Welcome to 2025

In one way, it has been a quiet period for Brexit news since my previous, pre-Christmas, post. That is hardly surprising, given the season. But it is only true if Brexit is understood in its narrow and literal sense. Understood in the wider sense of the unfolding of populist politics, 2025 has started with a noisy tumult, of a volume and variety which make it hard to analyze. For personal reasons (my mother died this week), this is a much shorter post than usual, but there is already no doubt that this is going to be an eventful Brexit year.

Brexit costs, again

Starting with the narrower and more literal issues, there has been another outbreak of claim and counter-claim about the costs of Brexit, largely sparked by a report in The Independent trying to summarize these costs. It referred to many of the studies and estimates which I’ve discussed previously on the blog, and provoked the usual criticisms of those estimates from the usual Brexiters (£).

Some of those criticisms have a spark of validity. In particular, as I’ve pointed out before, it is correct to say it is misleading to describe the ‘divorce bill’ as a cost of Brexit because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement.

The only research mentioned by The Independent which I haven’t previously covered, because it came after I’d written my previous post, was a recent study by the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. As was widely reported, this estimated that in the in the first two years since the transition period ended the UK had “only” lost £27 billion in trade, and that although this had been a “disaster” for small businesses, this is less, so far, than would have been expected from the long-term (15 year) OBR prediction. This caused much back-slapping in Brexiter circles (where the usual objections of it being too early to tell, impossible to estimate, and academics all being remainer stooges were suddenly forgotten). Yet it is hard to see why they should be so gleeful, since Brexit was sold on the basis that it was going to be of positive benefit.

So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made. At best, they shrug them off as having been thwarted by remainers and the EU.

How we got here, again

That, too, isn’t a news item, but I am in the process of reading Tim Shipman’s Out, a massive tome which provides a lot of crunchy detail about the politics of the Brexit process, and it serves as reminder of what actually happened in those years. Admittedly, it is only a reminder of a certain sort, not because it is biased in any crass way but because it takes as its frame of reference the idea that this was a negotiation in which the outcomes were about the political power-plays between Johnson’s government, the domestic ‘Bresistance’, and the EU.

In those terms, it is highly informative. But what is missing (unless it comes further on than I have yet read) is an understanding of the real legal parameters in play. In particular, on the key issue of the Northern Ireland border, it proceeds as if a borderless hard Brexit was, in principle, a possibility, and what was at stake was simply whether or not it could be negotiated. In this sense, intentionally or not, it accepts the essentially unrealistic position of the Johnson-Frost-Cummings period of Brexit.

Good evidence that my assessment is an accurate one comes from the laudatory review of Shipman’s book by David Frost himself. Hailing it as the “definitive” account “at least until [his] own book is written” (an implausible boast, but one displaying all his habitual delusion and arrogance), he praises it as “objective and fair” which, from so partisan a figure, suggests the opposite might be the case. More specifically, Frost sees the book as vindicating all his well-rehearsed criticisms of the ‘remainer parliament’ (£), the Supreme Court and, especially the Benn Act. No doubt he would always have been liable to read it in this way, but the fact that he is able to find Shipman’s book susceptible to such a reading (whilst criticising other accounts as biased) is an indication of its fundamentally uncritical framing.

Even so, precisely because of that, Shipman’s book is valuable, partly because it confirms just how ignorant those enacting Brexit were about its realities, and partly because it confirms just how monocular their focus was on ‘getting Brexit done’, regardless of how it was done. This, in itself, gives the lie to the idea that Brexit was undertaken in a form that was foisted on them: Johnson and Frost chose it. That, in turn, also gives credence to Starmer’s claim that, even within the red lines of hard Brexit’ a somewhat different arrangement could be possible. 2025 will be the year when he needs to make good on that claim, if he is ever going to, but that is likely to mean a year of slow grind rather than great fireworks.

Donald Trump, again

The opposite applies to Brexit in its wider sense. This year is going to be an important one for transatlantic populism, and though the connections with Brexit are indirect, they are real. At the most general level, there has always been a connection, acknowledged on both sides, between Trump and Brexit. But there are two more specific connections.

One is to do with how the UK navigates its relationship with the US, and whilst Trump’s second presidency would always pose issues for that, it does so with particular force now that Britain has cut itself off from the EU. Just how poisonous that relationship may become has already been suggested by the berserk ferocity of Elon Musk’s attacks on the UK, and the Starmer government specifically (£), and the frenzy it has engendered in domestic politics. No doubt there is much more to come and, given Musk’s attacks on other European countries, the sense that the UK’s shared interests lie with the EU will be all the more obvious.

The other is the extent to which Trump’s return will be associated with the continued insurgence of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. But this has the opposite implication for UK-EU relations, because the more it seems obvious that Farage’s populism is a strong and permanent feature of UK domestic politics, the less likely it is that the EU will regard the UK as a stable and trustworthy partner for any kind of new agreements, even those as limited in scope as Labour’s ‘reset’. Just this week, Brexiter fury about the appointment of Sir Olly Robbins as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office was a reminder of the hold of Brexitism in the UK.

Stay cool, again

I haven’t had time this week to give much attention to these developments, which is regrettable given how extraordinary Musk’s accusations have been, and the vile manner in which they have been endorsed by some British politicians. But, in another way, it is not regrettable at all.

I pointed out in a recent post how narcissistic politicians like Trump exert power partly by generating a frenzy of comment around their each and every utterance. That’s also true of Farage. It is probably even more true of Musk, not least because he isn’t, in the normal sense of the word, a politician. It is no coincidence that his latest stuff tries to mobilize the natural revulsion most of us feel about the disgusting crimes of grooming gangs. Nor is it any coincidence that it does so in ways calculated to mobilize counter-revulsion at its opportunism and dishonesty. These people want us – need us – to be excitable, angry, confused, befuddled, and upset. They want us to be freaked out by their freakishness.

So our best response, and, actually, our best resistance, is cool, calm, considered analysis. Not only do they hate it, but it’s also the best way of keeping sane in the face of the mad psychodramas they try to create.

I have a strong feeling that this year, more than most, it is going to be important to remember that.

Unpicking the defences of Brexit

Bemused by the ‘mysterious silence’ of the government about the benefits of Brexit, last weekend former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley bemoaned (£) that “the consequence of that silence is that the narrative about Brexit is being written by its opponents”. The mystery is easily solved: the benefits of Brexit are effectively non-existent and the failure of its promises is self-evident. And the formidable attempts by Brexiters to proclaim a narrative of success have foundered not because its opponents’ voices are louder but because the public, without much leadership but seeing the evidence accumulating before them, have seen that failure.

But it’s true that, as a result, Brexiters have increasingly found themselves having to defend their project rather than get away with airy promises, or bullish assertions of it being ‘the will of the people’. These attempts have become ever-more desperate and convoluted, and their very variety is, in itself, one of their most important defensive weapons. In the hands of the more adroit, or perhaps just the more opportunistic, Brexiters it enables them to continually shift from one line of argument to another, deliberately creating a swirl of disorientation.

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments currently used to defend Brexit, and especially those about sovereignty and democracy, which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial

These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has either ‘never really been tried’ or that it has fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path of purity.

Slightly more optimistic versions of the same thing are that ‘it hasn’t been done properly yet’, or that it ‘hasn’t had enough time’ for the benefits to be obvious. These claims are, by definition, impossible to refute, placing the utopia of Brexit in sight but always out of reach, like a mirage oasis. But one obvious rejoinder is that it wasn’t suggested before the referendum that the benefits would be long in coming, let alone the 20, 50 or even 100 years that some Brexiters have since spoken of.

Still, perhaps it is reasonable to apply the ‘David Frost test’ for what would constitute failure for Brexit. He suggested one piece of evidence of failure would be “if we are still debating this in five or six years’ time in the same way”. That was in June 2022, so the jury is still out, but there is no sign at all so far that Brexit is not going to be a failure in these terms.

One thing which all the defences of Brexit in this category share, albeit to varying extents, is that they render nonsensical attempts to make claims about the benefits of Brexit. That’s most obvious if Brexit has been comprehensively betrayed and is ‘Brexit in name only’ for, if so, how could there be any benefits? Even the much weaker defence that Brexit will take time to deliver benefits has an obvious circularity, whereby any sign of success shows it was right, whilst any absence of signs of success doesn’t show it was wrong. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Bathos and deflection

This category includes what is emerging as a favourite Brexit defence, that which does not necessarily deny that Brexit has been damaging, but constantly invokes the most extreme forecasts of how damaging it would be (or, often, garbled versions of those forecasts) so as to defend it on the bathetic grounds that it ‘hasn’t been as bad as the warnings’. It’s a line which can be traced back at least as far as David Davis’s 2018 assurance that Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” and its obvious flaw is that Brexit was meant to be something positive and desirable, rather than ‘not being cataclysmic’ or, even, ‘not being too bad’.

A related defence is to admit the evidence of (especially economic) damage that has occurred since Brexit, but to deflect blame for this away from Brexit to, typically, the pandemic, the Ukraine War or, more recently, conflict in the Middle East. This can readily be run alongside the ‘more time is needed’ line of argument, and has a similar circularity in enabling any supposed successes to be celebrated but any damage or lack of success discounted.

However, it differs from that line in that, whereas the promise of future success can never, strictly speaking, be disproved, the argument of damage being down to other factors can be, by reference to the specific effects of Brexit which have not been experienced by other countries. Thus, for all that Brexiters dismiss them, counterfactual economic models do, at least approximately, strip out Brexit effects from those of other factors.

Whataboutery

Such counterfactuals seek to answer the real question, which is how does Brexit Britain compare with Britain had Brexit not happened. That question is evaded by another defence, that of the ‘whataboutery’ which makes comparisons with other countries, especially other EU countries, or with the EU as a whole.

The narrow version of this is to compare, especially, GDP growth so as to show (especially if the ‘right’ time periods are cherry-picked), that the UK is doing no worse than some such comparators. Again, this doesn’t meet the objection that Brexit was promised to be a positive. Moreover, when these comparisons show, as they sometimes can, the UK outperforming its comparators it doesn’t address the real question. At particular times, even when an EU member, the UK performed better than other members. So if there are times, now, that it does so this tells us nothing about Brexit, at least in the absence of a plausible explanation of how Brexit is responsible for it.

The Brexiters do not have such an explanation, since the things they claim for what would be explanations – regulatory divergence and major new trade deals – have, as they constantly complain, scarcely happened. On the other hand, anti-Brexiters can plausibly explain why the UK performs less well than the counterfactual of Brexit not having happened, primarily in terms of the increased barriers to trade with the EU and the loss of freedom of movement of people.

The broader version of whataboutery is to point to events in the EU – not just in terms of economic performance, but actual or alleged crises over things like irregular migration, or Hungary, or, currently, the farmers’ protests – to say ‘look what a mess they are in’. This in turn links to the endless predictions, both before and since Brexit, that the EU is about to collapse entirely.

This kind of whataboutery is nonsense at multiple levels, as well as being incompatible with the idea that the EU is a powerful bully that is able to ‘punish’ us. Firstly, it’s nonsense because few of those who oppose Brexit have ever believed that the EU is some kind of nirvana. Secondly, even if the EU were in crisis, or collapsed, that doesn’t make Britain any better off. Indeed, given geographical proximity, and economic and political connections, any instability and suffering the EU endures are likely to have a profound negative impact on Britain, whilst Britain no longer has any influence upon what happens within and to the EU.

Lies, half-truths and exaggerations

This category could be expanded to fill a whole post, so here I will only give a few of the commonest or most egregious examples. Some are plainly ridiculous, such as Kemi Badenoch’s recent claim that “we have used our Brexit dividend to get the NHS more than a £1 billion more every single week than it had before Brexit” [emphasis in original tweet, where it was denoted by ‘*’ symbols]. Of course, there was no such dividend, and the NHS budget is, as it always was, purely a decision of the British government. The same applies to the similar, and more frequent, claim that the NHS has now received the £350 million a week proposed at the referendum, so Brexit has fulfilled that promise.

Equally untrue, although probably much more widely believed, are the claims that Brexit allowed the early roll out of vaccines (it didn’t: the UK was still operating under EU laws and regulations at the time) and that it allowed the UK to give support to Ukraine (it didn’t, and the UK had begun to do so ever since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when still an EU member).

Other things in this category are more difficult to unpick, as they may contain some element of truth. Many of the Brexiter claims about trade deals are of this sort, because it’s true that neither CPTPP nor the Free Trade Agreements with Australia, New Zealand, and any which may follow, could have been done by the UK as an EU member. The half-truths and exaggeration relate to the benefits, which are paltry. In other cases, the claims are lies in all but name, most obviously the description of non-binding Memorandums of Understanding with individual US states as ‘trade agreements’, which they aren’t in the standard use of that term (plus they have little or no economic value, and could almost certainly have been made as an EU member anyway).

Likewise, most claims of regulatory independence are overblown, since they either aren’t practical to exercise, or make little difference, or are things which would be likely to have happened at some point as an EU member. I’ve written so much about these things before that I don’t have the strength to do so again and, for regular readers at least, probably don’t need to.

The last redoubts: sovereignty and democracy

What does warrant more attention is what have become the last redoubts of the Brexiter defence, and in some ways its strongest if only because they are the most intangible. Sovereignty and democracy are not, of course, the same thing, as sovereign states can be undemocratic. As regards sovereignty itself, Brexiters routinely deploy this as the central defence of Brexit, the more so given the evident lack of benefits and the mounting evidence of costs. For if sovereignty ‘has no price’, then these inconvenient truths can be ignored.

There is a particularly specious version of this defence, a recent example being furnished by Julia Hartley-Brewer, which argues or implies that people voted for Brexit knowing the damage it would cause, because the remain campaign told them (that this is the meaning of Hartley-Brewer’s tweet is borne out by her previous remarks). The obvious flaw is that the leave campaign thundered assurances to such voters that every single one of these warnings was part of ‘Project Fear’, and it defies belief that many voters believed the warnings but voted to leave anyway rather than doing so because they accepted the assurances that the warnings were false.

Indeed, more generally, it’s worth recalling how Brexit was sold. Yes, the slogan of ‘taking back control’, which may be taken as a proxy for ‘regaining sovereignty’, was central to the leave campaign, but it was proposed not as an abstract virtue but as a means of delivering concrete benefits, most obviously control of immigration to those who wanted that, but also benefits to the economy and, more expansively, to the totality of policy, which Brexiters said had been ceded to the EU. So it is dishonest now to propose ‘sovereignty’ as the justification of Brexit, detached from whether it has delivered these concrete benefits.

Flawed ideas of sovereignty

Alongside that dishonesty lies another, or, at least, an ignorance. Sovereignty has probably never meant untrammelled national freedom of action, and certainly doesn’t nowadays. This is why the regulatory independence of Brexit has proved so illusory. In practice, countries operate within a framework of international standards, whether they be derived from the EU or other trans-national bodies. More broadly, countries pool and/or cede sovereignty for purposes of defence, as with NATO, or for a whole variety of non-economic reasons which give rise to international treaties, conventions and, indeed, law.

Of course, Brexiters are constantly straining against those limits but, in doing so, are simply repeating the same flawed idea of sovereignty. The flaw isn’t just that countries can’t escape external constraints, it’s that to the extent they can do so it has negative consequences which they choose to avoid. That choice is, itself, an expression of sovereignty. Thus the idea that Spain, or Denmark, or Germany do not have sovereignty because they choose to be in the EU is as preposterous as the idea that the UK has gained sovereignty by leaving. Indeed, one of the most arresting moments in the entire Brexit process was when the government published the first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. For it contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” (para 2.1).

Interestingly, the hollowness of the sovereignty argument was again unwittingly revealed by Rees-Mogg just this week, when he was questioned by Lewis Goodall of the News Agents. He was asked about the PopCons’ ‘anti-institutional’ agenda for changing the structures and systems of government, and why, if this was so necessary, the Conservative government in which he had served had not done so. Rees-Mogg replied, “we had no ability to change the system until we left the European Union”, but went on to say that “they [structures and systems of government] were changed very effectively by Tony Blair”. To spell out the obvious: when Blair was Prime Minister, Britain was in the EU.

Flawed ideas of electoral democracy

It is here that the Brexiters very last line of defence comes in, emphasizing not just sovereignty but democratic sovereignty. It echoes the line that Tony Benn took to justify opposition to EEC membership in the 1970s in saying that ‘at least, now, you can vote out the politicians who make the laws that govern you’ (although it’s notable that Benn didn’t share the Brexiters’ naïve view of sovereignty). It was wheeled out by Rees-Mogg (in his interview with Tyrone) as if it were a sort of dialectical checkmate. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To the extent it works at all, it rests on the premise that Britain is more democratic than the EU. How democratic Britain is can be debated, given, amongst other things, its arcane uncodified constitution, non-proportional voting system, unelected upper house, and extensive executive power underpinned by Royal Prerogative. So, too, can the democracy of the EU be debated. Perhaps it should indeed be constituted as a Federal State, with a constitution and an elected government, a United States of Europe, but such ideas were anathema to Brexiters, as they are to Eurosceptics in many EU states. There’s much more to be said about both debates than I have space for here but, at best, it’s a shaky premise.

Beyond that, the idea that, unlike before Brexit, British electors can now exert control over the policies and laws that govern them is fallacious. First, as with sovereignty, it ignores all those internationally derived regulations which, necessarily, continue to apply despite Brexit. Something similar could be said of the way that - as Liz Truss found, just as Harold Wilson did in the 1960s and James Callaghan in the 1970s - with or without Brexit ‘the markets’ put as much constraint on UK economic policy as, say, the EU did on that of Greece, and for much the same reasons. More generally, it massively overestimates the impact that EU membership had on Britain. We know, because of the extent of Retained EU Law (or what is now called Assimilated Law), that plenty of rules came from the EU, but these turn out to be rather dull and uncontentious things that few people care about or want to see scrapped. They aren’t the stuff of political controversy.

By contrast, the most controversial political issues of recent decades, from privatization and trade union restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s, to Iraq in the 2000s, to perennial battles over the extent of public spending, had little or nothing to do with EU membership (other, of course, than that of EU membership itself). Likewise, the big political issues of post-Brexit Britain remain similar to the big political issues of pre-Brexit Britain. So inflation, unemployment, tax rates, interest rates, the NHS, crime, education, defence, housing, immigration, and so on were and are what people vote about. But Brexit makes little difference to the policy options offered by political parties in these areas, and even if it may expand some options (certain taxes, perhaps) it reduces just as many (security data-sharing, say).

That’s even true for immigration policy because, although the UK has ended freedom of movement, the question of its overall total level was always subject to domestic choices as the government controlled non-EU immigration. Moreover, when an EU member, it was the UK’s choice not to use the controls on freedom of movement available to it, just as in 2004 it chose not to restrict free movement from newly acceded member states in Eastern Europe. On the Rees-Mogg argument, British voters could have changed both those things, so either they didn’t care enough or the idea of voter control of policy is flawed. On the other hand, as regards irregular migration, post-Brexit Britain no longer has the benefit of the Dublin regulations, and British voters can do nothing at all about that, even if they want to.

This also begins to show how the argument that Brexit gives electors control frequently rests on an entirely unrealistic idea of how electoral democracy work. Very occasionally, a single big issue may be defining, swaying large numbers of voters, but it has to be a very big issue. Even then, it doesn’t necessarily determine election results, or even change government policy (recall the Iraq War). For the most part, voters choose on the basis of the overall package of a party’s policy offer, their perceptions of its leadership and values, and similar ‘broad-brush’ considerations. Likewise, the record of an incumbent government is typically judged in the round, over many years and in relation to many issues. So when, to use the Rees-Mogg/ Tyrone clip again, Rees-Mogg says “if you didn’t like a tariff introduced by the EU, you had no means of stopping it” it is irrelevant. Elections aren’t fought or won at that level of specificity.

To be fair, presumably Rees-Mogg didn’t literally mean a single tariff, but trade policy generally. However, as an EU member, the UK could have held parliamentary votes on the ratification of EU trade deals, as other member states, or even regions, do (recall the Walloon vote against CETA), but it waived that right. On the other hand, parliamentary oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals is limited and lacks a statutory basis. Perhaps, if voters really cared about it, they could pressurise politicians, or even vote in elections, to make this oversight more rigorous. But, by the same token, they could have done the same to force pre-Brexit governments to hold votes on EU trade deals, and, indeed, to vote those deals down if they did not want them. In fact, voters were not interested in making this an electoral issue any more than, until the referendum, voters saw EU membership as a contentious or important issue. The underlying point is that a parliamentary democracy doesn’t give voters overarching control of policy any more than sovereignty bestows unconstrained freedom of action.

Flawed ideas of parliamentary democracy 

However, it's also doubtful to whether leading Brexiters understand, or are even committed to, parliamentary democracy at all. It was, after all, Johnson and Rees-Mogg who instigated the Prorogation of parliament in 2019. And just this week David Frost (£), recalling that period, wrote that “the problem there was Parliament deciding to act independently on Brexit, as if it were itself the government”, a reference, apparently, to the Benn Act, and perhaps to the Indicative Votes process.

So, apart from the irony of a placeman lawmaker, especially one of a distinction either nugatory or inordinately well-disguised, lecturing about democracy, it seems that Frost doesn’t understand the most basic fact of parliamentary democracy, which is that the government governs to the extent that it commands a majority. But it’s not actually a lack of understanding, it’s one of the dirty secrets at the heart of Brexit that, even as the Brexiters spout about democracy, what they have done is to substantially increase the power of the Executive at the expense of parliament, most obviously in the growth in the use of Statutory Instruments and ‘Henry VIII powers’.

There must also be more than a suspicion that when Brexiters rail against ‘unelected’ judges and civil servants they don’t grasp that whilst elections are central to democracy and its institutions they cannot and should not completely define them. Or, again, they do actually grasp this, and hate it, partly because of the constraints it places on the Executive and partly because what defines Brexiters, and populists generally, is not a commitment to parliamentary democracy but to a mythologised idea of ‘the will of the people’, mystically distilled and enacted by their leaders. 

For a brief period, the referendum result empowered them to use that slogan as a battle cry to bully and scarify their opponents. Now, with Brexit, in any form, so self-evidently unwanted by the majority of the people, and, in its actual form, so unloved by the minority who still want it, they are forced to ever-more contorted and untenable justifications.

Moving forward

At issue in all this is not a re-litigation of Brexit itself. Brexit has happened, so the real point is to set out and challenge at least some of the extraordinary array of arguments, some contradictory, some illogical, some dishonest, some just wrong, which Brexiters are still deploying.

With some exceptions, they have had to just about accept that Brexit has had many costs and no benefits, but they still seek to excuse that and still fall back on the more intangible claim to have restored sovereignty and democracy. But that too is flawed, not least because, apart from everything else I’ve written in this post, the very fact that Britain could and did vote to leave the EU shows that doing so was unnecessary on those grounds. Stripped of that final conceit, the Brexiters have nothing to protect them from the hard facts of their abject failure.

Exposing the many ways they try to conceal or deny that failure matters, not because of the past but because of the future. Having wreaked so much damage on our country, the Brexiters now want to do it one final disservice by preventing an honest appraisal of what they did, thus preventing us from finding any real solution to it.

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.

Could this be a cathartic moment for Brexit Britain?

Writing a weekly blog that appears on a Friday morning carries an inherent risk of something important happening later in the day. So it was no doubt tempting fate to begin last week’s post with the observation that it had been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, only for Boris Johnson to resign as an MP that evening, having read the draft report of the Privileges Committee inquiry into whether he had misled the House of Commons over the ‘Partygate’ scandal.

Subsequently, yesterday, the final report was published, and it contained what the BBC’s Political Editor called a “punishingly brutal” and “devastating” judgment both on the original offences and on Johnson’s “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation” of the Committee and its members, finding him guilty of multiple contempts of parliament. It was a verdict that left no room for doubt about Johnson, and could also be regarded as a vindication of the robustness of Britain’s democratic institutions that he should be held to account in this way, including in the very robust defence the Committee offered of its own process in the face of the vitriolic, Trumpian attacks against it by Johnson and his allies.

In other circumstances this would mark the end of a political career, the definitive exposure of a wholly dishonest ex-Prime Minister and, now, ex-MP, and that may well be the result. Yet, whatever Johnson’s ultimate fate, there is more at stake than that because it is not just about Johnson but about the wider politics of Brexit and of post-Brexit Britain. For this was, indeed, a major piece of ‘Brexit news’, even though, in principle, the inquiry had nothing to do with Brexit, because there’s an ineluctable link between Johnson and Brexit, such that it is impossible to discuss the one without the other.

Johnson and Brexit: conjoined twins

Brexit had many causes, and it is an over-simplification to say, as Guardian columnist Martin Kettle does, that “Brexit was Johnson and Johnson was Brexit”. But it’s quite plausible to say that but for Johnson’s involvement the campaign to leave would not have succeeded in winning its narrow majority. It’s certainly the case that he played a crucial role in shaping the form Brexit eventually took. And, looking at things from the other direction, it is at least arguable that, but for Brexit, he would never have become Prime Minister and that, but for his ambition to do so, he wouldn’t have supported Brexit.

So, like a safebreaker too careless and complacent to wear gloves, Johnson has left his fingerprints all over the Brexit crime scene. And just as his pathological dishonesty, entitled incompetence, grotesque egotism and moral depravity caused his downfall first as Prime Minister and now as an MP, so did they indelibly mark Brexit. From the outset, who better to front a campaign based on lies than someone to whom lying is first, never mind second, nature? Who better to deny the complex trade-offs entailed in the Brexit process than someone who applied his ‘cakeist’ philosophy to every aspect of his priapic, venal life? Who better to oversee a project based on vapid boasts and slogans than someone so lacking in substance and depth that to accuse him of vapidity would be the most generous of flatteries?

Perhaps the most disgraceful thing is that many of these criticisms of him, and more besides, would be made by those who supported leaving the EU. For they always knew that his involvement in it had no foundation of principle or belief. He was never ‘one of them’ – indeed he was never one of any particular group or ideology – he was useful to getting what they wanted, just as they were useful to him in getting what he wanted. This was no Luther or Calvin, dogmatically committed to Reformation, but a political Vicar of Bray, guided by opportunism, albeit with a view to glory rather than mere survival.

“Revenge for Brexit”

All of this is would be so regardless of whether Johnson’s resignation had any specific connection with Brexit. But, in fact, he himself chose to make them connected. Within his more general attempt to depict himself as the innocent victim of a ‘witch hunt’ and a ‘kangaroo court’ (for Johnson, whose supposed qualities as a wordsmith invariably yield snide metal not gold, has no fastidious objection to cliché) he explicitly claimed in his resignation letter, and since, that the reason he had been targeted was “to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about.”

It is hardly surprising that he should make this claim, and it is similar to the one made by Dominic Raab about his own resignation as well as those made about supposed ‘plots’ against Suella Braverman (£). In part, it is just a refusal to accept responsibility for his own wrong-doing. But it is also distinctively ‘Brexitist’ in tapping in to the familiar ‘victimhood’ narrative, and the associated idea that Brexit is some ‘anti-establishment’ revolt being undertaken in the face of a shadowy remainer elite ‘plot’ to foil it or ‘coup’ to overturn it.

Thus, equally unsurprisingly, it was taken up across the Brexit Blob as the explanation for Johnson’s demise, a further illustration of the way that Johnson has always been enabled by others and a reminder that, even now, there are still plenty of saddle-sniffers like David Frost to parrot the paranoid squawks about the ‘Remain establishment’ getting its dastardly way (£).  

Of the many things that could be said of these fantasies about the anti-Brexit establishment, perhaps the most obvious is that, since Brexit did in fact happen, it can’t be very powerful or effective. The very obviousness of that fact may explain why Johnson defenders like Jake Berry are reduced to the transparent lie that Brexit has been “blocked” by the establishment. It’s a peculiarly self-defeating lie, as well, since his defenders are also adamant that Johnson’s great achievement was to ‘get Brexit done’.

In the case of the Privileges Committee’s judgment about Johnson, an anti-Brexit plot is an especially absurd allegation, since the majority of its members are Conservatives, and some of the most critical questioning of Johnson at the hearing came from Bernard Jenkin, one of the most hardline of Brexiters. Presumably this is why Johnson made a particular attempt to discredit him this week on the grounds that he had apparently broken lockdown rules himself, an utterly bogus argument since the Committee was investigating whether Johnson had misled parliament, not whether he had broken the rules.

Johnson, Brexit, and the Establishment

Even so, this idea of Brexit as an ‘anti-establishment’ project is a more complex and less risible one than it would appear from some of the sillier claims made about it. There is certainly a sense amongst the ‘Brexit Jacobins’ that all conventions and norms can be dispensed with in order to ‘save Brexit’. That was seen with the Prorogation, and the various threats to break international law with the Internal Market Bill and the NIP Bill. Johnson’s temperamental disdain for rules was useful for that, and his willingness to trash the process that judged him illustrates that disdain, but his anti-establishment credentials were as questionable as his Brexit ones.

That isn’t so much because of his decidedly elite, Eton and Oxford, background. As I’ve argued before, it isn’t this kind of elitism which populism necessarily objects to, especially if it is combined with some public perception of ‘authenticity’, which, perversely given the plasticity of his principles, Johnson enjoyed. Rather, the deeper ambiguity of Johnson is the sense that, despite that disdain for rules and conventions, he also wants the respect of the Establishment and the respectability of belonging to it.

In this way, he strikes me as somewhat different to Trump, despite the resemblances in their character and conduct. It is most obvious in his manifest desire to be compared to Churchill, and not the Churchill of his maverick ‘wilderness years’, but the Churchill acclaimed as a great national leader and international statesman. Clearly, Johnson lacked any of the necessary qualities to be such a figure – perversely, had he done so, the pandemic gave him the best opportunity short of war to display them – but the desire to be seen that way made him much more conventional than some of the ‘true Brexiters’.

Had those true Brexiters been right in thinking that Brexit was a national liberation which would unlock both freedom and prosperity then he might even have been acclaimed in that way. As it was, even had he been cut from finer cloth, he presided over what was doomed to be a divisive and damaging fiasco. And, actually, one of the reasons that he lost the support of Conservative MPs when Prime Minister was that the Brexit Ultras thought he was failing to deliver the deregulation they saw as what would make Brexit a success, and many of them thought he was too ‘soft’ in defying the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Similarly, whilst Nigel Farage may now float the idea of joining forces with Johnson to “defend the Brexit legacy”, and be “eternally grateful to him” (£) for delivering Brexit, it is the Brexit Johnson delivered which is what Farage regards as a failure. Whether that alliance comes about remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely, not least for the reasons set out on the politics.co. uk website by Josh Self (who, by the way, is emerging as one of the most acute of the new generation of political commentators).

Brexit Conservatism

It is more likely that Johnson has his sights set on a post-election return to leading the Tory Party. That, too, seems improbable right now but he still has some powerful, influential, and rich backers (£) and the idea is already being spoken of by his allies (£). Certainly his resignation letter seemed an attempt to position himself as ‘properly Conservative’ in the Liz Truss, tax-cutting, small-state mould which is surely the direction the Party will go in after Sunak. Again this entails getting Tories to forget that, when he was Prime Minister, his internal critics castigated him for not being a “real Conservative”. And then, of course, there was his call to “make the most of Brexit”, to which the response might be to ask why he didn’t do so in office if there is anything good to be made of it. As for his professed puzzlement about the government having “so passively abandoned the prospect of a free trade deal with the US”, that is easily answered: the US doesn’t want such a deal, and he had already discovered that when he was Prime Minister.

So all of this – along with reports of him planning a comeback to deliver “total Brexit”, whatever that may mean – looks like a pitch to lead what, writing in The American Conservative this week, David Frost called “Brexit Conservatism”. This essay sets out the application of ‘National Conservatism’ to the UK context, which has already attracted much interest in Tory circles, and which Frost has recently championed (it also reveals, yet again, that Frost’s sole point of intellectual reference is Edmund Burke). It might also be read as part of Frost’s own thinly-disguised ambitions to lead the Tory Party, although his greasily sycophantic tribute to Johnson (£) suggests he could be angling for a place in government if his old boss does stage a return. After all, it’s possible that, although neither self-awareness nor modesty are his most obvious characteristics, Frost might recognize that nor is the gift of charismatic leadership.

However, Johnson’s attempt to re-ignite the glowing embers of his political career with the bellows of Brexit isn’t just a way of appealing to Tory Party members in the unlikely event that he stands in a future leadership contest. For both him and his supporters It is also an attempt to retain political relevance by reference to that brief moment of triumph in 2016. His injunction, again in his resignation letter, to “remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit” seeks to revive the idea of Brexit as a (somewhat) popular project and of ‘the will of the people’ as a way to scarify opponents, as well as to garner support.

But that mandate was long ago discharged, and harking back to it ignores the fact that only a minority, and that a dwindling minority, now actually support Brexit. It also reflects the failure of Brexit, since the only achievement Brexiters can claim is having won the referendum or, perhaps, the fact of having left the EU. All the promises they made for what it would actually mean in practice have been discredited. Yet at another, and deeper, level it is about returning to the comfort zone of campaigning rather than governing. Even when actually in government Johnson and his fellow-Brexiters always acted as if they were still campaigning. Obviously, the whole shtick about being anti-establishment and anti-elite is a way of positing Brexiters as being powerless, or insurgent, even when in power, but it is especially useful to Johnson now that he is out of power.

Brexitist logic

All of this points to the wider issue of ‘Brexitism’. That is not quite the same as, though it relates to, Brexit Conservatism, in that it refers to a mode of logic (or illogic) rather than to a particular policy agenda. Central to that logic is the bogus anti-elitism and victimhood, just discussed, and also the ‘simplism’ in which complex problems have simple, supposedly ‘commonsense’ solutions.

Beyond that, though, Brexitism has other features which are more difficult to pin down. Possibly the main reason why, to me and many others, Brexit has seemed different from any other political division is the way it’s not just a matter of different opinions, interpretations, or even values in the normal sense. Rather, it’s that the very basic stuff of political debate, some shared commitment to basic facts, evidence, rational argument, and logical consistency is missing. Or, even, that having such a shared commitment matters or is possible.

It’s about more than just lying, though it may entail that. It’s things like, to take a well-known example, trying to justify the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line by (amongst other things) weird logic-chopping about how ‘is joining’ denotes an ongoing process rather than carrying the obvious meaning that it is an accomplished fact and an imminent reality. Much of this blog has consisted of discussions of how this way of approaching politics has permeated the Brexit process itself (see, especially, all those posts specifically tagged ‘Brexit logic’), but this week’s furore over Johnson and the Privileges Committee illustrates its wider currency.

On the one hand, there is the Committee’s report, a textbook example of calm, forensic, evidence-based analysis and quasi-judicial rationality, and itself the outcome of an established institutional process of peer-based self-regulation with a public hearing at its heart. On the other hand, there are Johnson and his allies who, faced with all this, gurn out the dismissive line of it being ‘kangaroo court’, which no sensible or reasonable person could apply to that process and report, and despite the fact Johnson himself had deprecated the term before the Committee had reported. So any basic commitment to truth, let alone to consistency of argument, is simply dispensed with.

Then there are the numerous sub-arguments from Johnson and his defenders. For example, there’s the complaint that it should be voters, not other MPs, who decide who sits in Parliament. But, by resigning, Johnson forwent the chance for the electors in his constituency to make that decision. Or there’s the persistent attempt to discuss the findings in terms of the question of Johnson’s Covid rule-breaking or, relatedly, the actual or alleged Covid rulebreaking of other MPs or, as mentioned earlier, Bernard Jenkin, when the inquiry was solely about whether Johnson had misled parliament. Or the attempt to depict the Committee’s Chair, Harriet Harman, as having pre-judged Johnson in earlier remarks, when none of those complaining about this had voted against her chairing despite those remarks having already been known to them (£). Or, most ludicrous of all, the idea that the Committee had shown prejudice because during the hearing some of its members had made facial expressions of disbelief.

All of these arguments have a kind of ‘black is white’ craziness that makes them easy to discredit from the outside, and yet utterly impermeable amongst those who continue to advance them with stubborn obtuseness come what may. Moreover, within minutes of them first being aired they flow rapidly through the political ether to the point that, no matter how often discredited, they take on a permanent life, and not just on social media but ‘in real life’ with, in this case, members of the Committee having to be offered extra security in case of physical attacks on them.

And of course, both initially and ultimately, these arguments find confirmation by any criticism of them being dismissed as coming from actual or supposed ‘remainers’. One reason why this should be called Brexitism is because it spreads into every single aspect of political discourse. For example, already Rees-Mogg and others are trying to discredit the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid pandemic as being biased by “die-hard remainers” because reference was made on the first day to the possibility that no-deal Brexit planning got in the way of planning for a pandemic.

A cathartic moment?

This Brexitist twisting of logic and bare-faced denial of even basic facts had, in Johnson, its most skilled exponent, as it coincided his own character. Now that his practice of it has been so brutally and publicly exposed the question is not just what it means for him but what it will mean for Brexitism. Of course, Brexitism will never be expunged, but it might be marginalised. In this respect, there are grounds for very cautious optimism. It is significant, and very much to his credit, that so committed a Brexiter as Bernard Jenkin conducted himself as he did, as this certainly did much to blunt the Brexitist attack on the Committee. Similarly Penny Mordaunt, another Brexiter (and, indeed, one of the worst culprits in pushing the ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ line) spoke out in defence of the Committee.

More generally, it is notable that, whilst all Johnson’s defenders appear to be pro-Brexit, by no means all pro-Brexiters are defending Johnson. Indeed, amongst MPs, those defenders seem to be confined to the most obscure and peculiar even amongst the ranks of the obscure and peculiar. For example, anyone finding themselves reduced to being dependent upon ‘Sir’ Michael Fabricant to tour the studios to defend them might conclude that the jig is up. Against that optimism, there still seems to be a sense within the media that these fringe figures have to be represented for ‘balance’, giving the public the impression that there may to two sides to what was a cut and dried report.

An early and important test will be how Conservative MPs vote on Monday, including how many of them decide to abstain, when the Committee’s report will be debated. Beyond that, a great deal will depend on whether, with or without Johnson, what Frost calls Brexit Conservatism comes to dominate the Tory Party after the expected loss of the General Election.

Ultimately, that will matter a lot for British politics, but in one way at least it will be less immediately damaging than what we are currently living through. For this latest eruption of instability and infighting within what is, for now, the governing party has to be counted as the latest instalment of the political and reputational damage wrought by Brexit. The crucial question is whether it will also prove a cathartic moment? Could it, indeed, a be a further sign that, as I tentatively suggested in March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ has broken?

Nested within that are many sub-questions, or perhaps versions of the same question, which are currently being asked by many commentators from across the political spectrum. These include whether the UK system is proving more resilient than that of the US (£), how embedded the toxic myths of Brexit are, whether Johnson and Brexit have left a permanent legacy of political ‘doublethink’ (£), and whether this current Sunak-Starmer period marks a return to more conventional politics (£)?

The Privileges Committee has delivered its damning verdict on Johnson, but on these deeper questions the jury is still out.