What the Covid Inquiry tells us about Brexit

The Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic still has a long way to go, but the evidence it is taking is already revealing an extraordinary picture of the British government at the time and, in the process, much about Brexit. It is tempting to say that it is not revealing much that many of us did not guess, but, apart from the fact that there’s much in the detail that is fresh, there is an important difference between ‘guessing’ and seeing hard evidence laid out in documents or given by witnesses under oath. And, actually, what is emerging is even more dire than could have been guessed.

What we could guess

Of course, it is not an inquiry into the handling of Brexit but it has long been clear that there were multiple intersections and interactions between that and the handling of Covid. I discussed many of them during the pandemic period, including in what is still the most-read post on the blog, from April 2020, which also gives links to some of the other places they are discussed by me and others. 

Some of those posts contain details which are now irrelevant, but the overall picture that is emerging confirms what is perhaps the central point made in that April 2020 post:

“What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in [i.e. Dominic Raab], and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.

They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.”  

What ‘the people in the room’ are telling us

I’ve quoted that at length not to say ‘I told you so’ (and, in any case, I was hardly the only person saying similar things at the time), but because it serves as a fair summary of what we have been hearing recently at the Hallett Inquiry. As Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer, wrote in his column last Sunday, “the testimony from the people in the room” has shown that Johnson was “comprehensively incapable of doing the job”. But, Rawnsley continues, it wasn’t just Johnson who failed, it was the cabinet and senior civil servants, and the blame for that lies in part with Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave team.

Cummings’ own self-serving and obscenity-strewn testimony to the Inquiry, in both its written and, especially, its oral form, showed his utter contempt for ministers and civil servants, whilst in itself giving a glimpse of the bullying and misogynistic culture which, as confirmed by Helen MacNamara’s evidence, permeated the inner workings of the administration. MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant at the time, makes it clear that this culture was not just morally grotesque, but substantively and substantially impaired the quality of decision-making.

Moreover, although it may appear unconnected, or at least less malign, I think the “unbelievably bullish approach that everything is going to be great”, which MacNamara says characterised the early days of the Covid crisis, is inseparable from the vicious machismo she describes. The blokey boosterism, which is also instantly recognizable as being identical to Johnson’s approach to Brexit as well, is the affable face that quickly contorts to hate-filled thuggishness, at least behind closed doors, when it encounters any challenge. Unsurprisingly, this culture was not just misogynistic but semi-racist, “laughing at the Italians” and in doing so being not just laddishly unpleasant but, again, substantively damaging the Covid response by jeering at what could have been useful lessons.

It must be beyond question that Johnson and Cummings were jointly responsible for this culture and all that came with it, though no doubt others played a part, and they had presumably transferred it over from the Vote Leave campaign operation. More generally, for all their well-attested differences, Johnson and Cummings were conjoined, enablers of each other and enabled by each other. Cummings is quite explicit about this in his evidence, as well as showing a shameless contempt for democracy, declaring that “we” (by which he seems to mean the Vote Leave cabal) had the right to pick and choose who would be Prime Minister, and that “we” installed Johnson despite knowing how unfit for office he was. [1]

Meanwhile, it was, of course, Johnson who appointed Cummings as his Chief Adviser and gave him such latitude of powers, a latitude which amongst other things, led to the resignation of the then Chancellor Sajid Javid, just as the pandemic was starting. And it was Johnson who expended so much political capital to keep him in post after the ‘Barnard Castle’ scandal. They were two cheeks - one flabby and purpled, the other scrawny and pockmarked - of the same backside, and what lay between them, connecting them, defining them, was Brexit.

Brexit, too, explains the uselessness of the Cabinet which, as Rawnsley says, the Inquiry is showing to have “failed to act as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional Prime Minister”. How could it have been otherwise given that, as Martin Kettle wrote when Johnson appointed his first Cabinet, it consisted of “mostly second-rate ideologues, many of them with negligible records of ministerial achievement and several of them with very dubious political ethics. All the positions of power are held by Brexit extremists. The rest are political hostages to the hard Brexiters.”  

The undermining of the civil service

As for the role of the civil service, part of what is at stake here was, as MacNamara’s evidence disclosed, changes that Brexit had wrought on the processes and machinery of government. But there is certainly more to it than that. Rawnsley points out that the Hallett Inquiry shows Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to cut an “abject figure”, but his appointment to that role, in the middle of the Covid crisis, was partly because his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, was seen by Johnson as “too much of a Europhile” (£) whilst Case was described as a “Boris Johnson ally”. It has also been reported that he had originally been brought into Number 10 as Permanent Secretary at Cummings’ behest. [2]

The wasn’t just a matter of a Prime Minster smoothly, if ruthlessly, appointing a more congenial or compliant Cabinet Secretary. On the one hand, Cummings’ written testimony (p.59, para. 276) reveals the utterly chaotic manner in which Sedwill’s ejection began. On the other hand, other evidence to the Inquiry shows that, Johnson ‘ally’ or not, Case, prior to taking over that role, had confided to Sedwill that he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, referring, apparently, to Johnson and his special advisers. [3]

Crucially, this particular episode was itself part of a wider picture in which many senior civil servants had already left, or were leaving or being sidelined, because of a perceived lack of commitment to Brexit. Indeed, in my post of 28 February 2020 – the date is important as it is just as the Covid pandemic was developing, and shortly before the first lockdown – I recorded in detail how the civil service was under attack for supposedly being anti-Brexit, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants the government wanted to expunge. It was not long afterwards, in June, that Cummings made his threat of a “hard rain coming” for the civil service (£). That was, of course, only the latest instalment in a process which had been going on since the referendum, and, in Cummings’ case, stretching back to his days as a special adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, when ‘the Blob’ first emerged as a term of abuse in British politics. The title of my February post is also worth noting – ‘Brexit is going feral’ – given that evidence to Hallett this week shows that, just four months later, ‘feral’ was exactly the term applied to Johnson’s government by Case, and apparently endorsed by Sedwill.

It's vital to recall this vitriolic attack on the civil service from Johnson and Cummings, and Brexiters generally, because it is quite as important as, if not more important than, the related issue, which is getting far more attention, of how Hallett is showing that Brexit was prioritized over tackling Covid. It wasn’t just that Brexit overloaded the bandwidth of the civil service, Brexiters also undermined the civil service as an institution. Even now, Cummings presumably includes the civil service amongst the “insiders” who “refus[ed] to accept the referendum result” who he blames for the lockdown having been necessary at all. For, on Cummings account, it was this alleged “refusal” that meant that Brexit created the “constitutional and political crisis that consumed a vast amount of the focus of the core of the state 2016-2019”.  Unsurprisingly, as Anthony Robinson observes, this account conveniently ignores the role of the Vote Leave campaign in creating this crisis.

Frost (as always) muddies the waters

In a similar way, like Billy Bunter to Cummings’ Flashman, David Frost responded to MacNamara’s evidence that the government focused on Brexit to the exclusion of everything else from July 2019 with the justificatory bleat that “we were in the biggest constitutional crisis for a hundred years”. He also asserted that the claim that ‘no-deal Brexit’ planning got in the way of pandemic planning does not accord with the facts because the Brexit deal was completed in October 2019 (i.e. before Covid), and the Transition Period meant that “there was no economic shock and no new arrangements to prepare for during the height of the Covid crisis”.

As so often with Brexiters’ claims it is complicated to unpick them, and Frost is particularly prone to tendentiousness. The only constitutional crisis between 2016 and 2019, and certainly between July and October 2019, was the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament, for which Johnson and Cummings were entirely responsible. Frost makes it sound as if this crisis was something the government heroically struggled against when, in fact, it was something the government created. It’s true that there had been a rolling political crisis since at least the 2017 election but, stripped of all its great complexity, that was not a constitutional crisis but a simple reflection of there being no parliamentary majority for any particular form of Brexit, just as was the case in the country. [4]

It’s also true that this political crisis still existed until the December 2019 election, and the Inquiry has already heard evidence that the work streams implementing provisions from the 2016 Exercise Cygnus on pandemic planning had been largely halted by no-deal Brexit planning. However, it is not true the completion of the Brexit deal, in the sense of the agreement with the EU of the text of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) in October 2019, ended no-deal planning. Firstly, that WA was not agreed by parliament until after the election. Secondly, even when it had been agreed, it initiated a new phase of no-deal planning – this time concerned with the possibility of there being no future terms, or trade, agreement.

This also means that it is either completely dishonest or totally ignorant for Frost to say that there were “no new arrangements” to prepare for during the Covid crisis of 2020. There were. Whether or not there was to be a trade deal, it would mean completely different trading (and other) arrangements compared with being in the single market, customs union, and other EU entities, once the Transition Period was over. Which of these two outcomes would prevail was not known until Christmas Eve of 2020 and so, throughout the year, there was the prospect of at least major change, and possibly of major disruption, to be prepared for. That was as true for businesses and other organizations affected as it was for the government.

The (non-) extension of the Transition Period

Moreover, Frost fails to mention that, until July 2020, the UK had the possibility of seeking to extend the Transition Period, something which the EU would almost certainly have agreed. Doing so would have helped the UK to deal with Covid, by taking away the urgency of the negotiations and the imminency of the changes that the end of the transition would bring. It would also have helped the UK to deal with Brexit, by deferring completion of the trade deal until the exigencies of the Covid emergency were over. For although the focus of attention arising from the Hallett hearings is how Brexit got in the way of dealing with Covid, it is equally the case that Covid got in the way of dealing with Brexit. For Frost to use the Transition Period as a defence against there having been such mutual impacts whilst ignoring his government’s refusal to extend the period, which would have reduced or contained them, is absurd.

As I wrote in June 2020, the decision on whether to extend the Transition Period wasn’t the last gasp of the battle over whether Brexit would happen, it was the Brexiters’ first challenge to show that they could govern Britain after leaving the EU, rather than just campaign for Britain to leave the EU. It is a challenge they comprehensively failed, because they were (as they still are) locked into the idea of defending Brexit against ‘betrayal’. Never mind that, by that time, Britain had actually left the EU, and that could no longer be prevented: they just ploughed on.

In doing so, they not only pulled time and attention away from dealing with Covid, they also ensured that Covid-battered businesses had no time to prepare for the end of the Transition Period. Even if Brexit were not intrinsically a huge folly, they ensured that it came into effect in the most unpropitious of circumstances, and they did so with absolutely no justification beyond the stiff-necked false pride that the period could not be extended even in the extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic.

The Covid government was also the Brexit government

The Hallett Inquiry is beginning to uncover the deep dysfunctions in the way that the government handled the pandemic and, almost as a side-issue, showing some things about Brexit. But the real significance of the Inquiry for Brexit is that the government it is exposing to view is exactly the same government that before, during, and after the pandemic was handling Brexit. So, although it is not an Inquiry into the handling of Brexit, it is surely inconceivable that the way it handled Covid does not also apply to Brexit to some degree.

For, self-evidently, these dysfunctions did not arrive with the pandemic but pre-dated it, at least as far back as Johnson and Cummings coming to power (though, as noted, some features, especially the denigration of the civil service, go back further). It is inconceivable that the factionalism and infighting, the misogyny and the vapid boosterism, were not all occurring in the period when, after Johnson came to office, the Withdrawal Agreement and, especially, the Northern Ireland Protocol, were still being negotiated. It is certainly true, by definition, that the government dealing with the Covid crisis in 2020 was the same as that which was undertaking the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations during 2020. And, although Cummings departed in November 2020, it was still the Johnson government, with all the flaws Hallett is revealing, which, throughout 2021 and until he resigned in June 2022, was embroiled in the ongoing row with the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There are already plenty of reports that show how little Johnson understood about the practicalities of Brexit. To take just one example, he reportedly “slumped in his chair” when “the penny dropped”, during a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker in September 2019, that his ideas about the Irish border were totally unworkable. But we now know that this same Johnson, during Covid, seriously suggested being injected with the virus on live TV to show its harmlessness, and seriously asked whether the virus could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nostrils, actually circulating a You Tube video of someone demonstrating this ‘cure’. Patently someone so dull-witted, or, more accurately, so lazy-minded, as to do these things would be equally incapable of grasping even quite basic things about Brexit, let alone its more complex details.

Similarly, the Inquiry is revealing how during Covid Johnson was flip-flopping daily, or even hourly, on both the overall strategy and the detailed measures for dealing with the pandemic. So it is surely reasonable to assume that he behaved in the same way on detailed issues in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and also on the big questions about them, most especially whether to allow there to be one or both versions of no-deal Brexit.

It is also surely reasonable to assume that he flip-flopped in the same way during the long period when it was rumoured that he would, or would not, invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol and, subsequently, whether he would pass and make use of the Northern Ireland Bill to pull out of the Protocol in its entirety. Relatedly, we already knew that during the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations at least one senior Tory thought that “the Irish really should know their place”. So, learning now about how the Johnson administration jeered at the Italian response to the pandemic, it hardly strains credulity to suppose that it was similarly contemptuous of the Irish position on Brexit and the Protocol. 

Whilst Johnson is the most obvious culprit here, the same applies to his entire administration, including his feeble and mediocre Cabinet and his team of arrogant and bumptious Vote Leave Special Advisors, both during and after the Cummings’ period. If, as the Hallett evidence so far suggests, the entirety of this administration suffered from multiple deficiencies in handling Covid, then it is inconceivable that it became super-competent when dealing with Brexit. And whilst it might be said that the pandemic was a wholly unusual and complex problem, the same is true of Brexit. If they differ, it is not in that but in the fact that Covid was a crisis imposed on the UK, as it was on other countries, whereas Brexit was imposed by, indeed created by, the Brexiters, many of whom were by this time running the country. So they were incapable of dealing with either, but with Brexit they had the added culpability of having caused it.

We may never have a Public Inquiry into Brexit, and if we do it will have to encompass different issues and cover a longer period than Hallett. Yet, even without that, Hallett is providing a glimpse of just how rotten the Johnson period of Brexit was – the period, don’t forget that ‘got Brexit done’. If, as Covid data expert Professor Christina Pagel argues, Hallett has already “laid bare the government’s dereliction of duty” we can hardly imagine that the very same government at the very same time was the epitome of care and competence in its handling of Brexit. But the cases are different. We didn’t have this government because of Covid, but because of Brexit. In this sense, Brexit was the ‘original sin’ for which we paid twice-over. Once by having an utterly useless government when Covid hit, twice by having an utterly useless government to deliver Brexit. And that is before even considering the price inherent in Brexit itself. [5]

 
Notes

[1] This is not to say that Johnson could not have become Prime Minister without Brexit (and Cummings). Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog this week has an interesting discussion of this.

[2] Because for the purposes of this post I am splicing together different parts of testimony to Hallett it may be confusing as to what jobs Simon Case was doing at different times. In May 2020 he was appointed as Downing Street Permanent Secretary, a role that had been unfilled since being vacated by Sir Jeremy Heywood in 2012 (it had in any case only been created in 2010), who became Cabinet Secretary until his retirement in 2018, when he was succeeded by Mark Sedwill. Then, in September 2020, Case was appointed Cabinet Secretary, replacing Sedwill.

[3] The Cummings’ evidence referred to in this paragraph is confusing in that it suggests that Sedwill was initially sacked in May 2020, and subsequently refers to Case as having been Cabinet Secretary in July. This doesn’t square with the public record of posts held, but it seems to be that the outcome of the botched sacking was Sedwill’s resignation and that, by July, it had been decided that Case would be his successor even though he wasn’t formally in post. There is much more detail on all this in Beckie Smith’s report in Civil Service World. Another confusing issue is why, if Case was indeed a Johnson ‘ally’ and Cummings had supported his appointment in May 2020, did he speak about them in the disparaging terms quoted here? A possible answer is that it is because that quote comes from July 2020, by which time he had come to witness the chaotic nature of the administration.

[4] Frost, especially, has been vociferous in insisting that this political crisis was also a constitutional crisis, because it enabled, on occasion and most notably with the 'Benn Act' of October 2019, the House of Commons to take control of its business from the Executive. But this was absolutely consistent with the Constitution: Parliament is sovereign, and the Executive only has power to the extent that it commands a parliamentary majority. As regards ‘no-deal Brexit’ in the sense of no WA (the subject of the Benn Act), it did not.

[5] Part of that price is the damage to trade, and another Brexit story this week is the publication of a woeful IEA report denying that damage. Fortunately, Professor Gerhard Schnyder has done an excellent, painstaking job in exposing its numerous and profound flaws. I know from experience that undertaking that kind of detailed debunk is a hard, time-consuming business, because such reports contain nested layers of falsity or misunderstanding. But it really matters, not least because such reports gain so much traction including, in this case, endorsement by Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

Raab, Brexit and the Civil Service

One day there will undoubtedly be a book written about the impact of Brexit on the civil service, and it will be one of the most important parts of the story of the harm Brexit has done to Britain. Some elements of the story it will tell have already been outlined on the blog. In the very first post, in September 2016, I wrote that “there are already noises from Brexiters that civil servants are obstructing British exit. We will hear much more of that in the coming years as the complete lack of realism of Brexit becomes impossible to avoid. Over a whole swathe of issues … the Brexit position is composed of, at best, half-truths or just outright fantasies. It is therefore inevitable that the coming months and years will see a series of collisions between these fantasies and the realities (and equally inevitable that Brexiters will blame this on others)”.

Not every prediction I’ve made about Brexit proved true but that one most certainly has, and since 2016 I’ve returned to it in detail several times. Particular moments have included the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers in January 2017, the concerted attacks on Olly Robbins and the civil service in general, especially in the wake of the Chequers Agreement in 2018, the 2019 resignation of Sir Kim Darroch and what it betokened, the 2020 ‘hitlist’ of senior civil servants deemed to be anti-Brexit, the resignation of Sir Philip Rutnam and the associated allegations of bullying by Priti Patel, and the resignation of Sir Mark Sedwill.

The consequences of faith-based politics

These are just a few of the key episodes in a very complex story. Of course, tensions between civil servants and government ministers didn’t begin with Brexit, but I think it is fair to say that there has never been such sustained hostility from politicians, and their media supporters, towards both individual civil servants and the institution of the civil service as Brexit has engendered.

Moreover, as with Brexit itself, that hostility has become entwined with a more general culture war attack on ‘the liberal elite’ and ‘wokeness’. For example, supporting the attacks made by Boris Johnson and Dominic ‘hard rain’ Cummings on civil servants, the ferociously pro-Brexiter Sunday Telegraph Allister Heath insisted (£) that “Brexit is not enough” and that “our arrogant overrated civil service must now face a political reckoning”.

The former senior civil servant Jonathan Powell has described these attacks as part of a “rolling coup against institutions”. And, indeed, under Liz Truss it became even clearer that Brexiters and the wider populist Right consider not just civil servants, the judiciary, universities, the Bank of England, the OBR, and the BBC to be part of an ‘anti-Brexit Establishment’ but also the IMF, OECD and even currency and bond market traders. Welcome to what David Frost and Jacob Rees-Mogg are pleased to call “National Conservatism” (£), or what I have called ‘Brexitist Conservatism’.

Without repeating all of the analysis in the previous posts I’ve linked to above, the core reason why Brexit has provoked a particular issue for the civil service is that it is a politics based upon faith rather than rationality or evidence. This inevitably brings Brexiter politicians into conflict with the civil service in a way that very rarely happens over ‘normal’ policy and has never happened over what amounts to a complete change in national strategic direction. As Jill Rutter, a leading expert on the civil service, has put it: “for many Brexit supporters, Brexit is an article of faith that people believe in ‘in their heart’. Ideas like sovereignty and autonomy are not amenable to the usual civil service approach of solving problems by looking at the costs and benefits”.

Thus Brexit wasn’t simply a ‘policy’: it betokened a completely different principle of political and governmental conduct. At the most extreme, it led to Brexiters demanding of civil servants things, such as ‘frictionless trade’ outside of the single market and customs union, which were simply undeliverable, or things, such as the clauses in the Internal Market Bill that led to the resignation of the head of the Government Legal Department, which were illegal. In a faith-based politics, that inevitably gave rise to the accusations of ‘obstructionism’ and ‘sabotage’ that were levelled at the civil service throughout the Brexit negotiations, as if a different civil service of ‘true believers’ could have changed the facts and would not have been bound by the law.

Raab’s resignation

Against this background, what of Dominic Raab’s resignation last Friday and its aftermath? Ostensibly, it has nothing to do with Brexit. Raab faced eight accusations of bullying civil servants, two of which were upheld by an independent report prepared by Adam Tolley KC, and as such demonstrated that Raab had violated the Ministerial Code. This report also showed that, even where bullying was not proven, Raab’s conduct was “abrasive” and “intimidating”. As former Justice Secretary David Gauke put it, it “may well have been that it was only evident that Raab crossed the line on a couple of occasions but it is also clear that he was at or near the line as a matter of course”.  It could be argued that, even leaving aside any breaches of the Ministerial Code, this showed him to lack the effective leadership skills needed by a senior minister. At all events, as a result of the report, Raab resigned.

To read Raab’s account of these events (£), and those of his many supporters, it might be thought that he had been entirely exonerated and his resignation was an act of principled nobility; that he was a victim if not indeed a martyr in the whole affair. That piece of moral gymnastics was achieved through three moves. Firstly, he implied that because most of the complaints of bullying weren’t upheld, he was somehow more innocent than guilty. Secondly, he suggested that those which had been upheld had applied a ludicrously “low bar” in defining bullying. Thirdly, he suggested that he only resigned because he had promised to do so if any of the accusations of bullying were upheld, thus, far from being disgraced, this was an honourable and actually needless act of self-punishment. The implication - which, given the fact that Priti Patel was not punished by Boris Johnson for her bullying of civil servants, might actually be true - was that, but for Raab’s promise, Rishi Sunak might have decided that he need not resign.

All of this could be read as the slippery self-justification of a discredited Minister or, as with the Patel case, an example of the ludicrous inadequacy of how the Ministerial Code operates. Instead, it became twisted round, as if it was not Raab who had been investigated for misconduct but civil servants. On this account, as with Patel, the suggestion was that all Raab had done was to demand good performance of civil servants, whose complaints arose from a combination of covering up their own incompetence and a ‘snowflake’ inability to accept criticism. Hence Oliver Dowden, now installed as Deputy Prime Minister, rushed to insist not, as one might expect after such a Ministerial resignation, that higher standards would be expected of Ministers in future, but that “there would be no letting up in the high standards I expect of civil servants”. At the same time, further weight was added to the pre-existing suggesting of making civil service roles the subject of political appointment.

Yet even this wouldn’t have amounted to a direct connection with Brexit, had Raab himself not made it in blaming his downfall on “anti-Brexit activist civil servants”. This accusation, eagerly repeated across the Brexit bubble, obviously related to Brexit itself, with Raab having at different times been Brexit Secretary and Foreign Secretary, but also to post-Brexit policies on the judiciary and migration. So here, once again, was the same accusation that has been made ever since 2016, although the Tolley report had made neither explicit nor implicit mention that opposition to Brexit had in any way motivated the complaints about Raab.

In this sense, Raab’s resignation is, indeed, the latest episode of the story of Brexit and the civil service. It is all too easy to envisage the collision of Raab’s own fanatical belief in Brexit and his dealings with civil servants who had to cope with the realities of implementing it. After all, it was Raab who, at a Select Committee in 2016, was totally bemused by the fact that hard Brexit would increase, rather than decrease, border red tape; it was Raab who, as Brexit Secretary in 2018, announced that he “hadn’t quite understood” the UK’s reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing for its goods trade; and it was Raab who admitted in January 2019 that he hadn’t read the Good Friday Agreement.

Thus Raab, who apparently prides himself on his meticulous attention to detail, seems to have lacked an understanding of some of the most basic facts about Brexit, a policy for which he campaigned for years and had a key role in implementing. So, given the general picture of his conduct given by the Tolley Report, it isn’t hard to imagine how he would have reacted to civil servants having to tell him, for example, what hard Brexit would mean for border controls or cross-channel goods flows. The ‘abrasiveness’ of that reaction might be attributable to his personality, but the likely ascription of the civil servants’ advice to their “anti-Brexit” bias would be a consequence of the systematic refusal of Brexiters to accept reality, as well as their almost wilful ignorance about what Brexit entails.

A scapegoat for the failures of Brexit

However, whilst Raab’s case is in part an illustration of what Brexit has meant for the civil service, the current debate around it reflects two slightly different, though related things. One is just the general extension from Brexit into culture war, the targets of which all have ‘remainer’ as the foundational ascribed characteristic, to which can be added indiscriminately any or all of ‘liberal’, ‘elite’, ‘establishment’, ‘woke’, ‘declinist’, and ‘unpatriotic’ to make up the dismal bingo card of the populist imagination. But the other is about Brexit itself, and the now unavoidable evidence of it having failed to deliver any of the promises Brexiters made for it and of its massive damage to almost every part of economy and society.

It's true that there is still a small industry of Brexiter politicians and commentators who deny every single example of such damage, using every trick of sophistry to do so. But it is hardly convincing, perhaps even to themselves given that so many of them, often the very same people issuing the denials of damage, are equally adamant that ‘the Brexit I voted for’ hasn’t been delivered. Moreover, they can’t avoid the clear polling evidence that most of the public believe that Brexit was a mistake and (which isn’t necessarily the same thing) that the government is handling it badly. So an alternative strategy is to blame this on, well, everyone but themselves. Theresa May, the EU, and the ‘remainer parliament’ are all amongst the targets, but none more so than civil servants.

Thus, recently, the first Brexit Secretary, David Davis, denounced the “crap job” the civil service did of the Brexit negotiations. The charge sheet again is one of entrenched opposition to Brexit and ‘pro-EU’ sympathy. The alleged result was that Brexit was unnecessarily delayed and that Britain failed to get a good deal, still less the deal which would have allowed the promises of Brexiters to be realised. However, there are three big problems with this analysis – or perhaps four if you count the fact that, as I identified in that first blog post, and many others also said at the time, it was obvious from day one that this was where Brexit was going to end up.

The case for the defence

The first problem is that what is believed to be the biggest research study of the civil service ever conducted, led by Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School, concluded unequivocally that “there is no evidence of bias against Brexit by the Civil Service or civil servants. I found no civil servants who attempted to frustrate or disrupt the Brexit negotiations due to their alleged anti-Brexit or pro-European sentiments”. This goes to the heart of the entire issue, and could not be a clearer refutation of the Brexiters’ case against the civil service.

Of course, they have never accepted the findings of this study, and have continued to make those claims since it was published in 2018. Nor does it take a huge leap of imagination to think that, if confronted with it, they would dismiss it as ‘remainer bias’, since academics are regarded as being just as suspect as civil servants (unless, of course, they are one of those academics who supports Brexit, such as Patrick Minford or Robert Tombs, who then automatically become distinguished intellectuals and totally free of all bias).

The second problem is with the accusation that civil servants (or for that matter others) delayed Brexit. This has become an unquestioned belief amongst many Brexiters, and many of the general public. In fact, what is most striking about Brexit is how quickly it was done. The initial Article 50 period of two years was, it’s true, extended by eight months from March 2019 to January 2020, but that was almost entirely due to the fact that the Tory government chose to hold not just one but two General Elections, as well as a leadership contest, after having triggered Article 50. Together, these knocked at least six, and probably seven, months out of the negotiations. As for the subsequent trade negotiations, few thought they could be completed as quickly as the year they actually took, a year in which the massive disruption of the pandemic occurred.

So there is no basis for saying that Brexit was delayed by the civil service. In any case the real problem with the tempo of Brexit was the excessive speed with which it was undertaken. It is now widely agreed on all sides (£) that Article 50 was triggered far too early, without proper preparation or agreement on the UK position, and this was entirely because Theresa May accepted (or agreed with) Brexiter insistence that delay would be betrayal. Subsequently, what Johnson and Frost were later to denounce as a wholly unacceptable agreement about Northern Ireland was made solely to avoid extending the negotiations, and their total refusal to extend the transition period was one of the reasons why both businesses and the government were so badly prepared for its ending, just days after the trade agreement was finalised on Christmas Eve 2020.

All of this was self-imposed by Brexit-supporting politicians, and at the urging of Brexiters, and had nothing at all to do with civil servants who repeatedly warned against it. Indeed, it was the issue of unrealistic implementation timescales that began the conflicts between Priti Patel and Sir Philip Rutnam, which ended in his resignation and a payment of £340,000 for unfair dismissal amid the bullying claims.

As for the accusation that it was civil service sabotage or ineptitude that led to Britain getting a poor deal, this is falsified by the fact that Boris Johnson, and all his MPs, fought the 2019 General Election on the claim that, as regards the Withdrawal Agreement, it was an excellent deal. They said the same thing about the subsequent trade agreement. If the civil service had negotiated such bad deals, why did these politicians even agree them, let alone sing their praises? And in any case, which comes back to the core issue, what was this better Brexit deal which would have delivered the promises? If these included the ‘exact same benefits’ as EU membership, and no Irish border anywhere, then they were never going to be delivered because they are not deliverable.

The bigger picture

In linking his resignation to Brexit, Raab revealed the ongoing hostility of Brexiters to the civil service, as well as aspects of the still ongoing ‘battle for the Brexit narrative’. That battle has now largely shifted from a debate about whether Brexit has failed because, with the exception of a handful of admittedly very vocal diehards, the Brexiters realise they have all but lost that.

One illustration of this was the outcome of this week’s parliamentary debate about holding a public inquiry into the effects of Brexit, a debate held because a public petition demanded it. The fact that the government refused to hold such an inquiry, and the fact that no high-profile Brexiter supported the call for one – indeed only one Brexiter MP, Adam Holloway, even attended the debate – is a tacit admission that any such inquiry would show the effects to have been hugely damaging. Hence the ‘battle for the narrative’ is increasingly turning to arguments about who is to blame for the failures and damage of Brexit – Allister Heath, again, supplying a splenetic and spectacularly illogical contribution this week (£) – with the civil service being amongst those most frequently lined up.

Equally, and as the Raab resignation also illustrates, Brexiters are shifting their focus to a wider contestation between ‘Brexitist’ or ‘National’ Conservatism and what they would no doubt call the ‘Wokerati’ or the ‘New Elite’. In that context, the post-Brexit discussion about the civil service, with which Raab’s resignation has become explicitly linked, is potentially quite different to the more familiar one of the possible desirability of party-political appointments to the civil service or the possible problem of party-political bias amongst civil servants.

Indeed, the key to understanding this whole issue of Brexit and the civil service is that it isn’t the party-political impartiality of the civil service that Brexiters have called into question. Rather, it is the more fundamental question of whether the civil service should operate on the basis of belief rather than facts and be guided by zealotry rather than legality. (It’s actually a very similar question to that posed by Brexit for the BBC, in the way that factual reporting of Brexit is readily perceived and portrayed by Brexiters as being animated by lack of belief in Brexit, but that is a story for another time.)

The stakes in this question are very high, and if Brexiters could but see it they are higher even than Brexit. For what Brexiters should be considering is not the desirability of having a civil service imbued with true belief in Brexit, but the dangers to them, quite as much as to everyone else, of a future civil service imbued with true belief in a creed that they find obnoxious, and willing to sacrifice both reason and legality in pursuit of that belief.

The charge sheet against Brexit’s guilty men just keeps growing

The long-awaited Budget – in all but name – has now arrived, but the public could be forgiven for not realising the extent to which it is a Brexit budget, given the near taboo in the Conservative and Labour parties on mentioning the economic consequences of Brexit. I discussed that silence in a Byline Times article this week, describing it as being ‘Lady Chatterley’s Brexit’, and won’t labour the general point here (the article is free to read). In any case, I’m hardly the only person making the same observation, both in the UK and abroad.

Suffice to say, it was a silence barely broken in yesterday’s announcement. Jeremy Hunt spoke vaguely of making use of “Brexit benefits” whilst Rachel Reeves’ response, although in other ways robust, merely mentioned in passing Labour's intention of “fixing the holes in the government’s Brexit deal”. Yet in the accompanying OBR report it was once again laid out what Brexit meant for the economy. It was left to smaller parties, most notably the Green’s indefatigable Caroline Lucas, to point this out, and also to point out that his silence about it made a mockery of the Chancellor’s claims to ‘honesty’ about the country’s financial situation. As Paul Johnson of the IFS said earlier this week, Brexit “has had a substantially negative effect on the UK economy”.

There’s really no room for serious doubt about that anymore and, in a sense, this Budget is the latest instalment of the so-called ‘punishment budget’, much mocked by Brexiters as ‘hysterical’ and ‘Project Fear’, that George Osborne warned would be necessary if the UK voted to leave the EU. That ‘punishment budget’ would have involved £30 billion of measures, half tax increases and half spending cuts. It didn’t happen in the immediate way Osborne had threatened, but has developed more gradually, and actually we can now see how modest his proposals were compared with the scale of damage Brexit has done. For, even before these latest announcements, Sunak’s March 2021 budget had already introduced record tax increases of £29 billion to (almost) cover the costs of Brexit at that point.

It's a Brexit Budget in another sense, too, arising as it does from the catastrophic failure of the Truss mini-budget, that ended her premiership. For that was explicitly hailed by Brexiters (£) as being the budget that would finally begin to deliver true Brexit, and was drawn up by pro-Brexit politicians, surrounded by pro-Brexit ideologues in explicit rejection of the supposedly anti-Brexit Establishment in the form of civil servants, the OBR, the Bank of England (BoE) and all the other bugbears of Brexit’s gimcrack revolutionaries. It left a £55 billion ‘black hole’ to fill, and massive reputational damage.

The Observer columnist Sonia Sodha is certainly right to argue that the concept of a ‘fiscal blackhole’ is misleading, and that there were different and better ways to respond to this mess. But that the mess had to be responded to isn’t in doubt, and this Budget is the government’s way of doing so. So, during an interview with Bloomberg’s Lizzy Burden (whose coverage of Brexit has been consistently excellent), former member of the BoE monetary committee Michael Saunders was equally right to say “without Brexit, we wouldn’t be talking about austerity this week”.

That is damning, but we could also turn all this round on its head. The post-Brexit economic debate has been almost entirely one where both remainers and independent economists point to the damage that has been done, whilst Brexiters and pro-Brexit economists deny it. It’s as if the important question were: was ‘Project Fear’ right? But Brexit was sold on the basis that it would positive for the country. In that sense, the clearest indictment of its failure is that literally no-one is suggesting that Britain’s fiscal position is better as a result of Brexit. 

Failure: conformity assessment

If the Budget is the most high-profile, even if under-acknowledged, example of Brexit’s mounting failure, others are, more or less quietly, gradually being admitted. At the quieter end of the spectrum, this week Business Secretary Grant Shapps announced another extension to the introduction of compulsory UKCA marking, and to the end to the validity of CE marking, on goods sold in the UK. Originally due to come into force in January 2022, the deadline had already been extended to January 1 2023 but, as I remarked a couple of weeks ago, it was all but impossible that firms would be ready to meet this.

This week’s statement extended the deadline to the end of 2024. But it would not be at all surprising, and the latest announcement hints at this, if these extensions go on and on being made until, eventually, the entire UKCA idea is dropped. It’s also by no means unlikely that the same will end up being true of the now four times delayed introduction of import controls on EU goods, currently postponed until the end of 2023.

This whole saga of conformity assessment marking, which I’ve been discussing on and off since March 2021, is a microcosm of Brexit folly, imposing a double regulatory burden on manufacturing firms which sell in both the UK and the EU. It arises solely from a theocratic, ‘sovereignty at all costs’ approach to Brexit. It had no economic or business rationale, and indeed Shapps’ announcement implicitly acknowledges that UKCA marking constitutes a cost for businesses and a distraction from their priorities. Also implicit is that those businesses which have begun to comply have already incurred costs, and if the whole scheme ends up being abandoned then those costs will be a total waste of money. For that matter, what are firms who are not currently ready to comply meant to do now? Continue to prepare for something that may never happen? Or take a bet that there is no need to do so?

As well as being a stupid idea, UKCA marking was stupidly done. The original timescales were always unrealistic, and, like many other aspects of Brexit, it would have been far better to have created a genuine – and long – transition period. The issue wasn’t just business preparedness but, again as with many aspects of Brexit, the time needed to prepare the regulatory infrastructure to register and certify the new markings (even though, just to hammer home the full nonsense of the idea, the actual product standards need not change at all). But the Brexiters have always been not just unrealistic but totally reckless in pushing for an early and quick Brexit, starting with the massive pressure they put on Theresa May to trigger Article 50. If there is a rational explanation for that, it is the wholly disreputable one that they knew how slender and flawed a mandate they had for Brexit, and were determined to ram it through whilst they had a chance.

The decision to postpone UKCA is, in one sense, a sensible one, in that at least it is better than insisting on the previous unworkable deadline. What would be far more sensible, of course, would be to abandon it completely, now, rather than defer it. But that, presumably, is still in the realm of the politically impossible, for fear that the Brexit Ultras will erupt in fury.

Failure: independent trade policy

Some aspects of the UKCA fiasco are present in one of this week’s louder admissions of Brexit failure, the wholesale denunciation of the UK’s trade deals with Australia and New Zealand by George Eustice. There are multiple important aspects of this. One is that Eustice, formerly DEFRA Secretary, was closely and directly involved in the negotiation of those deals. Another is that he is a long-standing Brexiter, originally a European parliamentary candidate UKIP (in that respect his intervention has some parallels with that of Theresa Villiers over the scrapping of EU retained law, discussed in last week’s post). So although none of his criticisms are new, having been made extensively by commentators, including me, for years, they are significant in showing how they are starting to be admitted by Brexiters themselves.

That’s particularly so given that the UK’s capacity to make its own free trade agreements is not just any old aspect of Brexit. It is repeatedly and vociferously claimed by Brexiters to be amongst the most crucial of Brexit dividends, and these two trade deals are so far the entirety of that dividend. Moreover, it was repeatedly claimed by the government that these deals were good for British farmers. Now, Eustice reveals in public that the critics were right, and that both the Australia and New Zealand deals conceded British interests, especially farming interests, with no compensating return. The reason, as again all informed observers have repeatedly said, was because the deals were rushed (£), giving the other countries anything they wanted, solely in order to ‘prove’ to the public that Brexit had benefits.

At the same time, Eustice made an astonishing attack on the competence of Crawford Falconer, now the most senior civil servant in the Department of International Trade. But, unlike other Brexiter attacks on the civil service, this was made against someone originally brought into the Civil Service, by Liam Fox, precisely as an antidote to the supposedly obstructive remainer ethos of the career civil service. He came from the infamous pro-Brexit thinktank the Legatum Institute, having been, along with Shanker Singham, one of the hard Brexiters’ go-to trade experts.

So, again, this is revealing of much about the entire Brexit process: its unnecessary haste, its emphasis on the symbolism of sovereignty, its disdain for established expertise in favour of ideological fervour, and, of course, the ever-present Brexiter dishonesty in the lies told about how wonderful these deals were for Britain and for British farmers. Not only that, but the government, and specifically Liz Truss when Trade Secretary, were warned at the time of the dangers but pressed on regardless. And to all that can be added the side-lining of parliamentary scrutiny of the deals, ironically one of the things claimed to be of value in being able to make them independently of the EU (a claim itself based on another lie, since, whilst still a member, the UK had chosen to exempt itself from holding parliamentary votes on the ratification of EU trade deals).

Whilst it is revealing, and to that extent welcome, that Eustice has now confirmed what so many had said all along, it is hardly to his credit that he did not have the spine to do so whilst still in government, when he described the Australia deal as “a good agreement”. Even more disgraceful is the fact that Rishi Sunak implicitly agrees – calling the Australia deal “one-sided” and saying that future trade deals will “not sacrifice quality for speed” – and yet intends to push on to the final ratification of both deals by passing the Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill. Again, the reason is presumably fear of how his Brexiter MPs would react if he did otherwise.

It’s difficult to over-state how despicable and just plain absurd this situation is: that in the name of sovereignty, and for fear of those who proclaim sovereignty’s benefits, the British government is going to make international agreements which are damaging to the national interest and to a strategically, historically and culturally key sector of the economy.

Two kinds of failure

It's important to differentiate two aspects of the damage Brexit is doing, albeit that they interact. One, encapsulated by the budget, and shown almost daily by the growing economic evidence, is to do with what has been lost – especially in trade, investment, and labour market flexibility – by virtue of leaving the EU, and particularly the single market and customs union. The other is to do with the abject failure and utter incompetence of what is being created as an alternative to EU membership. That includes the stupidity and waste of UKCA and other regulatory duplications, as well as the creation of duff trade deals. But it goes much wider than that.

No realistic strategy

In a sense, the issue is that there is simply no post-Brexit economic strategy at all or, to the extent that there is, it is wholly unrealistic. The most obvious idea, that leaving the EU enables greater gains through globalizing trade was always nonsense, partly because of the constraints of geography but also because it was based on the falsehood of there being an either/or choice between EU trade and world trade as an EU member. In fact, being in the EU facilitated both, whereas being out significantly impairs EU trade whilst barely, if at all, shifting the dial on trade with the rest of world.

That aside, such strategy as there is has been based on boosterism and hubris about Britain as a world-leading innovation hub, but it is all talk and very little walk. The historian David Edgerton gives a defining example in the sorry story of the Britishvolt gigafactory, concluding that “Brexit Britain has faked it but not made it”. Another case is the replacement for the Galileo Project, which is still in limbo, a situation arising from a complicated chain of events but ultimately rooting back to Theresa May’s refusal to accept the EU’s terms for continued participation in the EU’s system (at the time, she said that “as a global player we are not short of options”). And the post-Galileo situation is part of the wider issue of the UK’s Space policy, where, as Peggy Hollinger of the Financial Times put it this week (£), “the government’s ambition in the sector is at odds with its strategy”, an ambition she goes on to criticise for its “incoherence”.

This hubris, boosterism and lack of realism shares, along with the ideas of the UK being able to dictate global terms of trade and of being able to act as a global regulator, the common root of a fantasy about Britain’s global significance, perhaps encapsulated in the endless invocation during the referendum and afterwards of the power that being “the world’s fifth largest economy” bestowed. It was based on an illusion: there are three economic superpowers and they are the US, the EU and China. After that, being fifth, tenth or even fiftieth comes to much the same thing in terms of setting terms.

Dither and uncertainty

But the situation it is worse than that. Even at the domestic level, there has been no coherence in what the government has tried to do with its post-Brexit ‘freedoms’. Farming policy is a prime example where, leaving aside the issue of trade deal impacts, the Environmental Land Management System (ELMS), set out in March 2021 as the post-CAP system for England is already mired in uncertainty. Under Truss, it seemed that it would be reviewed and replaced, then that was called into doubt when Sunak came to power, but now it appears that it will indeed be scrapped. There are related doubts about whether the post-Brexit ban on the export of live animals will be reversed.

This is just one part of a wider picture in which, according to the Social Market Foundation, uncertainty about regulatory policy across the economy is inhibiting growth. It is an uncertainty which is massively enhanced by the EU Retained Law Bill which, despite noises to the contrary, is still in process, with the potential for as yet unspecified regulations to be changed or scrapped as early as next year. That uncertainty is not helped by the almost daily drip of articles from influential Brexiters proposing all sorts of regulatory changes which are either not specified or which airily suggest things like departing from the GDPR framework with no apparent understanding of how this would poleaxe UK businesses and other organizations. And there is also the ongoing uncertainty of which Brexit faction will win out over whether there is a maximalist or a minimalist immigration policy, a question about which the Budget statement remained resolutely agnostic.

All of this is without even discussing the continuing uncertainties over the Northern Ireland Protocol. These bear heavily on the people of Northern Ireland, and especially on the fragile politics of the post-GFA devolved institutions. At the same time, they mean a continuing cloud over the UK’s international reputation, with its threat to break international law still present, if perhaps more muted than it has been. And, again, there is still no clear strategy about this, any more than there has ever been. Instead, there has been denial, dishonesty or – which is most apparent now – drift. Certainly there is no sign that Sunak’s government have any idea how to proceed except for promising to resolve matters in time for the anniversary of the GFA, apparently under US pressure (as I suggested would happen in last week’s post). Exactly how that is supposed to happen no one knows, least of all, it would seem, Sunak himself.

The guilty men (and, yes, they are mainly men)

None of this uncertainty has been helped by the massive churn of ministers in many departments, itself an artefact of the post-Brexit political instability that has seen five Prime Ministers and two General Elections since the referendum. However, it goes much deeper than that. Both the damage done ‘by Brexit’ and the damage created by what is being done ‘with Brexit’ can be traced back to the total ignorance, wilful dishonesty, and reckless irresponsibility of those who proposed and campaigned for Brexit without the tiniest understanding of how to do it – something we have seen play out since 2016 – and without any understanding of what to do with it, something which is now playing out ever more clearly.

We know who they are*, these latter-day guilty men, from Farage through Johnson, Gove, Hannan, Paterson, Rees-Mogg, Francois, Duncan Smith, Baker, Cash and any number more, right through to Sunak (and, yes, women, too, like Stuart and Hoey). We know who their henchmen in the media are, the Hartley-Brewers and the Heaths and their innumerable clones. We know who gave them their tiny shred of intellectual ballast, the Minfords and the Littlewoods and the Howes, or their skin-deep patina of business credibility, the Martins and the Longworths and the Dysons. We saw their promises, their falsehoods, their evasions, and their lies, and they are all on record. On record, too, is all the spite and ridicule and bile they threw at those who warned them, who pleaded with them, not to inflict this on our country.

And as I’ve suggested in this post, their guilt is not just for having campaigned for Brexit but for all they have done since. I don’t usually quote Tweets unless they are posted by public figures, but this, from Dr Simon Ubsdell this week, is a perfect summary: “The worst crime of Brexit is not the dark skulduggery that secured it in the first place. It is the relentless mendacity, the shameless fraud, the arrogant deception, the unremitting shiftiness that has driven it ever since”.

It would be comforting to think that they will pay a price, these guilty men, if not through public arraignment then by dint of private remorse. They will not. That falls to the rest of us. We’re paying, literally, in literally devalued pounds and pence, as in this week’s budget, and the bill will go on rising. We’re paying, too, in the more intangible currency of a country whose reputation is sullied abroad and which is shabbier and meaner for those who live in it. A diminished and dolorous land whose only route to salvation lies in the honesty stolen by its guilty men and which, even now, or at least for now, eludes us.

 

 
*Others who have drawn this comparison, such as ‘Cato the Younger’, Anthony Seldon and, most recently, Tom McTague configure the list of names differently, but the charge sheet is much the same.

Partygate, populism and Brexit

As briefly suggested in last week’s post, there are numerous, if indirect, connections between the still unfolding ‘partygate’ scandals and Brexit. At the most basic level, the very existence of the present government is down to Brexit, its central manifesto message was ‘getting Brexit done’, its composition is based on the central test of Brexit loyalty, and its advisers, from Dominic Cummings downwards, initially came from the old Vote Leave campaign team.

That team, including Cummings, has of course now been mainly expunged from Downing Street, but one aspect of the scandals now engulfing Boris Johnson is that they derive from that rift. Indeed Katy Balls, Deputy Political Editor of the Spectator – and therefore presumably well-connected to the players – suggests that the “pivotal moment” for these scandals was Johnson’s decision in November 2020 to cut ties with his Vote Leave advisers.

This led Cummings to embark on a “revenge mission” which Balls suggests included a series of damaging leaks. Certainly Cummings’ public statements have significantly contributed to the mess that Johnson is now in. So for all that there’s a certain piquancy in seeing Johnson tormented by this “extraordinary vendetta”, as Jacob Rees-Mogg squeakily calls it, it is a highly unedifying spectacle since it seems motivated by egotism and bitterness rather than principle or the public good.

Thus the present crisis can be read as part of the unwinding of the ramshackle coalition that fought for, and obtained, Brexit, with another example being the now widely expressed dissatisfaction of Thatcherite Tories with Johnson’s Brexit. However, its deeper roots lie in the incoherence of the populist politics that delivered Brexit, and the way the subsequent Covid pandemic has exposed that incoherence far more clearly than Brexit itself.

The paradox of populism

At the core of this is the central paradox of populism. Brexit was presented as the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the elite’; the “victory … for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won”, as Nigel Farage put it the day after the referendum. In the years since then all the conflicts it has given rise to have been explicitly cast in those terms (hence, ‘will of the people’, ‘enemies of the people’, and the equation of remainers with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’). It’s also implicit whenever there are reports of Brexit causing prices of imported foods to rise or foreign travel to be more difficult, which are always met with sneers implying that ‘ordinary, decent people’ have no experience of such fripperies.  

Yet this was always a precarious construct, given that the country was and is more or less evenly split – making ‘the people’ an unconvincingly small proportion and ‘the elite’ a preposterously large one – and the self-evidently elite nature of its leaders. For the idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxford educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Johnson, Gove, Farage, Cummings, Carswell, Lawson, Rees-Mogg, Hannan, Redwood and many more – are anything other than a privileged elite is plainly ludicrous. It is a fiction which is constantly vulnerable to obvious inconsistencies, but although they are often pointed out (Rees-Mogg’s investment fund company, Lawson’s French Chateau, Redwood’s advice to investors etc.) this has no 'cut through' with their supporters.

Why? I’m sure it is not that those supporters fail to spot the elite privilege of their leaders. It is that this isn’t the kind of privilege to which they object. Such figures – Johnson most obviously, Farage certainly, even Rees-Mogg surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ and, perhaps more important, as ‘authentic’. More than anything, they may be privileged but they are not what their supporters mean by ‘the elite’ which, instead, is associated with the supposedly finger-wagging, won’t let us say what really think, prissy, moralistic, do-gooders. The Human Rights Brigade. The PC Brigade. The girly swots. The experts. The bleeding-heart liberals. More recently, the Woke police.

It’s a shadowy and amorphous group which, together, constitutes a ‘them’ to which the ‘us’ – ordinary people and our perhaps not ordinary in the ordinary sense but still authentic leaders – are opposed. For years we suffered as the ‘silent majority’, but with Brexit we found our voice. Within this is another, and crucial, dividing line. As brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Coe’s ‘Brexit novel’, Middle England, the elite in this meaning are ‘constantly telling us what to do and say’. They are interfering. They are authoritarian. They force us to be other than ourselves, and so to be humiliatingly inauthentic. They make us follow their rules, whereas Johnson, Farage and Rees-Mogg are themselves and let us be ourselves.

Taking back control

In this cultural universe, ‘taking back control’ was a doubly potent slogan. It was about freedom from EU control, but also freedom from the control of them – who, not coincidentally, were opposed to Brexit – freedom to ‘talk about immigration’, freedom to celebrate Christmas not ‘Winterval’, freedom to fly the St George Flag and the Union Jack without being sneered at. In this last way it was, of course, partly about nationalism – about ‘us’ as a nation – but also about internal divisions – about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, those who for so long had ruled over us but were now exposed as traitors and saboteurs, as anti-British Elite Remainers (£).

So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link all sorts of disparate ideologies and resentments, the spines of which were ‘freedom from the rules’. Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-referendum period were framed by this. These ranged from the Miller case on Parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 to the row over Bercow’s “bombshell” ruling that Parliament couldn’t vote twice on the same motion (Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement), through to the court cases over prorogation. They were all battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether ‘the will of the people’ trumped such niceties.

It also informed the government’s brazenly announced intention to break international law over the Internal Market Bill and the decision arguably to actually do so by unilaterally flouting the Northern Ireland Protocol. It lay behind Johnson’s refusal to accept that Priti Patel had breached the Ministerial Code. And it explains the attempt to rip up the rules governing MPs’ conduct in order to get arch-Brexiter Owen Paterson off the hook, the failure of which now looks increasingly like the watershed moment in Johnson’s premiership.

Anti-ruleism

At least until the Paterson scandal, Johnson was an ideal front man for all this because of his own disdain for rules in any form. This doesn’t derive from any coherent philosophy, but seems simply to be a mix of psychological disposition and sociological entitlement. On the one hand, he is lazy, irresponsible, and financially and morally incontinent. On the other, he grew up in and inhabits a privileged milieu where ‘rules are for the little people’. So, for example, this week it was reported that during a period of isolation due to exposure to Covid, despite being a grown adult:

“We had to create a ‘cat run’ for him to get from the flat to his office so that he wouldn’t come into contact with people. The idea was we could talk to him through the open door. But he kept on coming out so we put two chairs across the door like some kind of puppy gate. There was a pattern throughout. He just simply didn’t think about following the rules. They were not for him.”

This almost instinctive disdain for rules is very different to, but for a while gelled with, the ‘anti-ruleism’ of Cummings (which is also very different to the libertarianism of some Brexiters). Despite some of the more breathless commentary, such as David Runciman’s recent portrait of him, Cummings’ views of politics and policy are not especially unusual (though the tenacity with which he pursues them may well be).

Ironically, given his, often accurate, criticism of business schools, they closely resemble those of big-league MBA students in the 1990s and 2000s. Both share the ‘work round the clock, win at all costs, smartest guys in the room’ machismo. They’re also similar in the mix of adulation for this or that business leader, Silicon Valley ‘disruptor’ schtick, and geek-macho enthrallment to science and data, the confluence of which then informs various ideas about the management and organization of big projects, often discussed on Cummings’ blog.

Whilst having some interesting insights in them, these discussions are like jelly in being a sprawling mish-mash of ideas without much in the way of disciplined thinking. At all events, the key point here is that, to the extent they have an over-arching theme, they sit within a well-worn groove of anti-bureaucratic analysis of organizations. Since the core of bureaucracy is rational-legal authority, these ideas are associated with a specific hostility to the Civil Service and to what Cummings and others call ‘the Blob’ (£), and often slide into impatience with, even disdain for, the rule of law.

In this way, the supposedly anti-establishment project of Brexit morphed into one directed at the machinery of government when Johnson and Cummings got to Downing Street. Yet, just as the idea of Brexit as anti-establishment became an absurdity once Brexiters won and became the Establishment, so too was it an in-built paradox to rule based upon an approach to politics defined by rule-breaking.

Enter coronavirus

That paradox became glaring when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and Johnson was suddenly confronted by a situation which required the imposition of draconian rules and restrictions on everyday life that were unprecedented in peacetime. Small wonder that he did so belatedly, reluctantly, and with a nod and a wink that the rules were there to be broken.

But here the populism that had delivered Brexit took an unexpected turn. Because what was revealed were two diametrically different responses to the Covid rules from Brexit supporters. Some of the most high-profile of them became, as discussed in another post on this blog – lockdown sceptics, insisting that no free-born Englishman could submit to the yoke of Whitehall tyranny, with ERG membership closely overlapping the new ‘Covid Recovery Group’. Few could doubt that, had he not been in power, Johnson would have been amongst them. Yet amongst plenty of rank-and-file leave voters an entirely different version of cultural identity held sway, and one they shared with plenty of remainers.

This was the traditional image of the British – and for once it was the British, not just the English - as a ‘naturally’ law-abiding people of orderly queues, fair play, pulling together for the common good, and ‘all in it together’. A people who, in fact, did not disdain but played by the rules. Indeed Johnson himself, with his constant invocations of Second World War unity, mobilised exactly this cultural theme, and it proved to be remarkably powerful. Most people have followed the rules, despite the hardship, and in some cases tragedy, that entailed.

This disjuncture first emerged with force in May 2020 when Cummings was exposed as a lockdown rule-breaker in the ‘Barnard Castle’ episode*, yet defended by – oh how the wheel turns – Johnson. Finally, the incipient distinction between ‘the people’ and their anti-elitist yet self-evidently elite leadership was exposed in a way which had ‘cut through’ whereas, for example, the funding of the Downing Street flat refurbishment didn’t. The ‘freedom from rules’ umbrella of Brexit was blown inside-out by the wind of coronavirus.

Crucially, with the Cummings scandal came what Fintan O’Toole called “the unpardonable snigger of elite condescension”. It was that same sniggering which, come partygate, caused Allegra Stratton’s downfall as she rehearsed precisely the defence line of a party having been ‘a meeting’ which Johnson was subsequently to use in his ‘apology’ to parliament. And it was the same sniggering as Johnson’s when asked by a reporter about the most controversial of the parties. Suddenly, breaking the rules ceased to be funny, and ceased to be part of a popular insurrection against the Establishment, and became a potent symbol of elitist hypocrisy and contempt for ‘ordinary people’.

Rules have their uses

Whereas the scandals over PPE procurement were defended on the grounds that ‘in an emergency’ the niceties of bureaucratic rules governing the award of contracts had to be abandoned, those over lockdown rule-breaking had a very different character. Attempts to run a somewhat similar defence – that the parties were an understandable response to pressure of work – founder on the fact (£) that the same could have been said of NHS or other key workers.

So Johnson, like Cummings before him, has sought to save himself by an ironic invocation of rules and procedures. In Cummings’ case, he invoked some supposed exemptions in the detail of the regulations. In Johnson’s, he has tried to argue that the party he attended fell “technically” within the guidance, and that he “implicitly believed” he was following all the rules. Yet this cuts little ice considering the many cases where even unwitting rule breakers had been prosecuted and fined.

In another irony, as it is very much in keeping with the traditional response of the political Establishment to scandals, he has also deployed the ruse of ‘initiating a full inquiry’, hiding desperately behind the much-despised Civil Service Blob in the shape of Sue Gray. Suddenly bureaucrats are not just back in fashion but the fount of wisdom and justice, for whose words we are constantly told we must wait before passing judgment; there are rules and processes that must be followed after all!

Indeed in all the many scandals that have afflicted his short premiership it is notable that Johnson has invariably invoked procedural solutions or established customs to defend his rule-breaking, hence the seemingly endless inquiries of various types (equally notable is how often their findings have been anodyne or ignored). Even the prorogation of parliament was passed off as just a standard ritual until the Supreme Court put paid to that, something which still rankles with Brexiters and is believed to have led Johnson to want to seek revenge by ‘reforming’ its role (£).

Partygate and Brexit

However, unlike the prorogation and many other post-referendum cases of rule-breaking, reaction to the partygate scandal doesn’t follow the Brexit fault line. As was also attempted in relation to Cummings, some, such as doltish MP Michael Fabricant, have tried to pass it off as the anger of the “London Remain classes” but it’s very plain that it transcends that divide (£). That matters, because it is perhaps the only time since 2016 that this has happened. It shows that both remainers and leavers can and do share some very significant common values. In fact it is closer to the public outcry in 2009 over politicians' expenses, except for being aimed entirely at the Conservative Party (attempts to widen it to include Keir Starmer having so far failed).

It’s also of note that Operation Red Meat – the deployment of populist policy announcements to try to rebuild that coalition of support for Johnson – does not seek to work the Brexit divide, for example by making new threats to invoke Article 16. As I argued last week, that would not be likely to work as a distraction from his difficulties but would add to them. That’s because another part of Johnson’s defence is the endless claim that, whatever his partygate sins, he ‘got Brexit done’, something hard to reconcile with a fresh crisis over the attempt to re-write the Northern Ireland Protocol (of that, the only concrete news is that intense talks are continuing prior to Truss and Sefcovic meeting on Monday, but the respected commentator Mujtaba Rahman detects signs of progress, even if there are doubts of an early resolution).

Partygate obviously doesn’t mean that we’ve seen the end of the populist politics that underpinned and flowed from Brexit, still less of Brexit itself. It may not even mean the end of Johnson, whose fate remains precariously in the balance. If he does go, it will make a difference to the Brexit debate from then on, though. That is partly because so much of the leaving process remains ongoing, and his successor will affect how that is approached – albeit within a limited palette of options, some of which are even worse than Johnson’s and none of them hugely better.

Instead, partygate matters because it exposes the risks and fragilities of populism. A politics that mobilises ‘the people’ against ‘the Establishment’, and which posits rules as elitist meddling, can be an effective weapon for campaigning but is a double-edged one for governing. There is an implication in that for Brexit. As the damage charted by, for example, Yorkshire Bylines' now 500 item-long Davis Downside Dossier, mounts, ‘the people’ may recall that it’s nothing like what they were promised in 2016. They may even conclude that so fraudulent a deception was not ‘playing by the rules’ to a far greater extent than Johnson’s Brexit Establishment lockdown parties, and react with a correspondingly greater wrath.

 


*Long-term readers of this blog may have noticed that this post is in parts based on the one I wrote about the Cummings scandal at the time, reflecting the way that it was a precursor to partygate.