Father of Brexit tells Boris . . . THE WAR IS OVER

THE war is over. As 2021 dawns, the most dramatic political conflict of our lifetime will draw to a close. This issue, which has broken prime ministerial careers and divided families, will no longer dominate our lives in the same way. While the precise terms of our leaving may continue to be finessed for some time, the fact that the anti-EU movement ever got this far is a political miracle.

It was back in 1990, when Britain joined the ill-fated Exchange Rate Mechanism, that I became a Leaver. It was apparent to me that the European Common Market and Free Trade area, as it was originally known in the spirit of post-war reconciliation, had turned into an undemocratic monster.

As the arch-Europhile Tony Blair later admitted: ‘The rationale for Europe today is not peace; it is power.’

All of Britain’s political parties, business lobbies and most of the media broadly supported our membership of what, from 1993, became the European Union.

Although there were some strong Conservative and Labour voices who spoke out against the Maastricht Treaty, which established this political union, nobody was prepared to sacrifice their career by calling for Britain to leave. To do so would have been political suicide.

Realising this, I made a decision that would define my life for more than a quarter of a century. I decided to fight for the cause of national independence via a brand new political party called Ukip.

Little did I know the extraordinary price I would have to pay for challenging the status quo.

One person who warned me how tough it would be was Norman Tebbit, with whom we all have sympathy this weekend following the death of his wife, Margaret, who was paralysed by the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. Norman told me that I was now an enemy of the state and that people would stop at nothing to prevent me from succeeding.

In the early years, it was hard going. Indeed, I was the only Ukip candidate to save my deposit in the 1997 General Election. But by then I was committed, bloody- minded, and happy to tour the country relentlessly speaking at public meetings. To those who knew me, I quickly became the patron saint of lost causes.

Ironically, what gave the movement a boost was the introduction of proportional representation in the European elections of 1999. Three of us became Ukip MEPs that year.

What further changed the political weather even more dramatically was the expansion of the EU in 2004. Its membership grew to incorporate first eight, and then ten, former communist countries.

It was obvious that if people from relatively poor countries were going to be allowed to move in unlimited numbers to a much richer country, they would do so in droves.

I knew that this was the issue that would alter everything. National democracy and sovereignty are important, but so is the right of everyday people to remain in work, pay the mortgage and do their best for their children. It was plain that vast numbers of people arriving in Britain unchecked would have a negative impact on wages, housing and public services and would lead to discontent. That is why I tried to make clear that uncontrolled immigration and Britain’s relationship with the EU were synonymous. With all of the main parties being in favour of the EU’s enlargement, and the free movement of people that went with it, the path was clear for Ukip’s purple revolution to begin. Support for the party surged. We won the 2014 European elections. Then two Tory MPs quit their seats to stand in by-elections a s Uk i p candidates. They were returned to the Commons. All this led directly to the 2016 referendum. If David Cameron had not agreed to hold the plebiscite, the Conservatives’ national support would have collapsed.

But for us to win a referendum in opposition to every major political party, business group, trade union, media organisation and global leader was never going to be easy.

As a team acting on its own, I think that Ukip, the businessman Arron Banks, and a handful of dependable rebel Labour and Tory MPs could have scored about 43 per cent in the referendum. That is why it was so crucial that Boris Johnson, who is now finishing the job, opted to join the Leave side.

Johnson’s Vote Leave group, which included Michael Gove, got us over the line.

Yet this was only the beginning of the bitter battle that would follow. Even though the result of that vote was crystal clear, with a majority of more than 1.25 million people backing Brexit, the Establishment spent three- and- a- half years trying to overturn it.

I think that historians will look back on the 2016 to 2019 period in astonishment. Whether it was the BBC, then Commons Speaker John Bercow, or hundreds of backbench MPs, a stubborn refusal to respect the outcome took hold. It was accompanied by a coarseness not seen before in modern politics.

The ensuing stalemate and the extension of the UK’s departure date was unsettling, but it was clear that the public had not changed their minds. In fact, having seen t he arrogant and overbearing nature of Brussels throughout that time, I am sure that in many cases their resolve was strengthened.

When I launched the Brexit Party as a means to re-establish our tattered democracy, the wave of

I was an enemy of the state – people would stop at nothing to thwart me

Boris’s Vote Leave group was crucial – it got us over the line

Brexit is an epic triumph for the people against the political classes

support was immediate. Millions of pounds were donated in small sums online.

The huge victory we scored in the 2019 European election led to Theresa May’s resignation and the premiership of Boris Johnson.

We then had our day of celebration on January 31 this year in Parliament Square. After 47 years, we had left the EU and, no doubt to the relief of the European Parliament, I left Brussels.

The 11 months since then have given rise to more trench warfare as an intransigent EU did its best to keep the UK aligned to its rules.

I am sorry to say that for all the tough talk of Mr Johnson and his chief negotiator, Lord Frost, some major concessions have been made. Northern Ireland has been cut off from the rest of the UK; the European Human Rights regime will remain in place here; our coastal communities have been saddled with a rotten fishing deal; and EU firms will still be allowed to tender for UK government contracts.

In regulatory terms, the EU will hold a Sword of Damocles over Britain with the threat of immediate tariffs if they judge that Britain is being too competitive.

This is not what I campaigned for and it most certainly is not what Boris Johnson’s supporters voted for in the 2019 General Election.

These handicaps will not allow Britain to transform itself into t he Si ngapore- s t yl e enti t y in a European t i me zone t hat it could become.

In 2021, however, I suspect that the debate around the EU will fade as more pressing concerns materialise. Let’s be in no doubt, though. Brexit was and is an epic triumph for the people against the political classes.

It will, I’m sure, prove to be the beginning of the end of the European Union. There is no going back. We won.

BORIS JOHNSON has sealed his place in British history as a ‘weathermaker’ Prime Minister. Historians tend to separate those premiers who make the political weather – that is, change the entire zeitgeist of their times – from also-rans who merely go along with whatever the established view is at the time.

But by getting Brexit done as promised, and on such favourable terms for the UK, Boris will be seen by history in the former, much more illustrious group.

There is nothing ignoble about being an alsoran premier. Many achieved useful things in their times. Harold Wilson founded the Open University. Gordon Brown protected the financial sector from meltdown during the Great Crash. David Cameron won the Scottish and Proportional Representation referendums and instituted gay marriage.

But when it comes to being considered a big beast a century hence, most will fail to make the leap from important contemporary political figure to historical personage.

By taking Britain out of the EU and setting us on a different, independent and sovereign trajectory for the first time in 47 years, Boris has made that leap, regardless how the rest of his premiership turns out. (And, crucially, escaping the EU will make it far easier for the rest of his premiership to turn out well.)

Rain-maker prime ministers since 1945 include such giants as Clement Attlee, who massively increased the role of the State in people’s lives, and Margaret Thatcher, who similarly massively decreased it.

Edward Heath took us into Europe and was therefore a weather-making PM, despite all the tragic disasters associated with almost everything else about his premiership, from the threeday week to the 1972 miners’ strike, and from the Ulster Troubles to price and incomes controls.

By winning three consecutive Election victories and fighting the Iraq War, Tony Blair was, I believe, a weather-maker, too, however controversial some of his achievements might seem historically. Boris joins them with an astonishing achievement that almost everyone in the Establishment said was impossible. For years, Brexiteers were ridiculed and reviled for insisting that Brussels would give Britain a free trade deal for the simple reason that the EU made much more money out of its trade with Britain than Britain made in reverse.

Yet in just nine months of (clearly hard-fought) negotiation – whereas trade deals usually take years to negotiate – the Johnson Government has brought this one to a successful conclusion.

At £668 billion, it is the largest in the EU’s history, and it was all done in the middle of the worst health crisis in a century.

THE extent to which the entire British Establishment was certain that Boris would fail is evident from what every living former Prime Minister has been saying over recent years. For example, Blair and John Major claimed in September that Brexit negotiations were ‘in disarray’ and that ‘the promise of a comprehensive trade deal with the EU’ was ‘long gone’.

In 2014, Major had said: ‘ Free movement of people is a core principle of the Union and that must be so. If we agree on free movement of capital and a free market, we cannot deny free movement.’

He and Blair had also argued that leaving the EU would destabilise the peace process in Northern Ireland. So far at least, that turns out to have been completely wrong.

Gordon Brown and Theresa May made similar dire warnings. David Cameron said one of his own biggest mistakes was to ‘let expectations about what could be achieved get far too high’. Yet Boris’s deal shows that all our past leaders drove down expectations of what Britain could achieve far too low. It was not just the political establishment. The Foreign Office, BBC, Financial Times, Economist magazine, House of Lords, university vice-chancellors, leading trade unionists, the Church of England and The Guardian all pooh-poohed Britain’s chances of a comprehensive free trade deal. Most thought it was impossible without compromising our sovereignty, as symbolised by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) having continued jurisdiction over Britain during the negotiations.

But Boris understood something that his predecessors in the Brexit negotiations – an army of civil servants and even members of his own government – failed to grasp.

While he may be flawed and to some he may even be considered reckless, he knew there was no alternative to issuing an all- out threat if a deal was to be struck that would benefit Britain.

No matter what his critics claim, this deal has proved all naysayers comprehensively wrong. It is a sad fact of politics (and human nature) that people so hate being proved wrong that they will jump through any number of intellectual hoops sooner than admit it.

For Britain, Boris’s triumph has been the end of a long journey. It was 32 years ago that Margaret Thatcher made her famous Bruges Speech, warning Britain and the world that EU leaders had a federalising intent and wanted the bloc to become a single superstate, something that had not been on the agenda when Britain had joined the then Common Market in 1973.

Yet it became ever- clearer to Thatcher that the European president Jacques Delors was hellbent on turning the EU into a superstate. Five months after Thatcher’s Bruges Speech – some months before she was brought down by a cabal of malcontents within the Conservative Party – Boris Johnson became a newspaper correspondent in Brussels, a job he held for five years. He saw for himself how the Brussels bureaucracy was working to try to draw Britain on to the vortex of the movement towards ‘ever-closer’ alignment of the EU’s laws. Not just laws, but an increasingly complex web of regulations and restrictions.

And all the while abolishing countries’ veto rights and replacing them with a system of Qualified Majority Voting in more and more areas of daily life where Britain was regularly outvoted. The crux moment came with the Maastricht Treaty, when 12 more countries joined the Brussels gang, providing the foundation for the EU, which came into effect in November 1993 after the

An astonishing achievement because so many said it was impossible

treaty was passed by John Major’s weak, Europhile Government.

It was opposed by Thatcher, Johnson (who was to return to London the next year to become a columnist) and a small but growing insurgent band of Tory Eurosceptic MPs who Major privately referred to as ‘bastards’ but who were, in fact, heroes who laid the groundwork for Brexit. Without that internal Tory resistance against the Maastricht Treaty, it would have been impossible to have kept the flame alight.

The same flame, of course, eventually lit the touchpaper for the explosion that was the Brexit referendum of June 2016. Those Brexiteer MPs who are currently poring over the small print of the 1,246page Brexit deal are the architects of this great historical revolution, having, in the footsteps of others, dedicated their careers and lives to escaping the clutches of the EU.

Conversely, the opinions of the Remainers were always predictable. The moment that I first suspected that Boris and his doughty senior Brexit negotiator Lord Frost had done a good deal was when the BBC relegated it to the third news item on the News at Ten. This was confirmed by the generally mealymouthed r e c e pt i o n from t he Remainer news outlets and commentators, all of whom have been uniformly critical of a deal that gives Britain a no-tariff, no-quota access to the European market but which simultaneously gives us back control of our borders and laws.

When, in 100 years’ time, children are asked to answer exam essays on Britain’s post-war history, it is unlikely that Covid- 19, however important and tragic it is to us today, will feature prominently. (If it, or its variants, go on to kill many millions more people, then I might be wrong, but that is unlikely given the vaccines coming available.)

Instead, I’m sure the questions will be about how and why Britain managed to effect an 11th-hour deal to break away from the EU and became independent once again. The smart student looking for top marks would cite the Government’s planning for a No Deal Brexit, which went a long way towards convincing EC president Ursula von der Leyen that Johnson was not bluffing. They would mention, too, the invaluable work done by Michael Gove at the Cabinet Office, playing the ‘hard cop’ to Lord Frost’s ‘ good cop’. Thanks to this combination, when it came to the undoubted disruptions of a No Deal Brexit, the EU’s negotiator, Michel Barnier, blinked first.

Britain has signed important trade treaties before, of course. For example, the Anglo-French commercial treaties of 1786 and 1860. But in the broad sweep of history, this one will be seen as different because of its profound constitutional implications. That alone puts Boris Johnson on a par with great figures of the past. His time working in Brussels, when he saw up close how the EU negotiates right up to the last minute and beyond, and how it only truly respects the language of threat and brinkmanship, was also invaluable. It took the theatricality and willingness to undertake risk of a Benjamin Disraeli or a David Lloyd George to pull off this feat; something else that puts him in the pantheon of great premiers.

Another exam question of the year 2120 might be ‘What did the Johnson administration do with the new freedoms that Brexit gave Britain?’ For his part, Sir Keir Starmer has said ‘the consequences of the deal are the Government’s alone’ might well come back to haunt Labour at the next Election. But those ‘consequences’ could be a resurgent Britain shorn of the EU’s regulatory authorities, its Common Agricultural Policy, Common Fisheries Policy, and so on. By the next Election, we might have already begun to see many great British breakthroughs – such as developments in the life sciences, artificial intelligence and green energy – that will emerge under a British, rather than EU, regulatory framework.

We’ll have freeports, economic investment in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ Northern constituencies, better environmental protection and an Australian-style points-based immigration system. All in all, the kind of government intervention that fosters growth in key sectors – rather than the 1970s version that propped up loss-makers such as British Leyland – will have started to bear fruit. Voters will realise that these positive and visionary consequences of the Brexit deal will be the Government’s achievements, and its alone.

Significantly, we have just learnt that Britain, despite being racked by Covid, has leapfrogged India to return to being the world’s fifthlargest economy, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research. And, of course, we were the first country in the world to roll out a Covid vaccine that works.

If the rest of the Establishment could only learn to believe in Britain in the way that Boris and his Government do, anything is possible now that we have settled our trading relations with our largest export market. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s place in history is already assured, which is an extraordinary achievement only 17 months after becoming Prime Minister.

He knew they only respect the language of threat and brinkmanship