Janet Daley:

Powerful forces are keen to stall Brexit indefinitely, and Mrs May’s dithering is exactly what they want

For months after the Leave victory in the referendum, I was being accosted – no, I should say graciously approached – by members of the business and banking community who would make helpful suggestions as to what I might write on the subject. Their advice was invariably the same: this is never going to happen.

They would assure me, with sublime confidence, that whatever was being said by the politicians and the official negotiators, the UK was not going to leave the European Union – not in any meaningful sense, at any rate. They did not put it quite like this, of course, but what they implied was that the forces that held power over matters of economic life and death would see to it that the absolute severance of Britain from the EU which the population believed it had voted for would be effectively prevented. Back then, I didn’t believe them. I do now.

If you are wondering why the normal political processes seem so utterly futile, and why even those individuals whose credibility is crashing toward career-ending debacle seem to be paralysed, it is because this is now out of the hands of elected leaders and the exasperated legislators who serve under them. It is the people who were sidling up to me back in 2016, with their preternaturally calm assurances that this will never happen, who are running the show – and just as they always knew they would, they are putting a stop to all this nonsense about obeying the will of the people.

This has little to do with the prominent Remain camp of MPs who are so noisily visible in Commons debates and who have now discovered that they are being shafted by Theresa May and the people who speak for her, just as the Leavers were before them. No, Mrs May isn’t a secret Remain loyalist who has been quietly, systematically seeking to further their goal. She apparently betrays the promises she has made to them just as glibly (and incoherently) as she did the ones she made to the hapless Brexiteers who protected her for so long because they thought they had convinced her…Oh God, I can scarcely bother to write this stuff any more.

Anyway, now the most vociferous Remainers like Dominic Grieve, as well as the quieter, more amenable ones like Nick Boles are furiously screaming for her head, too. Indeed, she has succeeded, where so many previous Tory leaders have spectacularly failed, in uniting the party: they are absolutely as one in wanting her gone.

But their unanimity will count for nothing because there is one significant faction in British national life which wants very much for her to stay on and to keep doing what she is doing – which is to say prolonging this futile “negotiation” into the indefinite future until everybody is so exhausted and bored that they accept Brexit In Name Only. For the people who believe themselves to be the true power brokers – and their formidable allies in the Treasury – Mrs May is a gift. She is the national leader of their dreams who seems willing to contradict herself repeatedly in the course of a single day in order to buy another five minutes delay to the Thing That Must Never Happen.

But there is one British political posse which is still very much involved in this “negotiation”. As one German industrialist I saw being interviewed last week put it, the EU is happy to listen to the counsel of a group of wise elders from Britain who speak its language. The German executive, speaking on behalf of EU business interests, breathed the names of these men with reverence: Sir Nick Clegg, Lord (Michael) Heseltine and Tony Blair were all voices of sense with whom Europe could deal. In dialogue with such paragons, he mused, it could surely be possible to make the sort of reforms that the UK would accept – and which many other member states might welcome.

He was apparently unaware that this triumvirate so highly regarded in Europe were discredited political has-beens in their home country, not to mention that, faced with requests for modest reforms by the eminently reasonable David Cameron, the EU had absolutely refused to countenance anything that threatened “the integrity of the single market” thus putting an end to Mr Cameron’s political career. As we now know, Sir Nick is to become head of global affairs for Facebook and Lord Heseltine has gone on record as saying that he still favours joining the euro. Enough said.

But the more interesting – and most important – name in this is Tony Blair whose messianic self-belief is doing so much to create mixed messages on Britain’s behalf in Brussels.

Mr Blair’s visions are never less than global in their aspiration. He who did so much to create popular resentment against EU migration by inaugurating an immediate unlimited entry policy to citizens of the eastern European accession countries (which no other western member state did) may now be the force behind the most dramatic unforeseen obstacle to Brexit.

You may recall that there was scarcely any mention of the now famous Irish border problem during the referendum debate. It was not raised as a potential deal-breaker even by the Remainers who surely ought to have seen its potential. (Perhaps they were too busy warning about planes falling out of the sky.) Only after a year or so of argy-bargy did the prospect of the Irish question hove into view as an intractable dilemma.

Now, who but the father of the Good Friday Agreement would have the greatest expertise for advising Mr Barnier and his friends about the sensitivities of Ulster – made peculiarly pertinent by Mrs May’s dependence on the DUP – and the usefulness to which that terrible history might be put? Let me be quite clear: I have no evidence that Mr Blair has been instrumental in the manipulation of this issue to the very top of the agenda. But so much of this “negotiation” process is being run – or blocked – by people who are not publicly visible that we are free to make our own guesses. And by the way, don’t get too excited about the possibility of No Deal. They won’t let that happen either.

‘She has succeeded in uniting the party: they are absolutely as one in wanting her gone’