For some reason, the last days of Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Conservative party reminded me of the last days of Nero. That self-serving, delusional speech outside No 10 evoked echoes of Suetonius’s version of the dying words attributed to Nero: “Qualis artifex pereo” – What an artist dies in me.
So much done! Brexit Unchained! So much more to be achieved … (Sorry. Sarcasm is dangerous.)
The purpose of the defenestration of Johnson for hardline Brexiters was given away by the attorney general, Suella Braverman. She admitted on the BBC’s Today programme that from her point of view Johnson’s political assassination had been all about Brexit. Brexit? Yes: Brexiters like her, fearing – irony of ironies – that the man who “got Brexit done” was not a true believer in a hard Brexit, this having been the stated reason of the former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost for resigning earlier from the Johnson government. Truth? Morality? Lawbreaking? Our international standing? Not the big issue for hard Brexiters.
It had been suggested to me earlier in the week that the reason why the rightwing Brexiters were now going for Johnson was that they felt their objective had been secured. When Keir Starmer shocked former Remainers, and now Rejoiners, like your correspondent, by ruling out any intention of rejoining the European Union and even the single market, then for the Conservative Brexiters Johnson had served his purpose, and could go. Labour would not wreck the project. The problem was that, for them, Johnson was not purposeful enough.
To hard Brexiters, who had been yearning for years for a low-tax, low-spending, minimum-regulation economy, Johnson’s “spendthrift” approach was all wrong. Interestingly enough, it appears also to have been all wrong for Rishi Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor helped to unseat Johnson, just as the resignation of one of his predecessors, Sir Geoffrey Howe, in 1990, released forces that unseated Mrs Thatcher.
In his new book The Chancellors: Steering The British Economy In Crisis Times, the former Bank of England deputy governor Howard Davies points out that Sunak’s views could not have been further from the conclusions of the Treasury papers on the economic impact of leaving.
As the bills for Brexit mount and mount, making the country poorer and, thanks to a disastrous Brexit-induced devaluation of the pound, more inflation-prone than our former partners in the EU, the Treasury’s concerns have been vindicated.
Leaving our nearest and most important market was always an act of extreme foolishness. The impact on our trade balance makes the sterling crisis of 1976 – which helped to bring down Callaghan’s Labour government – chickenfeed. Brexit has produced a situation where a 10%-plus devaluation of the pound (against the average of other leading currencies) has not even achieved a boost to exports.
The mounting bills of Brexit are, according to surveys, finally getting through to the electorate. As people resume travel to continental Europe they are finding that all manner of Brexit-induced hazards are inhibiting their freedom of choice. Yet Starmer, having failed for several years to take the Johnson government to task on such issues, now tells us he does not wish to rejoin the EU and single market, but wants to “make Brexit work”.
The point is that Brexit doesn’t work and cannot be made to work. The Labour leader seems obsessed with the third of Labour voters who were misled by what Lord Heseltine calls Johnson’s “pack of lies” during the referendum campaign. It is absurd to say we cannot go back on that so-called “democratic” referendum outcome. In a democracy – which I think we still are (just!) – the electorate can change its mind every time there is a general election.
Now, I have news for the Labour leader. I get around quite a lot and have met many a Labour voter in the past week. Every one of them has been shocked by his U-turn on Brexit. Every one of them has said that as a result they are going to vote Lib Dem in the next election. Offending two-thirds of your electorate in order to please one-third – who by now ought to realise they were conned anyway? Funny old electoral strategy.
The entire Brexit tragedy began with David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum in the first place. Brexit has been largely about what Michel Barnier, the EU’s negotiator, noted in his My Secret Brexit Diary: the “bickering, backstabbing, serial betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a handful of Conservative party MPs. Boris Johnson … will, along with David Cameron and a few others, carry a real burden of responsibility in their country’s history.”
Some of us would like Starmer to come to the rescue, not dip his fingers in the blood.
