “A lot of Labour MPS are frightened of not delivering Brexit,” said one Cabinet minister. They need political cover to shift position, however, which could take the form of amendments that make the deal “look more Labour”, though they won’t change much in substance and could be reversed later.
This pro-deal Tory faction haven’t given up because they think the agreement on offer is the best one available and simply do not think the party can win a mandate for no deal. With Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings and a poll this week showing a 10 point drop in Tory support, they also see it as pure folly to trigger a general election to get a mandate for something the party has already promised and failed to deliver.
Ambitious serving Cabinet
ministers, like Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, also know that they stand a poor chance of winning a leadership battle while Brexit policy is still wide open. Any party contest that occurs before ratifying the agreement is liable to turn into a competition on who can be tougher with the EU, triggering an arms race of unrealistic promises that they won’t win.
The other faction is led by hardbrexit, disaffected former government ministers, of the likes of Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, supported by part – though not all – of the European Research Group. As usual, this grouping is tossing around a plethora of half-formed plans. One of them involves ramming amendments into the EU Withdrawal Bill whenever the Government brings it forward, along the lines of the Brady amendment that demanded a replacement for the Irish backstop. What exactly this would solve is unclear.
Another plan under discussion is to demand that the Irish backstop be replaced by a longer transition period, which would last until “alternative arrangements” for the Irish border can be found. Extra EU budget payments would be deferred until the transition is over. This is truly crackers. Even if the EU agreed to the money part, which it won’t, it traps the UK indefinitely into a full rule-taking arrangement with no political rights – including free movement, fisheries policy and all – that is a hundred times worse than the backstop.
Meanwhile, some of these Brexiteers still think, despite everything, there is a way to engineer a no-deal. They think Emmanuel Macron will save them after all, or that the May 22 deadline for passing the withdrawal deal or participating in European elections is a backdoor exit (it isn’t). Or else, they hope to force out Theresa May following the likely dire local and EU election results and install a hardliner who can use all the levers of power to resist Parliament’s Remainers. As we have seen, this last-ditch plan can’t work, because if push came to shove, Parliament would simply revoke Article 50.
Conservative Party members are generally assumed to be on the side of this latter group, but in fact there is a range of views. They might be angry with Mrs May and not thrilled with the deal, but many also simply want this stage of Brexit done.
If there is any consensus between the two factions, it’s on the need to start talking to the country about other matters. “Stick Brexit on the backburner,” as one prominent Brexiteer leadership hopeful puts it. “Do something for lower middleincome families.” A pro-brexit MP who supports Mrs May’s deal said the first port of call for a new leader would be “to turn on all the Treasury spending taps” and hope to take advantage of a honeymoon period to win a quick election. This is, the MP points out, a massive gamble.
The trouble is that, having made such a hash of things, the Tories now have to earn the right to address the public about anything other than Brexit. It’s all very well talking about housing, minority voters or “Boohoo” capitalists, but if the party can’t point to some tangible progress on its biggest, all-encompassing, national project, if they can’t explain how it’s going to stop taking up all government bandwidth for the foreseeable future, why should voters listen?
Instead, the national conversation is being dominated by the only two groups who really do want to keep talking about Brexit. The first consists of Nigel Farage and MPS like Andrew Bridgen and Mark Francois. Mr Farage, feeling neglected after the referendum, has quickly and “reluctantly” leapt back into the fray for the EU elections. The formerly obscure backbenchers, meanwhile, can’t believe their luck at being aggrandised as “Spartans” and repeatedly asked on television to insult the Germans or bloviate about mutiny.
The second group is, of course, the hardline Remainers, like Andrew Adonis and Anna Soubry, both attention-starved former Cabinet ministers who have now found common cause with the “Spartans” in hunting down as many television appearances and speaking gigs as it is humanly possible to obtain.
As for the rest of us, we don’t want to hear from these people any more. For my part, I want to know how the Tories are going to stop a dangerous Marxist winning power, how they will improve our infrastructure and what their strategy is on China. Other voters have their own concerns. The queue of pressing issues is getting longer. Brexit, instead of being a bridge towards addressing them, has become a roadblock.
Many Conservatives might be angry with Mrs May and not thrilled with the deal, but many also simply want Brexit done