Hypocritical Hammond is making the ‘no deal’ he hates even more probable

Remainer rebels are risking Parliament’s legitimacy as the world starts to pass them by

In his brilliant Reith Lectures this year, Lord Sumption, a recently retired member of the Supreme Court, emphasised the importance of legitimacy. Legitimacy lies behind the functioning of law and of democracy. As he puts it: “We obey the state because we acknowledge its legitimacy.” Legitimacy, he says, is “the basis of all consent”.

Legitimacy runs deeper than mere opinion: it means our acceptance that the authority under which we live is what it says it is. Example: you might be anti-monarchy in principle, but you would be hard put to deny that Elizabeth II is the legitimate head of state of the United Kingdom. Example: you might always vote Conservative, but you accept the legitimacy of a duly elected Labour government.

The EU has always (here I suspect I diverge from Lord Sumption, who seems to favour it) had a problem with legitimacy. Because it moves steadily in one direction (“ever-closer union”), it is engaged in a permanent land-grab. It keeps taking powers which, we thought, belonged to us.

We ceded power to it by joining and in subsequent European treaties, but we became increasingly uneasy because we doubted whether this process was legitimate. Whoever is the British prime minister, most of us accept his/ her legitimacy in a way that we do not accept the legitimacy of Jean-claude Juncker. The PM is somehow ours: no President of the European Commission could be.

So the vote for Leave in the 2016 referendum had a logic which even Remainers should acknowledge. The largest number of people in this country ever voting for a single thing decided to defy all three main party leaderships and take a big step. That means a lot. They thus denied the legitimacy of the EU and, to use the Sumption terminology, showed they do not wish to obey the state (a United States of Europe, or thereabouts) that it has become.

Lord Sumption hates referendums, because they are not good at paying regard to the needs of the losers. He has some right on his side there. But they would be even worse devices if they did not pay regard to the needs of the winners. Yet that is where we have been ever since the results were known on June 24 2016. MPS legitimised a referendum; but then large numbers of them spent the next three years trying to evade its result. They are still at it.

At which point, I leave off this discussion of principle, and descend to Philip Hammond. This week, after a few weeks of grumpy silence, Mr Hammond said yet again that “no one voted for no deal”. This is a clever remark: it is both true and utterly misleading. No one voted for no deal, or for any deal. Neither was on the ballot. There was a good reason for this. Voters were invited to answer the one really important question: did they want Britain to be in the EU or not? They did not need to be asked anything else, because their MPS had collectively assured them that they would enact their decision. As with all legislation, it is part of the legitimate role of MPS to work out how to enact what voters want them to do.

At first, it seemed that this was what Theresa May was attempting. But once she had called, and nearly lost, an unnecessary general election, it gradually became clear that the Government was not acting in good faith. Mrs May said no deal was our negotiating backstop but, thanks chiefly to Mr Hammond, it wasn’t. He and his allies deliberately entered negotiations without a bottom line. As always happens in such cases, we lost and the other side won.

So Mrs May had to go. Because more than enough of the Tory party’s MPS and members recognised the nature of this disaster, they chose as her successor someone with a bottom line. Foolishly, from its point of view, the EU had already set our departure date for October 31, thus giving Boris Johnson the focus that enabled him to become Prime Minister.

The hypocrisy of Mr Hammond’s position today extends to all MPS who, like him, opposed no deal, yet voted for Article 50 and the Withdrawal Act, both of which provide for it. That is the context of the current excitements about no-confidence motions, Governments of National Unity and Mr Speaker telling the Edinburgh Fringe he is fighting “with every breath in my body” to make sure that “the House of Commons must have its way”. These are all devices to conceal the weird but true fact that although several Commons indicative motions have shown a majority against no deal, when it came to actual legislation, no deal is what Parliament voted for.

There are at least three consequences of this hypocrisy. One is that Mr Hammond and Co are making the no deal that they hate more likely. They are encouraging their friends in Brussels to think they can win in Parliament, and thus discouraging them from making Britain an acceptable offer.

Another is that they have become defeatists. They have invested so heavily in the horrors of no deal that they actually resent it when business leaders – this week, Lord Wolfson of Next and the leaders of British insurers – start to say that they are ready and no deal isn’t so bad after all. Defeatism means wanting your own side to lose. Mr Hammond has become a sort of genius at that.

The third consequence is that the Hammonds, Dominic Grieves and John Bercows who so loudly assert the rights of Parliament are in fact undermining its legitimacy. If you devote all your energies to frustrating the referendum you legislated for, going against the result of the 2017 general election in which the two main parties both promised to enact Brexit, breaking parliamentary conventions to get your way and now trying to undermine the new Prime Minister, you cannot be surprised if millions start to think you have got above yourselves and to feel a bit Cromwellian about you.

Meanwhile, the world is changing. When I first met John Bolton more than 25 years ago, I was impressed by the rarity of an American conservative who saw clearly how dangerous the European Union was to democratic national independence in the West and how likely the project was to go wrong. Now Mr Bolton is President Trump’s National Security Adviser, and his views are widely shared in his country. This week, he was in town to hold out to Britain the possibility of sectoral trade deals when we cease to be shackled to what he sees as a dying power.

In his article this week denouncing no deal, Mr Hammond found time to disparage Mr Bolton’s mission, too: “when our American friends talk about doing a ‘great trade deal’, they mean a trade deal that is great for America”. Of course they do! What country (except, perhaps a Britain led by Mr Hammond) seeks a trade deal that is not great for itself? But why does Mr Hammond not apply even fiercer strictures to a British deal with the EU – an entity that is larger, and far more politically and legally intrusive upon our sovereignty than the United States?

Continentals, especially the French, have long complained about “les Anglo-saxons”. They have exaggerated the power of the Anglosphere. But when Britain leaves, their fears may be realised. We shall have regained a sense of our legitimate interests.