The Tory rebellion
History does repeat itself, said The Guardian. Back in 1990, a savage speech by the softly-spoken former Tory chancellor Geoffrey Howe effectively brought down Margaret Thatcher. Now the savage criticism of the Government’s plans by another ex-Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, threatens to do the same for Boris Johnson… and on “exactly the same issue”: Britain’s fractious relationship with Europe. It’s a “scandalous betrayal”, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. As chancellor, Hammond did all he could to block no-deal preparations and veto crucial Brexit spending plans. Now he is leading a tiny “caucus” of Tory MPs – including Rory Stewart and David Gauke – which, by seeking to neuter Johnson, risks handing Jeremy Corbyn the keys to No. 10, and letting Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party devastate the Tories at the next election. “The saboteur-in-chief” is what many Brexiters are calling him, said Francis Elliott in The Times. He is even being blamed – though he denies it – for the leak of Operation Yellowhammer, the Government’s classified projections for what might happen under a no-deal Brexit.
For Johnson’s followers, Hammond is the ideal bogeyman, said Matthew d’Ancona in The Guardian. And when Brussels refuses to budge, you can be sure that he’ll be the key figure in their “Great Betrayal” narrative. “It’s all your fault, Spreadsheet Phil,” they’ll say. Your alarmism has proved fatal. By stoking up “Project Fear” you made the EU think we were just bluffing about no deal, and that it therefore had no need to negotiate. Yet it is madness to accuse Hammond of scaremongering. On the contrary, you only have to look at the Government’s own assessments in Operation Yellowhammer – fuel, food and medicine shortages; disruption at the ports; civil disorder; a hard border with Ireland – to see that he has been valiantly trying to avert a historic disaster by warning the country of what’s at stake. “If you look to the heavens and see a breeze block plummeting towards you”, it’s not “alarmism” to draw attention to it. And it’s not as if the British people voted for this calamity, said The Observer. As both Hammond and Corbyn have often said, “no one voted for no deal”.
That’s true, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It’s also “utterly misleading”. No one voted for any type of deal in the referendum: none were on the ballot. Voters were just asked whether or not they wanted to leave the EU, their MPs having assured them they’d enact whatever the verdict might be. And the verdict was to leave. But as it happens, by voting for Article 50 and the Withdrawal Act, both of which specify no deal as a last resort, Parliament did itself accept no deal. How hypocritical of the likes of Hammond, who go on about the sovereignty of Parliament, to then disavow what Parliament voted for. As for the British people, the reason they voted leave, according to a postreferendum poll by Lord Ashcroft, was political not economic, said Paul Goodman on Conservative Home. It was the principle “that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. In the event of the no-deal forecasts coming true, we shall see how attached they really are to that principle.