Our undead Prime Minister staggers on
“THIS was the week Brexit died”, declared the PM’s former adviser, Nick Timothy. It’s hard to disagree, even though it’s not clear what comes next, and our undead Prime Minister staggers on.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s hard Brexiter faction conveniently buried itself last month, following its failed coup attempt. None of the leading Brexiters who brought us the 2016 Brexit campaign, David Davies, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson, are still significant players. Johnson made a speech last week at the height of Theresa May’s parliamentary crisis, which went down like a lead balloon and was hardly reported.
Ukip, whose electoral rise in 2014/15 persuaded David Cameron to call the EU referendum, is also pushing up the daisies. Its leader Gerard (who he?) Batten would be basking in well-earned obscurity had it not been for his reckless decision to hire the far-right activist Tommy Robinson as a political adviser. This caused Nigel Farage, the only kipper who’s ever had a national political profile, to disown the party he more or less created as a vehicle to achieve Brexit.
The quiet death of Brexit looks a bit of a mystery. They were supposed to be the winners, after all. The Remain side was shattered and confused after 2016.
Most MPs in Westminster are pro-Europeans, but they kept a timorous low profile for two years. Jeremy Corbyn was terrified about losing swathes of safe Labour seats to immigrant-bashing Brexiters, so he cynically backed Brexit from the start.
Liam Fox was wrong last week: Brexit isn’t being “stolen”, it was given away. The Brexiters were incapable of providing any coherent plan, despite being given every chance. Boris Johnson was handed
the key post of Foreign Secretary. The hardest of the hard Brexiters, ex-SAS soldier David Davis, was made Secretary of State for Exiting the EU. They all deserted their posts.
They were never able to explain how leaving the EU without a trade deal could possibly be achieved without intolerable disruption and unacceptable social and economic costs. The waffle about reverting to “WTO rules” was just that. In 2016, Michel Barnier offered a bog-standard, Canada-style free trade deal straight off the peg. But it was so obviously worse than the comprehensive deal we already have with the EU, that even Brexiters avoided arguing for it.
It was folly to think a country like Britain could carve out some retro copy of the British Empire by reviving what Liam Fox once called the “anglosphere”. No-one talks of “Global Britain” any more. The International Trade Secretary failed to deliver the cornucopia of global deals he promised for one obvious reason: most countries are trying to form trade deals with the EU, like Japan and Canada, or are trying to rival EU, like the USA and China.
Brexiters were stuck with a leader, Theresa May, who is not only a Remainer, but a self-styled “difficult woman”. One of the conspiracy theories doing the rounds is she never intended Brexit to succeed, despite her Florence red lines and her promises about “no deal being better than a bad deal”. But no-one seriously believes the PM tried to sabotage her own negotiations. She did what a Remain politician would be expected to do: come to an arrangement that is close to being in the European Union while leaving it.
Unfortunately, through incompetence, May ended up with a legally-binding Withdrawal Agreement that, everyone now agrees, is much worse than remaining in the European Union. The belated publication of the legal advice from the Attorney General,
Geoffrey Cox (only released after the Government was ruled in contempt of Parliament), didn’t tell us much we didn’t know or suspect. But by stripping away the PM’s political spin, the document confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions.
Cox made clear that Northern Ireland would be remaining in the single market for goods, and the full EU customs union, in the backstop and after. “For regulatory purposes,” he affirmed, “GB is essentially treated as a third country by Northern Ireland.” This is precisely the regulatory divergence from the UK the PM promised would never happen. As did the Scottish Secretary David Mundell, who should have resigned on the spot.
Moreover, there’s no unilateral exit route from the backstop. “In international law,” Cox wrote, “the Protocol would endure indefinitely until a superseding agreement took its place …” Britain can’t back out of the backstop without the EU’s agreement. So much for sovereignty. Theresa May’s Brexit deal is not so much a capitulation, as a selfinflicted incarceration. It was an object lesson in how not to negotiate.
Right now, in the European Union, Britain has a vote, a voice, and a veto. A vote in the Council of