Sherelle Jacobs:
With victory within reach, the liberal snobs have overplayed their hand and now an election looms
The trouble with the Remainers is not their arrogant inability to grasp when they have lost, but their blindness to when they have won. So when Boris Johnson triumphantly returned from Brussels clutching the best bad deal possible, the eyes of MPS gunged up so quickly with spiteful, green anger that they failed to spot their finest chance to wreck Brexit.
The Prime Minister has negotiated the best Brexit in Name Only that Britain could hope for in today’s wretched political circumstances. But the deal is still insanity wrapped in victory. It leaves Britain kowtowing to the rulings of a foreign judicial power, the ECJ, for years to come (a surrender of sovereignty unheard of in international relations). It also clumsily butchers the Union, sentences our fishing industry to almost certain death, and – as fiercely as Tories deny it – theoretically commits Britain to a future relationship on Brussels’ terms. This Tory deal, sadly, puts off everything and resolves very little.
Kick the can too far down the road and you end up at the beginning. The Withdrawal Agreement paves the way for a Brexit so pointless and damaging, that, months from now, when Britain realises it is still trapped at amber with a Parliament that refuses to have an election, or break out of limbo on WTO rules, calls for a second referendum will become deafening.
Perhaps paradoxically, the logical, long-term plan for Remainers who hate Brexit would be to let the Withdrawal Agreement pass and then deny an election and sabotage the second stage of negotiations. But, with victory in reach, the liberal snobs’ visceral hatred for populism and weakness for pedantry has prevailed.
Some ex-tory MPS are so trapped in the hyper-rational senselessness of their anti-brexit resentment that they swapped strategy for invective long ago. Not least Dominic Grieve, whose bizarre outbursts this week included calling Dominic Cummings a “rat” and suggesting Boris Johnson is “like a dictator”. And for all the talk of Labour MPS in Leaver seats who back a deal, many are loathe to support anything that, even in the short-term, means a win for the Tories’ man of the people.
Even the “tactical” Remainers are beyond hope. Rather than taking a step back and grasping the bigger picture, they have chosen to immerse their egos in the intellectual goo of a sticky parliamentary legalism. Take Rory Stewart – the kind of man who relishes telling those who disagree with his personal views to be objective. He both solemnly supports the PM’S Withdrawal Bill and vows to hack it to pieces, with provisions that would delegate the decision over our future relationship with Europe to Parliament, and give MPS an automatic vote for a transition extension in 2020.
And, of course, the mind boggles at the gravity-defying anti-logic of Oliver Letwin. Here is a man so clever that his analytical mechanisms operate unconstricted by the basic laws of cause and effect. He says he backs the PM’S deal. Thus it follows that he should concoct a cack-handed amendment that scuppers any hope of passing it, via the crucial momentum gained from a “meaningful vote”.
But the Remainers who are claiming to honour Brexit only so they can destroy it have overplayed their hand. Unlike them, Boris Johnson sees the potential to win in every “defeat”. With the Government poised to call for a general election rather than let Parliament mutilate their deal, and Jeremy Corbyn indicating yesterday that he will support going to the polls on the condition that there is an extension up to January 31, the chances of a national vote have surged.
Given Johnson’s double-digit lead, a majority finally appears to be within the Tories’ grasp. A strong mandate to trade with the EU on WTO rules if we fail to agree a final deal by the end of transition might just give the PM enough political leverage to negotiate a free trade agreement, and wriggle out of the horrors that he has agreed to in the political declaration, from regulatory alignment to restricting UK taxation to a barely concealed freedom of movement arrangement.
The irony is that an election to strengthen Mr Johnson’s hand in “Phase 2” would have proved near impossible if Remain MPS had shown the good sense to pass his deal by October 31. With the Tories boosted by getting some kind of Brexit “over the line”, Labour would most likely have tipped into full-scale civil war rendering them in no fit state to agree to go to the country. The Lib Dems would have pressed pause on campaign mode, as they recalibrated from the Remain party to the Rejoin party. And as Alex Salmond’s court proceedings start on November
21, any hopes of getting a “simple majority” for an election with SNP support after Hallowe’en, as some Brexiteers have suggested, would also have been for the birds. This leaving the Remainers free to blow up the PM’S best-laid plans.
Thus, the hapless Remainers may yet prove to be the handmaidens of a hard Brexit. The clever incompetents in Parliament don’t realise it yet, but they have just become the useful idiots of the Leave cause.