Tebbit: We shouldn’t trust the economists

NORMAN Tebbit yesterday said economists had a history of getting it wrong after several hundred warned about the risks of Brexit.

In a poll of more than 600 economists, 88 per cent said they believed that leaving the EU and the single market would be likely to damage Britain’s growth prospects over the next five years.

But Lord Tebbit, the former Tory Party chairman, drew parallels with the 364 economists who famously said in 1981 that Margaret Thatcher’s economic plan threatened social and political stability.

Soon after, an economic recovery began that eventually resulted in one of Britain’s longest lasting booms.

Lord Tebbit said: ‘They are just offering an opinion and on the whole the economists have got it pretty wrong.’

MY PERSONAL insight into the way the EU referendum has introduced acid into the bloodstream of the Conservative Party came at a drinks event last week. I introduced a party member (previously a donor) to a senior member of David Cameron’s inner circle. All was well until Cameron’s advisor said how the City of London would be devastated if we left the EU.

The donor, formerly a big wheel in the City himself, disagreed and suggested London would do fine whatever happened. At this point, Cameron’s advisor just said ‘Goodbye’ and abruptly walked off.

But neither side of that little social contretemps was an MP, still less a member of the Cabinet. It was mere musket fire in the Tory civil war, compared with the thermonuclear bomb detonated yesterday by the two main Conservative campaigners for Brexit.

Michael Gove and Boris Johnson declared that the party’s manifesto commitment to cut net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’ was ‘plainly not achievable’ unless this country left the EU — and that the failure to keep this promise on immigration is ‘corrosive of public trust’ in politics.

Disrepute

Though they didn’t name David Cameron, what Gove and Johnson are saying is that the leader of their party is not just betraying the trust of the British people, but bringing our entire political system into disrepute. A more devastating charge is hard to imagine.

Although the employment minister Priti Patel might have produced one with her own broadside yesterday against ‘leaders of the Remain campaign with private wealth’ who didn’t care about the pressures on public services caused by mass immigration, because they don’t need to use those services themselves.

She was identifying — who else? — David Cameron and George Osborne. It will be interesting to see how these men — denounced as selfish toffs by their employment minister — greet Patel at the next Cabinet meeting. Is it even possible to run Cabinet government, when members of that very Cabinet are daily annihilating each other’s reputations?

These ‘blue on blue’ attacks are precisely what Cameron had hoped to avoid during the referendum campaign.

That, at least, is the reason he gave for refusing to debate on television against Johnson and Gove — an encounter the television companies (which have no reason to worry about widening the fissures within the Conservative Party) rightly saw as the best box office.

But while claiming he won’t engage in open conflict with his own colleagues, Cameron has been traducing them in his own way.

Last week he accused those supporting Brexit of being ‘immoral’. Number 10 solicited interventions from the former Conservative deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, who obligingly described Boris Johnson as ‘preposterous’, ‘obscene’ and ‘irresponsible’, and from the former party chairman Chris Patten, who said Johnson was unable to tell ‘the difference between fact and fiction’.

This only lets us know just how much David Cameron fears Boris Johnson, who he realises is much more popular than he is, both in the wider Conservative Party and in the country as a whole.

The PM’s sense of job security will not be enhanced by yesterday’s radio interview with the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who declared that even in the event of a narrow victory for Remain, a ‘leadership challenge’ is highly likely, as the party’s rules provide for such a contest if 50 Tory MPs demand it.

‘I think there are at least 50 colleagues who are dissatisfied with the way that the Prime Minister has put himself front and centre of a fairly outrageous Remain campaign. I think that’s probably highly likely [that a vote of no confidence would be called],’ he said.

Bridgen went on to argue that even if such an immediate leadership challenge did not take place, Conservative eurosceptic MPs would paralyse the Government — which has a parliamentary majority of just 12 — by refusing to pass legislation.

Now, would you like to hear a joke? The joke is that when in January 2013, Cameron decided to promise an in-or-out-of-the-EU referendum, it was purely for reasons of Conservative Party management. Nigel Farage was on the rise, and Cameron wanted to appease his eurosceptic backbenchers and stop defections to Ukip.

According to David Laws, a Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition government at that time, Cameron responded to Nick Clegg, when the then deputy PM said he was ‘crazy’ to promise such a referendum, by saying: ‘I have to do this. It’s a party management issue. I’m under a lot of pressure.’

Not nearly as much as he is now. But back then David Cameron was thinking only of how to get through to the next general election — which he probably never imagined he would win outright. The irony is, of course, that if he had formed a second coalition with the Lib-Dems, he would have had much greater parliamentary protection against his own disenchanted backbenchers. Now he is desperately vulnerable.

Savagery

The Conservative Party, however, is less so — despite its current internecine savagery (one Tory MP said yesterday: ‘I don’t want to stab the PM in the back — I want to stab him in the front, so I can see the expression on his face.’) This is partly because Her Majesty’s Opposition is led by Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose limitations would be devastatingly exposed in a general election.

It is also in less trouble than it seems, because Cameron has already pledged to resign before that election. His going will suck out most of the poison now flowing through the parliamentary party. And I believe that, because the next leader will not be one of those now making ludicrous assertions about Britain’s inability to cope outside the EU, the party will unite behind that man — or woman.

It is true that the divisions in Labour’s Cabinet during the first Europe referendum campaign of 1975 helped precipitate that party’s split six years later, when leading proEU members formed the Social Democratic Party. But Ukip already exists for disaffected Tories to defect to, if they wish; and its gain of only one seat for four million votes at the last election has ended its attraction for ambitious Conservative rebels.

David Cameron’s luck may be about to run out. But the Tory Party can survive his humiliation.