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Is Brexit Boris about to be fired or can he rise again?
My original plan was to make this latest edition of my weekly newsletter for Reaction a study of the shenanigans at Westminster over the EU withdrawal bill. But even mentioning it I can see readers drifting away, eyes glazing over, flicking on to their next email in search of news about something more exciting, such as manhole cover designs from the 19th century, or tips on what to do this weekend when at a loose end. There is also the question of Reaction readers who live abroad, in countries such as the US. How much more Brexit can they stand? We all have our limits.
Of course, the EU bill currently under consideration at Westminster matters to the UK, a great deal. It is the first of many such difficult EU-related pieces of legislation coming up at Westminster and the parliamentary fireworks will be quite spectacular. There is a ton of procedure to get through to make Brexit possible, and as Ken Clarke pointed out in his intervention this week in the Commons, both the major parties are badly divided on the question of whether, or how, to leave the European Union.
It is not grabbing people, though. There is a weariness about Brexit outside the two armed camps.
I make merely one point in passing about Brexit this week, and that is about trust and whether or not it will eventually become impossible for leavers to trust remainers. Increasingly, I wonder.
To listen this week to leading Tory ultra-remain rebel alliance MPs, Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry, make their attacks on the way in which the government intends to incorporate and adapt EU law into British law the day of Brexit, to minimise disruption, was to be gobsmacked. Transposing all this EU law straight over runs counter to the wishes of Brexit voters, said Soubry with a straight face. Honestly, I’ve heard it all now. Anna Soubry siding with leave voters and defending their right to get what they voted for.
What other solution is there other than to move all this law across? There is decades of the stuff. It will take years to work though. Whether or not the executive is awarded excessive powers in adapting and interpreting these laws is a different matter, and MPs are right to demand answers.
But the fear of leavers watching all this is, I think, rooted in an undiminished suspicion that some of those trying to amend and improve these bills are really for stopping Brexit, or undermining it to such an extent that it is easier to reverse at a later date.
This is one of the most bizarre aspects of the strange period since the referendum. Voters accept Brexit, the polls show, but the positions adopted by many in the political and media sphere have hardened. Yes, of course, plenty of mistakes have been made by Brexiteers. The failure to reach out to European nation states to explain we are leaving the EU not Europe, and continue to play our leading role in security, defence and intelligence, is lamentable.
But no matter the shortcoming of the government, Britain is leaving and a decent settlement, rather than a bad settlement, clearly requires some accommodation between moderate leavers and moderate remainers who accept the result. Almost 18 months on it has not come, and the divide seems even wider.
Leavers looking for cooperation note that every time an obstacle or difficulty appears – proving the EU is a project designed to be difficult to leave – the mask slips. It seems to be a worryingly quick jump from “we accept the result, but” to “ha ha of course we’re going to stop this.” The Labour peer Andrew Adonis is openly committed to Parliament reversing Brexit, and quite a few other peers seem to be too.
They are not alone. “That’s the end of Brexit!” said one of my favourite Remainers with a grin a mile wide on seeing Corbyn remove May’s majority on election night. Is it? Corbyn can’t stand the EU and wants to leave. The Labour leadership (McDonnell, Milne, etc) is for leave, because it wants to break out of EU constraints and rules and nationalise the economy.
In this tumult, what was needed in British politics was constructive compromise, that might command maximum support, to get to sensible transition and the heads of agreement on an outline free trade package. Somehow, the ultra-remainers who could be putting their energies into arguing for that seem only to come alive to play games, and then profess to respect the result – fingers crossed underneath the table – whenever challenged.
This makes leavers angry and is forcing some people into ever more entrenched and dangerous positions. It helps explain the otherwise baffling actions of the hardline European Research Group of Tory MPs, who this week declared they think the UK owes nothing financially to the EU (and say the EU owes the UK £10bn) meaning Britain would just leave as quickly and cleanly, or messily, as possible.
Why do this now? They want to remind the government that it cannot slide too far in negotiations, it seems. Having watched endless wrangles and positioning, with media reports of splits on transition and money and the customs union, they are, after the summer, trying to send a message that even if they don’t get all they want, they are there putting a stake in the ground.
To all this, I imagine, bruised remainers will say that they cannot be expected to trust leavers either after all the lies and half-truths of last year. And what’s more, some add, too right pal we’re going to never give up, Jacobite style, just like Farage and the headbangers did for 40 years. Which, when one hears it said, rather vindicates leavers being suspicious of the motives of the ultra-remainers and unwilling to trust them, but it doesn’t get the country very far.
And round and round it goes, and…
Anyway, I wasn’t going to write about all that, and there I’ve done it again and prattled on about Brexit too much.
Instead, I want to consider (briefly now) the extraordinary goings on in relation to the Foreign Secretary who faces the sack. Boris Johnson is in extremely bad shape politically after the summer. The hopes of his supporters that the FCO would be the making of him, turning him into a more rounded and grown up figure, have been dashed. There have been too many missteps and botched statements.
Boris just doesn’t work as Foreign Secretary. The office doesn’t suit him and he is done for. The star of the referendum is busted, it is said. He is now a “penny stock” at Westminster. That is the settled view of most bubble dwellers and his personal popularity in the country is not what it was. Even his former supporters have been surprised by his inability to hold it together and keep onside old allies. Last year’s referendum in which he was the dominant personality seems a long time ago.
To be clear, Number 10 wants to fire Boris or move him come the reshuffle, and there is a debate going on about how or when it can be done. Conveniently, he was photographed on a tank during his visit to Estonia this week. Might he be shifted to defence? Haven’t our depleted armed forces suffered enough?
And there it is worth sounding a note of caution. The Tories are in the most terrible mess and their morale is low. Their MPs look traumatised. Although many admit they need a new leader, to grab this Brexit business and get it done competently, there is no-one immediately available, meaning Theresa May stays at the head of a government that is a shell operation run by aides. While they have a talented crop of younger MPs coming through there is no-one ready to be Conservative leader. That leaves a gap of a few years, in which May might fall, by accident or because of poor health, and the Tories then will not have a new leader ready and be choosing from the existing crop.
Could it be Boris? It is not impossible, and consider the comparison with Corbyn. Earlier this year Jeremy Corbyn seemed finished, as a leader fronting a joke operation with no prospect of swinging support in the country. This was the settled consensus, just as it is the consensus view now that brand Boris is beyond bust. Imagine, instead, Boris rebuilding and constructing a group of MPs behind him with a promise to overhaul the bankrupt university fees system, with the added piquancy that his brother Jo is higher education minister, and cheering up the Tory activists. The depleted Tory party in the country still likes Boris and he has, more than any other Conservative around, the ability to disrupt the media narrative and connect over the heads of sniffy journalists, which voters (consider Trump, Corbyn) seem rather to like. Do not write him off just yet.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.