Britain heading for a true believers’ Brexit

They don’t believe in it. The tragedy and the ignominy of this Conservative Party cabinet in Britain is they don’t even believe in it themselves.

They don’t believe in the painless Brexit or the sunlit future they’ve promised to deliver. You can hear it in their voices as they tour the studios and TV sofas ducking the words “no deal” and babbling about Australia.

You can see it in their eyes as they try to reconcile their pledge to strain every sinew to get a deal, with their assurance that it will be fine if they don’t get one. You can sense it in their body language as swagger teeters on the edge of fear. That photograph of Prime Minister Boris Johnson standing beside European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said it all.

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Whole political careers have been built on selling Brexit by men and women who don’t, in their guts, buy Brexit. And now, in the days ahead, they must make the sales pitch of their lives.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has conceded it’s very likely he will fail to achieve a post-Brexit trade deal with the European Union.

Who are their customers? Until you understand which gallery Boris Johnson is playing to, you will never understand the crafty logic beneath his superficially ignorant performances.

Johnson knows his audience. Like every good journalist, he never forgets which side his bread is buttered on. Throughout his career the Prime Minister has mined one rich vein in modern Britain. It got him his readers, it got him his party’s support and it got him his voters last year. Boris Johnson would be nothing without it.

It was English exceptionalism that made Johnson’s career as a Brussels-bashing newspaper columnist. He saw early what so many on my side of the argument have been slow to understand.

Tens of millions of people in Britain really believe that we British are much, much better than the rest and that, since the Second World War, history has been selling us short. They have persuaded themselves that it is the European Union that has shackled us and that, unbound, we shall leap.

I don’t for a second think Johnson believes this himself. In his lonely soul he is darkly cynical. I don’t hold with the now widely expressed view that Johnson is the truest Brexit believer in his cabinet. But what with all his heart he does believe — and knows beyond question — is who his most enthusiastic readers always were, what brought his speeches the biggest cheers, and on how many doorsteps “Get Brexit done” delivered last year’s Tory landslide.

Johnson owes these people big time. They know he’s a charlatan but they need to be confident he’s their charlatan. His support on the Tory backbenches does not run deep: lose his Brexiteer MPs and the letters calling for a leadership election would soon start going in. So, hard deal or no deal at all, the PM will not let these people down.

And the second thing we former Remainers should understand, as hopes for a deal fade, is that there never was a good reason to leave the EU unless you believed in a clean-break Brexit.

The Brexiteers’ logic is impeccable, as I’ve argued on these pages before. The true believers have the only rational case for Brexit: you just have to share their confidence that it’s the EU that has been holding us back, that’s all.

If you don’t believe that then you shouldn’t want Britain to leave. If you do, then of course we cannot tie ourselves to evolving European regulation! What would be the point of that? The whole idea of Brexit was to cast it off.

That is why we waste our time lamenting the death of the “soft” Brexit some of us once hoped for. It’s probably true that with better handling Britain might have been steered towards something like the halfway-house “Norway” option, but such an outcome would only have reopened the wound of Eurosceptic anger.

It never was sustainable for long that, after Brexit, the United Kingdom should bind itself to taking the rules that our former EU partners continued to make. That sort of damage-mitigation Brexit would have bought only a few years’ peace. Why should the true believers have accepted it? And why should they accept, now, that we must bind ourselves to a perpetually re-levelled playing field of EU regulations, when competitive advantage was one of the biggest prizes that Brexit seemed to promise?

In the end there’s only one question, and it’s the same question that haunted the 2016 referendum campaign and has haunted our attempts to find an acceptable route out of the EU ever since. Do you believe that membership of the European Union has been holding Britain back and that, after removing these supposed chains, we shall be richer, happier and more free than we were before?

I don’t; most former Remainers don’t — so far, so unsurprising. But here’s the truth that shocks. The British government doesn’t believe it either, not really. The Prime Minister doesn’t. Very few in his cabinet do. Most of his ministers don’t.

Can there be a sadder disgrace, personal as well as political, than for those in power to pursue a project for which they have no enthusiasm, in which in their secret hearts they do not believe, and which most of them suspect, and some of them know, will damage the nation they lead, the ordinary men and women who placed their trust in them?

We all get things wrong, and honest politicians often do. But most of this feeble cabinet are not guilty of a mistaken belief in the benefits Brexit will bring; they are guilty of something worse: knowingly taking their country down a rocky road. What an indictment of a modern British cabinet, that we should define the good men and women as the ones who at least look queasy as they collude with the bad ones.

In my years of being conscious of politics, I’ve observed many terrible mistakes. Suez was a catastrophe, but Anthony Eden and many of his cabinet did believe it was the right thing to do.

Labour’s nationalisations of industry — pretty disastrous — were pursued in the belief that socialism would work.

The Tory poll tax was an awful idea but its cabinet and parliamentary cheerleaders honestly thought it would prove fair and workable.

The Iraq and the Afghan occupations were a costly blunder but I’ve never doubted that Tony Blair believed he was taking the morally right course. David Cameron really expected we could make Libya a better place.

But there is something infinitely depressing in the picture of a British cabinet avoiding the eyes of history even as they make it. Shame on the whole damn lot.

The Times

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