It is objectively quite absurd for the Conservatives to have spent the weekend having a row over whether or not the United Kingdom is moving towards a “Swiss-style” relationship with the European Union.
For starters, Brussels doesn’t particularly like the morass of bilateral treaties it has with Berne and there is no evidence that a similar arrangement would be made available to London even if we wanted one, which the government insists it does not.
Second, because despite possessing on paper a large majority, so fractious is the parliamentary Tory party at present that Rishi Sunak must govern as if he had a much smaller one, or none at all. In those circumstances, a significant renegotiation of our deal with the EU is simply not possible.
Third, whoever kicked off the row by speaking to the Sunday Times was talking about removing trade barriers over the next 10 years or so, and unless the prime minister proves a true political miracle worker, the Conservatives probably won’t be in government for more than two.
Beyond those hard realities, it is also just bad politics. The next two years are going to be extremely difficult as it is, and voters are going to expect ministers to be ruthlessly focused on the cost of living and other bread-and-butter issues. If the Tories instead spend the time engaging in arcane disputes about the technical details of our relationship with the EU, it will send entirely the wrong signal about where the party’s priorities really lie.
This doesn’t mean those details aren’t important; they are. We spent the whole of the last parliament fighting over them for a reason. But Boris Johnson secured his historic win in the 2019 election with a promise to “get Brexit done”. That meant not only getting us out, but also allowing politicians to start focusing on other issues.
If the Conservatives expect to reach the next election with precious little to show for “levelling up”, and still arguing over the terms of our departure five years after the voters gave them a majority to sort it out, it’s little surprise that relatively young MPs are already announcing their plans to step down.
Given the above, whoever the “senior government figures” were who set this hare running in the Sunday Times, they were remarkably careless. That the finger of blame has settled on Jeremy Hunt illustrates why it is historically unusual for an incoming prime minister not to choose their own chancellor.
It also suggests once again how little Sunak’s impeccable Brexiteer bona fides seem to count in some sections of the party. As a new MP (first elected in 2015) he took a big risk defying David Cameron to back leave in the referendum. That he should be viewed with such suspicion – more than met Liz Truss, an actual remainer – is therefore surprising.
But then it isn’t just this idle talk of Switzerland riling up the Brexiteers. There is also deep suspicion among members of the European Research Group about the positive “mood music” ministers claim they can hear coming out of the negotiations over the Northern Ireland protocol.
Given that Brussels has shown no sign of reopening its negotiating mandate, and that Sunak is accepting arbitrary deadlines from Joe Biden to get the whole thing sorted out, MPs are worried that ministers intend to fold on the government’s red line about the role of the European court of justice in policing Ulster’s relationship with the EU. It doesn’t help that the Northern Ireland minister, Steve Baker, whom one might have expected to be their man on the inside, seems to have interpreted his role as playing good cop in a double act without a bad cop.
Combine all this with mounting unease about the political consequences of the autumn statement, and the fact that MPs never really bought into anything one might call “Sunakism”, and it becomes easier to explain why the prime minister is so vulnerable to such fits of the vapours from his backbenchers.
Yet the costs of this infighting could be enormous, because 2024 is a general election the Conservatives – and the Brexiteer ones in particular – really need the party to win. They would have time to bed down our relationship with the EU, and a whole parliament to drive forward with regulatory divergence.
A new generation of Labour leadership would probably be much less keen to re-fight old battles than Keir Starmer, a veteran commander of the Europhile rearguard action after 2017. They might also be less keen to outsource their constitutional thinking to Gordon Brown, whose proposals the Tories will almost universally detest.
But should the Conservatives wake up after a Labour term in 2028 to a Britain tied to the EU, and a constitution more firmly entrenched against their vision for the country than ever, they will have nobody to blame but themselves.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
