Cassandra come again: the man who predicted Brexit’s myriad pitfalls, but no one would listen
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a beautiful princess of Troy who was able to foretell the future – but her curse was that she was never to be believed. She foretold the Trojan War, the Greeks’ use of the Trojan Horse and the resulting destruction of her city. But no one believed a word of it. It was all Project Fear.
Three thousand years later, it seems that Cassandra has been reincarnated.
Rather than a beautiful Trojan princess, however, she’s now a wearylooking British civil servant in his late 50s.
Yesterday in Parliament, Sir Ivan Rogers sat before the foreign affairs select committee, dolefully outlining the myriad prophecies he’d made about Brexit. Sir Ivan used to be the British ambassador to the EU, but resigned in January 2017, after
(accurately) predicting that Brexit would take a lot longer to resolve than Theresa May thought.
The committee listened as Sir Ivan trudged through his record of clairvoyance. According to him, he’d predicted Brexit a full 10 years before it actually happened (at the time, he was working in the City; when he told colleagues that Britain would leave the EU, “They thought I was mad”).
Before the referendum, he said, he’d warned government ministers that they needed to prepare for a Leave victory, but they didn’t want to know. He’d also predicted that triggering Article 50 would prove a mistake (because it would unwittingly give the upper hand to the EU), and that the EU would insist on agreeing the divorce bill, citizens’ rights and the Irish border before consenting to discuss trade: “That was blindingly obvious to me.”
He also said that he’d warned Mrs May that she would run into trouble with the Irish border, because the three promises she’d made on it (no hard border; no membership of the customs union; no regulatory divide between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain) were incompatible. Apparently his advice on this issue – and no doubt many others – was “unpopular”.
“It’s easy to be wise after the event,” Sir Ivan said drily, “but I hope I was wise before it.”
Was he making it all up to make himself look clever, and others foolish? It didn’t sound like it. He didn’t seem smug, or boastful. Frankly, he seemed utterly glum. With his long, tall, gleaming forehead, he looked, somehow, like a depressed boiled egg. His face appeared capable of only one expression: the frown. Between his eyebrows ran the most extraordinarily deep vertical line – in fact, more than a line, a crevice, a chasm, presumably carved out by a lifetime of constant frowning.
During the past year, Sir Ivan has given speeches arguing that a no-deal Brexit would be “grossly irresponsible”, and an act of “economic selfharm”.
A pity the select committee didn’t ask him for next weekend’s lottery numbers. If the future is as gloomy as the mandarin Cassandra seems to think, the Treasury could do with all the help it can get.