Brexit’s a mess, but we can’t just blame Remainers

It had been suggested for a while that Mrs May was about to lose a couple more Brexit-supporting Cabinet ministers. Instead, late on Friday afternoon, she lost a minister from the Remain camp. Jo Johnson resigned from his position in the transport department saying the withdrawal deal currently being finalised would result in “vassalage” for Britain. The only conscionable thing to do now, according to Mr Johnson, is to ask the people to vote again. My question to Mr Johnson and other MPs who share his views is this: what will you do if the country votes to leave again in the second referendum?

Almost all our Remain-supporting senior politicians are on record saying the 2016 referendum was a once-ina-generation opportunity for the British people to voice our opinion on the EU. Jo Johnson himself was a lead architect of the 2015 Conservative manifesto, which promised that the result of the referendum would be honoured, “whatever the outcome”. If these same politicians are now saying that Brexit is simply undeliverable, then wasn’t it fundamentally dishonest to put an option on the ballot paper that could apparently never be implemented?

The truth is that a referendum was only promised because none of these advocates of “people’s choice” ever imagined that Leave might win – they have been struggling to deal with the shock of the result since day one. Buoyed up by nearly two years of truly abysmal negotiation, the Remainers appear to have convinced themselves that this time their victory is certain, hence the charade of a second referendum.

But, as Diane Abbott warned on Question Time last week, those who voted Leave last time may very well do the same again. In the scenario posed by Mr Johnson, faced with the choices of no deal, Mrs May’s deal and remaining in the EU, what if the country voted to leave without a deal? How would Mr Johnson and his like-minded colleagues carry out the people’s will? What miraculous solutions will they develop then that they cannot now?

As for the Brexiteer MPs who never tire of expressing their frustration with the handling of the negotiations, I ask them this: what is the alternative plan and who’s leading on it? There’s no clear leader, leaving backbenchers unsure about whom to rally behind. The letters from Conservative MPs to the chairman of the 1922 Committee needed to trigger a leadership challenge never quite reached the threshold of 48. It’s now being reported that Cabinet Brexiteers are finally coming to our rescue with a “secret” alternative plan to Mrs May’s, but you’ll forgive me for not getting too excited given the abundance of suggestions of imminent action in the past, which never materialised.

The Remainers did everything possible to scupper Brexit, but it fills me with no confidence that things would have been any different had the Brexiteers been in charge instead. The 2016 vote was an opportunity for an outof-touch Establishment to reform and deliver change in order to ensure its own survival. That opportunity has been all but squandered by a crop of politicians who failed to rise to the occasion.