How Letwin went from Eurosceptic Thatcherite to king of the Remainers

Sir Oliver Letwin, architect of the parliamentary shambles over Brexit, had the most perfect background for a conservative intellectual. I don’t mean his privileged education (Eton and Cambridge) or the luxury of his upbringing; I mean his gifted and sensible parents, Bill (a professor at the London School of Economics) and Shirley, a confidante of Milton Friedman and part of the ultra-Tory set at Peterhouse in the Seventies and Eighties.

And yet Sir Oliver, an alumnus of Mrs Thatcher’s policy unit, has now revealed himself as a Blairite liberal democrat, a toady to Europe and (for there are times when only vulgar abuse will do, and this Letwin-induced mess is one of them) a bloody idiot.

So much that is written about Sir Oliver describes his supposed brilliance, but one wonders why: idiocy has so often taken the upper hand. Most famously, he let two strangers into his house in the early hours of the morning one day in 2002 because they wished to use his lavatory. They burgled him. Despite the emphasis placed in government on confidentiality, he threw a pile of letters from constituents into a bin in St James’s Park.

He is the sort of brilliant man who pulls doors marked “push”.

Sir Oliver was not always so unregenerate. He was a founder member of the European Research Group. Way back in 1999 he was the

co-author of an antifederalist pamphlet bearing the Union Flag called Battle for Britain, which attacked the EU for undermining the Thatcherite legacy and for controlling British immigration policy. It also said that “if the Conservative Party stands for anything, it stands for resisting that destruction of our nationhood”.

Soon after that, however, Sir Oliver became ideology-fluid. During the 2001 election, as a shadow Treasury minister, he delighted conservatives by advocating £20billion in tax and spending cuts. However, his party’s leadership, prostrate before the cult of Blairism, was horrified. They had him locked away in Dorset for the rest of the campaign. The effect on him was alarming; so much so that it would have been better had he stayed in confinement.

In response to what he was told was his egregious error, Sir Oliver developed a full cultural cringe against almost everything he had believed in. He repented his association with Mrs Thatcher, by the traditional means of attacking her: “I don’t believe she ever took on board the extent to which some people are victims of society,” he said, his promiscuous resort to cliché betraying the trauma he clearly felt.

After 2005, the Cameron era allowed him to give full vent to his post-Tory guilt. As the party haemorrhaged members after Dave’s repudiation of most aspects of social and economic conservatism, Sir Oliver confided in me that the Tories needed to lose all but about 20 per cent of their previous membership if they were to be able to embrace properly progressive politics.

Given those views, it was inevitable Dave should make him minister for policy. Sir Oliver was deputed to organise the operation of the coalition, something his aggressively technocratic mentality pursued with relish. He cooked up the “Programme for Government”, and seemed to abandon any vestige of being a Conservative. Despite the Tory Party’s outnumbering its Lib Dem accomplices by almost six to one, in policymaking forums the Lib Dems were accorded parity of influence, something of which Sir Oliver was very proud.

On all key committees a Tory chairman was matched by a Lib Dem vice-chairman, or vice versa, with the minority representative having a right of veto. Thus, the Lib Dems could exercise influence greatly disproportionate to their numbers; and Sir Oliver made them feel at home by pronouncing that he thought people were happy to pay higher taxes if they got better public services. Even more gravely, he has been described as the “midwife” of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, engineered by his fellow Euro-fanatic Lord “Gus” O’Donnell, and which clearly bred his utter disregard for the conventions of the British constitution.

As minister for policy he proposed an independent press regulator backed by royal charter. He claimed to have consulted Labour and Lib Dem leaders about the proposal, but it turned out he hadn’t, and they rejected it out of hand because it didn’t go far enough for their censorious tastes.

Partly as a result, it was something no serious newspaper could countenance – but it also handed over ultimate scrutiny of the press to the Privy Council. Its own guidance states: “Once incorporated by royal charter, a body surrenders significant aspects of control of its internal affairs to the privy council … this effectively means a significant degree of government regulation of the affairs of the body.” As with Europe it showed, once more, just how in touch he is.

He had a role in the 2015 manifesto, which had him acclaimed by fellow non-conservatives as a “moderniser” and caused many genuine Tories to search for the differences between Mr Cameron’s and Ed Miliband’s vision for Britain. Since then he has reached an apotheosis of anti-democratic fervour. Now a fully house-trained member of the liberal elite, Sir Oliver like them seems to find it hard to cope with people who disagree with him.

Naturally he abhorred the result of the EU referendum, with so many uneducated people refusing to do as the Cameron government had told them; and he has devoted the last two and three-quarter years to trying to prevent that democratic will being effected. He started early, bragging on Dec 15 2016 that “I was personally responsible for pushing the appointment of Olly Robbins and I don’t think you can do better.”

He has torpedoed the British constitution by seeking to wrest control of Brexit from ministers. He has shown contempt for most Conservatives by collaborating with Labour politicians. He has put up two fingers to the last Conservative manifesto. Best of all, he has driven his humiliated leader to grovel to a man who yearns to replicate the Venezuelan economic miracle. To Sir Oliver, intimacy with Jeremy Corbyn has become easier than loyalty to traditional Conservative opinion. There has been much wringing of hands at the supposedly uncouth treatment of Sir Oliver’s comrade, Dominic Grieve, whose activists passed a vote of no confidence in him. One trusts that, in Sir Oliver’s Dorset heartland, they are taking notes.

On Friday I flew to Berlin to speak about Brexit to German politicians and ministers. The aircraft was an hour late, air traffic control disrupted by fog, in what seemed like an apt metaphor for the Brexit negotiations. The politicians I met all stuck closely to the government script. However, it was clear that some were very uncomfortable with the state of the negotiations, the economic implications for Germany and the prospective political impact on Europe.

On the same day, the BBC published the comments of Annegret KrampKarrenbauer, the leader of Germany’s CDU party, who is very close to Angela Merkel and widely tipped to be the next German chancellor. She said: “If the UK now came to us and said ‘Let’s spend five days negotiating non-stop on how to avoid the backstop’, I can’t imagine anyone in Europe saying ‘No.’” It is in everybody’s interest to sort this out.

The Prime Minister’s offer of talks with Jeremy Corbyn is doomed. She is not going to find common cause in the national interest with a crypto-Marxist who senses a time of weakness.

She said she wants to find common cause with the House of Commons, yet this week’s constitutional putsch was rushed through by a single vote in a matter of hours, by the people who tell us a two-year Article 50 period was never enough time to reflect. So, we can disregard unreconciled Remainers.

The only thing that has truly gained the will of the House was the Brady Amendment. This tolerated some flaws