The wheels are falling off the Brexit revolution

By Pete North - November 21, 2020

The problem with Tories is they don’t actually know what conservatism is and wouldn’t recognise it were it in their midst. The media didn’t like the pitch of Theresa May’s “citizens of nowhere” speech, but it was probably the most conservative speech from any Tory leader in decades. The problem, though, was that it wasn’t the sort of thrusting free market Thatcherism that Tory boys were pining for. Thus nobody liked her pitch and the Tory party was pretty soon in the market for new leadership.

What they wanted was a buccaneering free trade no dealer who would slash and burn regulations, lower tariffs and roll back the state, not this hokey shire-tory stuff for vicars and village folk. This is why they so readily dropped their knickers for Boris Johnson.

What they thought they were getting was a properly right wing government that would drop the green crap, sort out immigration, deliver their year zero Brexit, and unleash Cummings on the civil service to drain the swamp.

Johnson, though, is not an ideologue. He just wants to be popular. At the time, filling up the cabinet with cronies and spad posts with IEA think tankers was indeed very popular on the right because of who it “triggered”. It should come as no surprise, however, that Johnson could just as easily change tack on a whim when the going got tough.

They will say it was Covid that killed the Brexit revolution, but I think the wheels would be falling off by now with or without a global pandemic. There is no reason to believe the Brexit negotiations would have looked any different or that we would be in any way better prepared. Arguably talks may have featured more in the media without Covid displacing all other news but I reckon the same fatigue would have kicked in anyway.

The dysfunction is obvious. Everything the right wants the Tory party to do in power is going to prove unpopular with the press and upset the liberal middle classes. Johnson never had the stomach to do unpopular things.

The other problem, though, is that his appointees recruited from the right actually aren’t very good at what they do. Cummings turned out to be an incompetent blowhard (to the surprise of nobody here) while his supporting actors in the cabinet are largely thick as mince and haven’t the first idea what to do with power.

As much as this government only had a vague idea of what it wanted, it never put the research in as to how these things might be accomplished. It turns out that achieving things in government is not an easy or fast process and there are no magic wands.

Immigration is one such problematic field. Priti Patel has already bumped into the international dimension that prevents rapid resolution of the dinghy problem, while illegal immigration is much harder to deal with, requiring a range of policies contingent on effective local enforcement. To get to grips with it you’d need a whole raft of policies. There isn’t one single lever you can pull. If that were the case we’d have done it by now.

Anyone even vaguely competent must have known this before taking office, but that is not Priti Patel. Having failed to make her mark in the first year, she now blames obstruction from the civil service, thinking that effective leadership amounts to screaming and shouting at the lower orders.

The Tory right are quite taken with Patel, largely because she is superficially attractive (so I’m told) and as far as the identity based slurs the left like to kick around go, she enjoys a certain immunity – as does the Tory party. They will accept her excuses and circle the wagons around her.

As to Cummings, the man is a bullshitter who built a myth around himself, which relies on those around him taking it at face value. The moment you question the myth, it falls apart – which he tries to pre-empt by being aggressively obnoxious to the extent that he cows would-be critics into silence. But, because there is nothing there of substance, whenever he is in a position of having to deliver, he fails, whence he blames everyone else for his failure and moves on. In that respect he and Patel are peas in a pod.

With Cummings having become an albatross around Johnson’s neck, his departure was only a matter of time. Why Johnson is prepared to squander what’s left of his political capital on a moron like Patel is unclear, but he can’t escape the fact that his Brexit revolutionaries are serial incompetents and crooked as they come. Little wonder Johnson sees the need for a complete rebranding.

In doing so, though, he has managed to alienate at least half of his vocal supporters who already suspect Brexit will be a sell out, and a furious at Johnson for locking down the country. Doubling down on the net zero agenda has put it squarely in the minds of the right that Johnson is a globalist puppet. This is the great betrayal they feared.

This, though, is entirely their own fault. They made Johnson the de facto leader of the leave movement, despite having no track record as as leaver. They knew who and what he was – they knew damn well he was an opportunistic charlatan but went ahead and deceived themselves anyway. They were warned.

This rebranding, though, gives you some insight into Johnson’s mind. Having dispensed the Brexit mandate, he believes he can pivot away from Brexit and the Tory right to resume business as usual politics and turn it around in time for the next election. That logic would be sound in normal times were Brexit a smooth transition from one case of affairs to the next, but it isn’t. From this I take it that Johnson does not anticipate the kind of chaos most are now predicting, which in part explains our approach to trade talks.

Put simply, this is not going to work. He can go the full Cameron and go and hug a husky, dispensing with the Tory right who “bang on about Europe”, to become a rudderless liberal party, but the legacy of Johnson’s first year will bleed into next year and beyond. He doesn’t get to sweep Brexit under the carpet and distract the media with wind turbines. He either has to stick it out or run away. My money is on the latter being that he doesn’t have the stomach for unpopularity the way Mrs Thatcher did.

The thing about Mrs Thatcher was she knew what she was doing and why – and could articulate an economic and moral case for doing so. She spoke with precision and purpose. That’s not something Johnson can do. He didn’t care either way about leaving the EU so couldn’t articulate a rationale for it nor outline any credible benefits. There is perhaps only Gove in the entire cabinet who could – and he’d struggle to pass the credibility test.

Furthermore, having taken the reckless approach to Brexit possible, short of leaving without a withdrawal agreement, somebody is going to have to explain the somewhat wide discrepancies between what the leave campaign said and what is unfolding in reality. By then Cummings will be long gone from the media eye and Johnson will wish to be likewise. He’ll be hated by his party and the country.

But then this “green crap” is also an inevitability of “hard Brexit”. Sandwiched between the EU and a USA run by Joe Biden, ultimately forces a degree of political conformity. The signals coming from the USA indicate moves to reinforce the West’s grip on multilateralism, which is no bad thing as a buttress against China, but if the UK is going to be aggressively divergent in trade then it needs to show it is still part of the club. Thus it would seem the UK has no choice but to go deep on the climate dogma. Peer pressure and global norms are more binding even than international law.

Had the UK taken a more collaborative approach to the EU instead of aligning itself politically with Trump in the hope of plugging the trade gap created by leaving the single market, the UK could have spared itself the need to put on a show of conformity now that Trump has gone. Pegging our foreign and trade policy on a one term president was a singularly foolish thing to do.

Virtually every humiliation the UK will be forced to endure, and every betrayal the Tory right feels is a consequence of their refusal to adopt a Brexit plan. Instead of defining a set of strategic outcomes, they treated Brexit as an event, winging it through every stage, not knowing what they were doing or even why. After all, Vote Leave Ltd was never established to deliver Brexit. It was there to ensure the Brexit insurgency never threatened Tory incumbency.

In that respect, there was never any possibility of Brexit being anything other than a shambles. The moment the Tories took ownership of it, we were on a path without a destination and on so doing we lost the ability to shape the outcome. All we can do is watch it unfold and hope we can pick up the pieces. The Brexit revolution will be defeated by its own arrogance and incompetence.