The Brexit battles never went away, and they’ve got a long way to go

A recurrent observation – made sometimes with surprise and sometimes with a kind of perverse nostalgia - about this week’s political and parliamentary events is that it is ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. And it is true that, like an ageing rock band, re-formed to reprise its well-worn hits despite the much-publicized hostilities of its members, there were some all too familiar sights and sounds. Thus, as the Rwanda Bill ‘crisis vote’ approached, there were fevered speculations, briefings and counter-briefings, and crisis talks with the almost endless number of factions that make up what can still just about be called the Conservative Party.

As with such a band, it came as a slight surprise to learn that some of its members had not long ago died of self-abuse, as when the raddled features of Mark Francois emerged to announce the findings of the self-important dolts of the ERG ‘Star Chamber’, chaired by the apparently indestructible Bill Cash. The show even began in the time-honoured way with a rendition of the classic ‘cave-in of the Tory moderates’, to set the toes tapping. Francois did, however, introduce one new number, ’the Five Families’ which, it seems, refers to a grouping of some the right-wing factions which, indeed, have much in common.

The Brexit battles never went away

But the observation is wrong. It is not ‘as if the Brexit battles have returned’. They are the same battles, and they never went away, and they are explicitly seen as such by people like ‘New Conservative’ Miriam Cates. There are multiple, interwoven strands to this. One is that, as I suggested in my book on Brexit, a possible post-Brexit scenario would be a push for a Brexit 2.0 of derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and, indeed, for months now, there have been growing calls from the Tory right for just that.

That scenario seemed possible not just because of the insatiability of Brexiters but because, as discussed in last week’s post, even before the referendum they conflated issues of EU membership with those of the ECHR. For that matter, it shouldn’t be forgotten that during that period, when Theresa May was still a remainer, she argued for withdrawal from the ECHR, whatever the outcome of the referendum, and that later, as Prime Minister, she vowed to fight the 2020 election (sic) on a platform of ECHR derogation (£).

It’s true that derogation isn’t what is at issue with the Rwanda Bill, which instead is an attempt to legislate to ‘disapply’ in domestic law some provisions within the ECHR, and certain other international agreements, in relation to the Rwanda policy (Dr Alice Donald and Dr Joelle Grogan of UK in a Changing Europe provide a detailed explanation of its provisions). However, some of the right-wing critics of the Bill would certainly prefer derogation, and all of them want it to go further in disapplying international law, especially in relation to whether individual appeals against trans-shipment to Rwanda would be allowable. In this sense, they are indeed pushing for a Brexit 2.0 scenario.

Closely inter-twined with that is the issue of whether the current Bill itself threatens to break international law. The government claims that it is framed in a way which stays just short of that, and this is the basis on which the ‘moderates’ of the One Nation group backed it. However, the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights issued a statement this week arguing that, even as drafted, it already breaches international law, a view endorsed by Professor Mark Elliot of Cambridge University, a leading authority in this area. In flirting with violating international law, or even actually doing so, the Rwanda Bill again represents a continuation, rather than a re-appearance, of something that began with Brexit. For it was not until the Internal Market Bill (IMB) of September 2020, which threatened to break some provisions in the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), that any British Minister had proposed legislation which would self-avowedly break international law.

The two aspects of Brexit nihilism

That threat arose again, with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in 2022, and although, in both cases, it did not actually happen, it shows how Brexit, specifically, has proved the catalyst for an almost nihilistic frenzy on the political right. One aspect of that is a kind of Jacobinism in which no measure is too extreme if it delivers Brexit, whether the price be the economic one of ‘no deal Brexit’ or the reputational one of reneging on international agreements. From quite early in the Brexit process, and especially once Boris Johnson came to power, international pariahdom seemed to matter not at all to the Brexiters. It is now abundantly clear that he signed the NIP without intending to honour it, and that many Brexiters who voted for it in parliament did so in the expectation that it would not be honoured.

A second aspect of this nihilism, related but slightly different, is a doctrinaire and wholly absurd idea of parliamentary sovereignty, within which international law is not just something that can be ignored but something which is actually meaningless. On this argument, which has been foregrounded again in relation to the Rwanda Bill (£), because parliament is sovereign it cannot be bound or constrained by anything else. At the time of the IMB proposals, this ludicrous argument was actually endorsed by the then Attorney General Suella Braverman.

That it is ludicrous was explained at that time, again by Mark Elliott, and, now, he has written of the Rwanda Bill that:

“it proceeds on the basis of the sleight of hand that the UK Parliament, because it is sovereign, can somehow free the Government from its international legal obligations. But this is to conflate the sovereignty of the UK Parliament in domestic law with the UK’s sovereignty on the international plane as a State. It is precisely in exercise of its State sovereignty that the UK can enter, and has entered, into binding treaty obligations.”

At its extreme, this idea of parliamentary sovereignty leaves no constitutional place for domestic courts, let alone international ones (actually, at its most extreme, as noted in my last post and amplified by Ian Dunt’s Substack, it proposes that parliament is sovereign over reality itself).

It is important to understand that these are not arcane points of legal or political theory. They have a crucial practical importance. For one thing, the UK is hardly in a position to call on other states, be it China, Russia or Israel, to act within international law and to respect human rights if its position is that sovereignty allows every country to do whatever it wants. For another, the UK is hardly an attractive partner for other countries to strike deals with, whether about trade or, even, asylum processing, if it reserves the right to violate those deals. And, for a third, which should matter to everyone, this doctrine makes it possible that parliament might act to remove any and every right from any or all of us, with no recourse to any court. It is precisely to constrain that possibility that we need the principle that there are some laws and rights that transcend the power of nation states.

It may seem as if these two aspects of Brexitist nihilism – the ‘Jacobin’ ruthlessness that the end justifies the means, and the ‘sovereigntist’ idea that parliament is unconstrained – are the same. But the reason I said they are ‘slightly different’ is because at times they contradict each other, even though they are often espoused by the same people.

Specifically, throughout the Brexit process, the idea of the ‘will of the people’ was often claimed by Brexiters to mean that sovereignty lay, indeed, with ‘the people’, and the constant accusation was that parliament was improperly ‘thwarting’ this will. But, if parliament is sovereign, how could there be anything improper in this (even assuming that was what parliament was doing)?  Moreover, the most extreme example of the Jacobin aspect was when Boris Johnson and his minions unlawfully prorogued parliament showing, in fact, utter contempt for parliamentary sovereignty. For, remember, their specific objection was to the way that parliament itself was passing legislation like the Benn Act (to prevent no-deal Brexit) in defiance of the Executive.

More generally, Brexit has been used as a pretext to sideline parliament, for example through the burgeoning use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ and, of course, but for the first Gina Miller case, parliament would not have had a vote on triggering Article 50. As with prorogation, it was only the courts which acted to constrain political power and, in these cases, to constrain the power not of parliament but of the Executive.

Rwanda Bill: Brexitism won the day without winning the vote    

In short Brexit nihilism is ludicrous in theory, dangerous in practice, and incoherent in both theory and practice. But it hasn’t just re-emerged for an encore with the Rwanda Bill. It is embedded in British politics. That is most obviously the case with the Tory Party which, as I wrote a couple of months ago, has been driven mad by Brexit. Even longer ago, in August 2022 when the Tories were engaged in choosing their new leader, who subsequently turned out to be Liz Truss, I made the point, which has become almost a cliché since then, that the Tory Party had become ‘unleadable’.

That had been only temporarily masked by Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory. It gave the government a substantial majority – albeit one now whittled away to 56 by by-election losses and expulsions – but, actually, apart from the very early vote to pass the Withdrawal Agreement that ‘got Brexit done’ (sic), it was always a fragile majority, and factionalism and infighting were never far from the surface. Then, following the Truss implosion, Rishi Sunak briefly had enough control over the Brexit Ultras to squash the rebellion over his Windsor Framework, which at one stage threatened to muster more than 100 rebels but in the end fizzled out. At that time, I, like others, wondered if Britain’s Brexit fever had finally broken.

That has proved not to be the case. Although Sunak also won this week’s Rwanda Bill vote, with many of the ‘five families’ abstaining rather than voting against, the circumstances are very different to the Windsor Framework vote. For one thing, this is only the beginning of a legislative process which, assuming House of Lords opposition, has no realistic chance of being completed before the next election. There are plenty more votes on possible amendments to come which the rebels may win.

For another, even though the Brexitists want to make the legislation even ‘harder’, its existence even in its current form shows the extent to which their ideology has captured “the soul of the Conservative Party”. A rather naïve column from Iain Martin in the Times (£) suggested that what happened this week was that the “moderate MPs” who form “the bulk of the parliamentary party” had shown how marginal the “fundamentalist Brexiteers” have become. What that misses is just how immoderate the entire party has become, so that what would once have been an extreme position is now mainstream.

Because this wasn’t Sunak ‘the pragmatist’ of the Windsor Framework, temporarily putting the Ultras back in their box. It was Sunak, with the support of the ‘moderates’, making as one of his central priorities an unworkable, immoral, and probably illegal populist policy, that began with Johnson, and finding that, as always, the Ultras want more. It doesn’t even matter if they don’t get that from Sunak now since, as Robert Shrimsley astutely pointed out this week, it will just be grist to their post-election mill that his government failed by not being ‘pure’ enough in its Conservatism.

Where is the Tory Party heading?

But the Tory Party is really no longer discussable without reference to Reform and Nigel Farage. Clearly that has been true for a while, going right back to UKIP and the roots of the referendum. It was certainly obvious at the last election, when Farage stood down from fighting most Tory-held seats. Now, the two are inseparable, both at the level of electoral fortunes and, perhaps more importantly, because there is no discernible ideological difference between Reform and most of – if we must call them so – the ‘five families’.

That’s especially so for the New Conservatives and National Conservatives, and there’s almost a sense – or am I imagining it? – that the ERG now seems slightly dated and quaintly respectable by comparison with this new breed of Tory rightwingers. Bill Cash may be many things, but he isn’t a Jonathan Gullis or a Lee Anderson. Even Francois is more ludicrous than sinister. It’s a bit like the way that ‘old school’ gangland bosses like the Krays were displaced by even more ruthlessly violent psychopaths. Say what you like about the ERG, but at least they looked after their own and loved their dear old mum, so to speak.

At all events, there’s no doubt the direction the Tories are heading in, at least in the short-term, assuming they lose the next election (and it’s telling that an ambitious one-time ‘moderate’ like Robert Jenrick is now re-positioning himself in anticipation of this direction). Even if Martin was right that there are still ‘moderates’ in the parliamentary party, it is undeniable that the membership, which will choose its next leader, is far from moderate. The Johnson-Farage dream ticket may just be a dream (or, perhaps, a nightmare), but the fact that anyone would even float such an idea, or that others pine for a Liz Truss comeback, shows the madness that is in the air. We may even see a complete re-alignment of the British Right, drawing in Reform but excluding what has previously been understood as Conservative traditionalism (for all that such an alignment would claim to be one towards ‘true Conservatism’), with it becoming the Brexitist Party in all but name.

Such a party, perhaps more likely led by one of the NewCons like Cates rather than one of the more familiar throwbacks like Braverman, and endorsed if not joined by Farage, would campaign not just on draconian anti-immigration policies but also on derogating from the ECHR and, very likely, reneging on the NIP.  This might doom the right to electoral irrelevance, but that certainly can’t be assumed, especially after the Brexit vote, even if the 2024 election sees a virtual Tory wipe-out. There is probably bedrock support of around 25%-30% of the electorate for such a Brexitist or NatCon party, augmented by some who habitually don’t vote and others who, after a few years of a Labour government, come to think that any kind of change, and any kind of ‘kick to the Establishment’ is justified.

That could create an electoral coalition similar to that which Vote Leave constructed, and, unlike then, it might only need, say, 40% of the vote rather than 50% to win an election, and it would have vociferous support from many sections of the media. Even if it only came close to winning, that might cement a NatCon takeover of the party for another electoral cycle, and for so long as it wasn’t in power then the many internal contradictions of its likely economic programme, which Times columnist Danny Finkelstein identified this week, could be glossed over. Indeed, as with UKIP and Brexiters in general, such a party could be far more effective and influential as a campaigning protest movement than as a government.

The Brexit battle to come

This is just speculation. But, assuming it has any plausibility at all, it is highly relevant speculation at least in relation to what will undoubtedly be continuing debate about re-joining the EU or the single market. That was given new impetus this week by a widely-discussed article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times suggesting re-joining is highly unlikely any time soon, if ever. Other views are available, of course. But my point here, and of course I and many others have made it many times, is that for as long as there is a feasible scenario in which an incoming British government would seek to overturn any version of re-joining which might have occurred, such re-joining would never be countenanced by the EU. In this sense, the political battle for ‘anti-Brexiters’ for the time being is not to re-join, or even to try to persuade Labour to have a re-join policy, but to expunge Brexitism from British politics, or at least confine it to the margins.

Clearly things may play out differently. Even Wolf acknowledges the possibility that, say, a re-elected Trump pulling the US out of NATO would create such a geo-political shock that all bets would be off. So, too, might something as yet completely unforeseen, and perhaps (even) worse. But it would seem foolhardy, and even more pessimistic than Wolf himself, to work on that assumption when the scenario I have described is, for the time being, the more likely one.

On that cheery note, I’m signing off for Christmas and the New Year (unless something big happens). Many thanks to all who have read and publicized the blog this year and, in more recent months, left comments. I nearly decided to give up on it when I reached the seven-year mark, but here we still are. I’ll re-start early in 2024.

 

If you are stuck for a Christmas present for someone, why not buy them a copy of the updated edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), published by Biteback in September 2023?

Morrissey's Brexit

There’s really only been one major Brexit development this week, the vote on the Statutory Instrument to create the Stormont Brake as part of the Windsor Framework. If that sounds convoluted that’s because it is. This wasn’t about passing primary legislation, and there was only a short debate, and no amendments were allowed. It was not even about the entirety of the Windsor Framework (WF), although it seems that the government will treat it as such. Nor was there any possibility of the government losing the vote, as the Labour Party was pledged to support it.

What difference does it make?

Nevertheless, it was important in terms of how many, and who, would vote against. In the event, just twenty-nine did, of whom a mere twenty-two were Conservatives, with the others being DUP MPs plus the whipless, and increasingly unhinged, former Spartan Andrew Bridgen. The list of Tory rebels, by the way, includes some of the most disreputable and despicable politicians of our, and perhaps any, age. So it was a fairly puny revolt, and though it was notable that both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined it, what was more notable was that neither have the pull to have made it a significant challenge to Rishi Sunak. Johnson himself had to interrupt his ill-conceived defence against charges of having misled parliament, of which more below, in order to cast his vote.

It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.

Even so, there are plenty of Brexiters on the Tory benches who are not ERG members but who might have been galvanized to rebel in different circumstances. Had there been enough to mean that the vote would have been lost without Labour support that would have been a significant embarrassment for Sunak, and a sign that the Brexit Ultras are still a force to be reckoned with, but there were not. It’s true that several Tory MPs didn’t vote, but it is impossible to tell how many of these were meaningful abstentions and how many were simply absences. In any case, abstention hardly bespeaks of Cromwellian resolve.

The day before, the ERG’s ludicrously-named, if not downright ludicrous, ‘Star Chamber’ had found the WF, including the Stormont Brake, to be unacceptable. But the fatal political flaw in this, as with all the Brexiter objections to the WF, is that everything they object to about it was also contained within the Northern Ireland Protocol itself, which they voted for. Not only that, but it was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ the 2019 Tory Government was elected to deliver. Now that the reformed Protocol has, effectively, been accepted, there is little realistic prospect of these objections being resurrected. Equally, the persistent Brexiter lie that the Protocol was always intended to be temporary, wheeled out again by Priti Patel in a Telegraph article this week (£), must surely have died this week, even if any of them actually believed it. It is expected that the WF will now be formally adopted at today’s meeting of the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.

There is a light that never goes out

So it is plausible to say that the grip of the ERG has finally been broken, and that Sunak, unlike any of his predecessors since 1992, has successfully faced them down. Certainly, Wednesday’s vote is widely seen to have strengthened his political position, with Jessica Elgot of the Guardian writing of it “having been a moment of pure delight for the Prime Minister”. Against that, it’s not just plausible but likely that, if the Tories go on to lose the next election, there will be a backlash from the Brexit purists, saying that the problem was that Brexit was betrayed.

By that, they will mean betrayed not just by Sunak and the WF but also by the failure of both Sunak and Johnson to deliver the deregulatory nirvana that many of the Ultras crave, for it is worth recalling that Brexiter dissatisfaction about delivering these ‘benefits of Brexit’ long pre-dates Sunak’s arrival. Johnson, if he stays the course, might seek to lead that backlash, arguing no doubt that his own failures were the fault of others. But his political stock may never recover, even if he dodges the bullet of the Privileges Committee hearing, and, anyway, the true Brexiters have always known he was not of the faith.

More likely, it will be championed by one of the true believers, perhaps one of this week’s WF rebels. Truss is probably irredeemably tainted by failure, a failure for which the greatest evidence is her own inability to recognize it, so Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg are more obvious candidates. It is already possible to see the battle lines being drawn, with Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath, in an article (£) ominously yet absurdly titled “The Brexit revolt against the Remain Establishment has only just begun”, hailing the twenty-two Tory rebels as “heroes” and insisting that, if Sunak loses the next election, “the next Tory leader will be chosen by the party membership and will be a Brexiteer, anti-ECHR and anti-woke”. In other words, neither the Tories, nor British politics, have yet seen the back of the ERG.

Ask

All that is for the future. More immediately, the Windsor Framework vote could be a sign that, as I put it in a recent post, Britain’s Brexit fever has broken. However, there are several questions to be asked about that. One is what now happens about the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which of course is in no way resolved by the vote, even though a new opinion poll shows not just strong support amongst the people of Northern Ireland for the WF (overall 45% support, 16.9% oppose), but that even within the unionist community only 15.7% (though 22.8% of DUP voters) are opposed to it (and 45.8% support it, though only 36% of DUP voters). Wrapped up in that is whether, regardless of whether the Assembly is restored, the Protocol will go on being not just a running sore for some unionist politicians, but also, in being so, will function as a rallying point for Brexiters generally.

Another question is whether, how, and to what extent, Sunak follows up his success with the WF by moving in more pragmatic directions on Brexit policy generally. As I suggested last week, there are already signs that he will do so in relation to defence and international relations. But what about domestic policy and, crucially, the Retained EU Law Bill? If he continues with the latter, Brexitism can hardly be said to be in abeyance. If he doesn’t, will that provide a new rallying point for the Brexiters? It is of note that both this Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill are on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Partnership Council of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Barbarism begins at home

Even if passing the Windsor Framework has broken the Brexit fever as regards government policy, it will also serve to re-enforce and perhaps grow the poisonous reservoir of Brexit betrayalism within British Conservatism in its wider sense. That matters not so much in terms of Brexit policy but the rag-bag of populist causes with which Brexit has become bound up. Those causes have their adherents amongst the Tories, of course, with Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg being obvious examples, but also within the Reform Party and the very powerful media and social media nexus that promotes Conservative populism.

Although the political parties in this space, not just Reform but the rump of UKIP, and Reclaim, which has never been more than a rump, remain angrily disunited, there is a sense of this ‘movement’ coming together, an example being the way GB News employs as hosts Tories like, again, Rees-Mogg and Anderson, as well as Nigel Farage and oddballs like Laurence Fox, alongside its wider cast of viciously aggressive presenters and freakish commentators. Similarly, an offshoot of Fox’s Reclaim was recently revealed to have funded Andrew Bridgen, whilst Bridgen himself co-hosted a lavish dinner for anti-vaxxers at the Carlton Club last month. In some ways, such loose-knit communities of interest are more effective than a political party, creating the impression of a disorganized ‘general consensus’ rather than an orchestrated agenda.

GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example – feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.

Meanwhile, the increasingly cowed and compromised BBC, though certainly a very far cry from GB News, routinely hosts spokespeople of the ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, and bends over backwards to placate its implacable populist critics. Thus, with or without parliamentary representation, or even creating a single party, this populist movement will continue to exert a significant and malign influence on the British polity. Perhaps most alarming is how difficult it is to distinguish between some of the apparently ‘respectable’ populists and far-right street groups like Britain First.

Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic).

This charming man

That elision is evident not just in the rough and tumble of anonymous social media slanging matches and newspaper columns like that of Allister Heath, mentioned earlier, but in the writings of populist intellectuals. For example, in last week’s Mail, politics Professor Matthew Goodwin managed to run together issues as diverse, yet predictable, as Brexit, the paucity of further and technical education, the ‘over-representation’ of ethnic minorities in TV shows and adverts, and, of course, “’woke’ policies in our schools [and] universities” to propose that “there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority”.

Tellingly, Goodwin sometimes slips between referring to the majority and to “ordinary people”, something reminiscent of the Farage formulation of the Brexit vote as being “a victory for ordinary decent people” and its implication that very close to half the country is, in some way, neither ordinary nor decent. The difference is that, after that brief moment of triumphalism, Conservative populism has now reverted to its habitual sullen victimhood, a kind of hybrid of the bedsit self-pity of Morrissey’s early lyrics and the aggressive martyrdom of his more recent political stances (yes, it took a while, but now the title and sub-titles of this post make sense).

None of this is new – Goodwin talks of the ‘New Elite’, but most of what he says about it was already hackneyed when I was young, and he himself rather paradoxically asserts that “The New Elite has been on manoeuvres for decades”, leaving one to wonder how far back we have to go for the Old Elite, or even quite what it was. Certainly historians will be puzzled to learn that “in days gone by the governing classes had much more in common with the millions of ordinary people who shared their nation”, though they would probably spot it as an example of populist nostalgia in which even the elite ain’t what it used to be. And all of us might be puzzled as to why, if this ‘New Elite’ is so powerful, it is having to endure Brexit.

But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism.

That joke isn’t funny any more

For particular example, the biggest political news story this week has been Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee to assess whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over infringements of the Covid rules. This has nothing to do with Brexit, except in the indirect sense that both relate to Johnson’s pathological dishonesty, and that Johnson might well never have become Prime Minister but for Brexit (and certainly only supported it in the hope that would be the consequence).

Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins.

Rees-Mogg’s attempt to discredit the process reveals his grating hypocrisy, seen also in his role in the illegal 2019 prorogation, since he so often affects to represent himself as the voice, an unctuous and preposterous voice admittedly, of parliamentary traditionalism. For, as Hannah White of the Institute for Government explains, the significance of the hearing is far less about Johnson’s future than it is about protecting the vital constitutional importance of ministerial accountability. But it also shows how Brexit continues to be the cornerstone of British populism, for all that it has ceased to have majority support. It is the talisman of Brexitism.

And, in fact, the hypocrisy and the role of Brexit in populism are linked. For the Brexit Ultras, no perversion of parliamentary rules and norms was too great if it delivered ‘the will of the people’. In that context, Johnson’s ‘anti-ruleism’ made him their ideal leader. But as I argued at length at the time, ‘Partygate’ exposed the risks and fragility of populism by opening a chasm between ‘ordinary people’ and their supposedly anti-elitist leaders. So it will be fitting if it is his lies over this, rather than all his other lies, which finally end Johnson’s political career. And it will be a fitting irony if, as argued by (£) the ferociously pro-Brexit Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, the ‘implosion’ of “the cult of Boris” is taken by association to mean the implosion of “his Brexit dream”.

Still ill

For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones.

Discussing those damages is still largely taboo for both the Tory and Labour parties but, to coin a phrase, the people have spoken, at least to the extent of successfully petitioning parliament to debate a call for the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact of Brexit. The debate will be held on 24 April, and whilst little can be expected as a result it is at least something that Brexit will actually be discussed and not treated as an embarrassing medical condition that shouldn’t be mentioned in public. The Brexit fever may have broken, but the nation is still ill.

 

Afterword

In case you missed it, I wrote an extra post this week, reviewing two recent Brexit books – The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James, and Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck.

Has Britain’s Brexit fever finally broken?

Where to start, after one of the biggest weeks for Brexit news for a long time? Perhaps with my post of a fortnight ago when I discussed two scenarios for Britain’s immediate post-Brexit future. In the first, there would be a gradual move to rapprochement with the EU, taking pragmatic steps to improve the tone and substantive quality of the relationship. In the second, there would be ongoing antagonism and an ideological drive to divergence. I suggested that what happened over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) negotiations would be a key test of which of these would prevail in the battle for the post-Brexit polity, and concluded that for the first scenario to come about the Brexit “fever has to pass”, which would then be followed by a long period of recuperation.

So, does the announcement on Monday of the ‘Windsor Framework’ (WF) as the outcome of the NIP negotiations mark the breaking of that fever? And what does it mean for achieving, or even going beyond, a scenario of rapprochement with the EU?

I’m not going to summarise the provisions of the WF here. The full suite of UK technical documents is available online, including the Command Paper which gives a detailed overview, with the corresponding EU documents appearing on the European Commission website. Moreover, there are numerous good summaries available including a House of Commons Library research briefing, an excellent detailed explainer from the Institute for Government, and an assessment from BBC Northern Ireland of what it means for Northern Irish businesses. It has also been widely reported in the news, as have the initial reactions of the main political parties.

Instead, in this post I will make a few observations and comments.

The Windsor Framework

The WF does not ‘replace’ the NIP, but rather amends and modifies its operations. That isn’t a criticism, because despite Brexiter fantasies there was never any possibility of it being otherwise, but it is a corrective to some of the claims and reports. The operational modifications are considerable and highly technical, will take time to implement, and the detailed ways that implementation will work will only emerge over time. There might also be unintended consequences: one which has already been flagged (£) is the possibility it will further depress GB-NI goods volumes through Wales’s already Brexit-ravaged ports, because they link to ports in Ireland rather than Northern Ireland.

Nor, despite claims by Rishi Sunak, has the WF “removed any sense of a border in the Irish Sea”. There will still be a border, and whilst it has been very considerably simplified, especially by the creation of the green and red channels, even the green lane does not mean a complete absence of border formalities. But there is no doubt that the WF is significantly better, in the sense of being operationally easier in this and many other ways: border frictions are probably the minimum they could be given the realities of Brexit.

In relation to governance and sovereignty, whether it is a better is open to interpretation as, of course, was whether the unmodified NIP was problematic in those respects. Northern Ireland is still treated differently to the rest of the UK (though unionists don’t always object to that) precisely because the Protocol means it remains in the EU single market for goods. As a result, there is still an ultimate role for the ECJ, as there was always going to be, and the new ‘Stormont Brake’ mechanism, whilst a significant innovation, doesn’t constitute the ‘unequivocal veto’ the government is presenting it as. However, again, the new governance arrangements represent the most minimum role for EU law and the least intrusive role for the ECJ that could realistically be envisaged.

In this sense, whilst the WF can be seen as having obtained very extensive ‘concessions’ from the EU, the reactions of the Brexit Ultras and the DUP are inherently matters of political judgement rather than the outcome of any ‘objective tests’ or legal scrutiny they might apply. It would be perfectly possible, taking the hard line that some in those groups have long adopted, to say that neither sovereignty nor parity with the rest of the UK have been achieved. If so, that would render any conceivable version of the NIP impossible. No doubt many in those groups would like to make that so, but they may not judge it politically viable to insist upon it, a point I’ll come back to.

To the extent that this is, indeed, a genuine improvement on the NIP, there are two obvious points to be made. Firstly, it is hardly a ‘triumph’ so much as further evidence of the dishonesty and incompetence of the original Johnson-Frost negotiation, of the dishonesty with which it was presented to the electorate, and of the dishonesty of the Tory MPs, and Tory and Brexit Party MEPs, who voted for it. Secondly, even having created that original mess, it would have been perfectly possible, as Fintan O’Toole explained this week, for something like the WF provisions to have been agreed at any point after the NIP became operational in 2021.

That it was not done before, and that it has been now, is because all of the Brexiter bluster about ‘playing hardball’ with the EU through drastic threats and unilateral breaking of agreements was not just hokum but bunkum. That in turn also discredits the recurrent Brexiter lie that it was the ‘remainer parliament’ making ‘no deal Brexit’ impossible which was the reason for agreeing the NIP they later disowned. The WF simply wouldn’t have happened if Sunak hadn’t paused the NIP Bill, something clear from multiple ‘insider’ accounts of the negotiations (£). All this is to Sunak’s considerable credit, as well as, apparently, to that of James Cleverley, Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker.

More generally, the WF happened because Sunak adopted a totally different approach, based on pragmatism, realism and ‘technocracy’ rather than ideology, fantasy and aggression. In other words, he not only dropped the threats, but, in a positive sense, replaced them with sensible engagement. This, and the related trust such an approach was able to engender, was something which Johnson was congenitally incapable of and which May, for all that she came to have some elements of Sunak’s pragmatism, couldn’t deliver on whilst the Brexiters were in full cry. For the first time since the Article 50 process began, the UK fielded a ‘serious’ negotiating team at the political level, comprised of Brexiters, certainly, but apparently relatively free of Brexitism.

A new chapter in post-Brexit relations?

With Sunak’s different approach has come something more than the delivery of the WF itself, in that there is now at least the possibility, explicitly expressed, of a complete re-set of UK-EU relations. One initial sign of that is that, within the WF, there is a commitment from the UK to completely drop the NIB Bill and for the EU to drop the infringement proceedings relating to the UK’s unilateral flouting of the NIP grace periods. More generally, in the Political Declaration it is stated that “the new way forward on the Windsor Framework marks a turning point in how both the United Kingdom and the European Union will work together collaboratively and constructively” (p.4).

The immediate fruits of that appeared during the press conference announcing the agreement, when Ursula von der Leyen indicated that UK participation in the Horizon Europe science programme could now be progressed, and Sunak spoke of other areas of possible co-operation, such as energy security. Moreover, again in the Political Declaration, “both the European Commission and the Government of the United Kingdom express their intention to fully exploit in the future the potential of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement” (p.1). So, here, there is an implicit recognition that, even within the limited remit of the TCA, the Johnson-Frost approach also delivered a sub-optimal outcome which the government will now seek to rectify.

The idea that the WF heralds a new and better chapter in UK-EU relations was underscored by the meeting between King Charles and von der Leyen. That occasioned much fury from the Brexiters (£), with Jacob Rees-Mogg clutching his pearls about constitutional impropriety (pearls made rather grubby by his own role in involving the monarchy at the time of the illegal Prorogation). Some saw it as an attempt to butter up the unionists by implying a Royal seal of approval for the deal. But I think its real significance, intended or not, and the real reason for Brexiters’ anger about it, was to symbolise a kind of healing of the rift and rancour that Brexit brought and hence to cement a re-set of relations.

Such as re-set has been on the cards for a while, partly because of Ukraine, and partly because the implosion of the Truss mini-budget put the issue of economic realism more centrally into UK politics than it had been since the Brexit referendum (and also did much to discredit the entire Brexitist world-view). It also, undoubtedly, has become more politically possible because of the now firmly established public view that Brexit was a mistake and has been highly damaging.

However, it is important to recognize that the WF, assuming it goes ahead, does not mark the point when Brexit is ‘done’, or even that the Protocol is done. In relation to both it is a moment, pivotal perhaps, but still only a moment, in what is and will always be the ongoing process, or processes, of Brexit. What the WF does, as regards the Protocol, is somewhat re-define those processes and, as regards Brexit more generally, potentially change the tone of the processes. So even if this is the beginning of a new chapter, it is only an early chapter in a very long book, itself only the first of several thick volumes.

The Ultras’ reactions

Naturally the Brexit Ultras, especially outside the Conservative Party, are viewing all this with dismay with, for example, Richard Tice of the Reform Party denouncing it as Brexit in Name Only (BRINO). But although that betrayal narrative will always fly with the hard core of leave voters it’s a message with diminishing traction because it has been the constant cry of wolf of people like Tice. Indeed, he implicitly recognizes this in saying that the WF “reinforces” BRINO. For if we already had BRINO then there’s not really anything new for him to complain about. Equally, the more insistent he is about BRINO the more he opens up the obvious question that, in that case, we might just as well reverse Brexit entirely.

The situation for the Ultras inside the Tory Party is rather different, not least because, unlike the Reform Party, they will soon be defending their seats at a General Election. In the immediate aftermath of the WF announcement they have been rather muted and are clearly split. The enthusiastic backing for the deal from Chris Heaton-Harris and, especially, Steve Baker did much to blunt any attack the ERG might have envisaged. It would also seem that the ‘traditionalist’ or ‘pragmatist’ sections of the party have been unusually robust in showing their impatience with the default vexatiousness of the Ultras and the default ambitiousness of Boris Johnson.

There is also clearly an awareness, not just from the pragmatists but also shown by Rees-Mogg, that inflicting a defeat on Sunak as a vehicle for a Johnson comeback would carry huge electoral dangers for the already floundering government. Johnson himself initially remained silent, and didn’t even attend Sunak’s announcement in the Commons. But yesterday he said he would “find it very difficult to vote for” the deal, and expressed a preference to return to the approach of the NIP Bill. However, to the extent he said he “hoped it would work”, he held off from outright condemnation and seemed to imply that if the DUP accepted it then so would he. (The speech itself included a litany of dishonesty about Brexit which I don’t have space to discuss: suffice to say there were no new lies).

This is all in marked contrast to the talk from just two weeks ago of a Johnson-led rebellion of 100 or more Tory MPs. There’s an element of chicken and egg here, since a groundswell of rebellion would embolden Johnson to take his chance to lead it, whilst the absence of leadership from Johnson means there is little for potential rebels to rally around. It’s a further illustration of his less than Churchillian propensity to ‘lead from behind’.

Then, too, as Rafael Behr points out this week, “the terrain of battle [provided by the WF] is so small – a scrap of European court jurisdiction under a mound of procedural safeguards in Northern Ireland”. Creating a massive political crisis from such unpromising materials is hardly likely to impress bemused and, at least outside Northern Ireland, largely indifferent voters, and nor does it provide an especially heroic hill for even the most red-faced and plumply excitable of the Spartans to die on. The only Brexiter MP so far to suggest she might entertain doing so is Nadine Dorries (£) and it’s not clear that, even amongst those who in some cases could, not uncharitably, be called somewhat unhinged, hers is a voice that commands immediate respect.

Is Brexitism dying?

As a result of all this, it's tempting to argue, as Behr does, that this moment reveals that “Brexitism is dying and Johnsonism may be dead”, which I suppose is another way of saying the Brexit ‘fever has broken’. It is certainly the case that the Brexitists have been wrong-footed and are floundering. It’s also true that this is one of Johnson’s lowest moments, with his own failed Brexit deal exposed, along with the depravity of his naked opportunism. From that point of view, we might be seeing a significant shift in the ‘Brexitist versus Traditionalist’ civil war in Conservatism that I discussed in a recent post. But I think it is a little early to write the obituaries just yet.

First and foremost, there is still the matter of the DUP reaction, with reports that they are split on which way to go. That split undoubtedly reflects the fact that their decision isn’t so much about the terms of the WF as what advantage they may or may not see in continuing to have a pretext to collapse the power-sharing institutions. In this sense, whilst ostensibly taking time to get legal assessment of the deal, this is, as I said earlier, primarily a political calculation.

Sunak has strongly implied that the WF will go ahead, unchanged, even if the DUP continue to refuse to allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to sit. But, if so, it’s clear that Johnson and at least some of the ERG will take their cue from the DUP (£) to argue that what it now suits them to call the primary rationale for the WF has not been realised. As they wait, the ERG have also turned the matter over to its ludicrously named ‘Star Chamber’ for legal scrutiny.

One straw in the wind as to how the Ultras are thinking came with David Frost’s response to the WF (£). In general, it showed not a shred of insight into his own culpabilities and failures, but the fact that Frost has about as much self-awareness as a toilet seat is hardly news. More interestingly, the article contained neither a complete repudiation nor a complete welcome of the WF. Thus it recognized that there were some substantive improvements that were “worth having”, and implied that the agreement was likely to go ahead. But it also recognized that the “fundamental Protocol framework” remains in place, ascribing this, inevitably, to Sunak’s failure to maintain the threat of passing the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

In this way, Frost left open the possibility of a more full-throated rejection of the WF in the future. So in effect he is waiting to see which way the wind now blows: notably, he tweeted his article as being only “an initial comment” on the deal given the complexity of the documents. But, on the basis of what he has already said, it’s clear that whatever the detail of those documents, the WF is not, in his own terms, the wholesale re-writing, still less ditching, of the Protocol that he and other Brexiters want.

A similar line is being taken by Jacob Rees-Mogg, now moonlighting as a presenter on GB News, who appears to regard it as some dastardly EU trick that the letter of international treaties is binding. But, again, his comments about the continuing role of EU law in Northern Ireland show that, even without reading the small print, he already thinks the WF violates the Brexiters’ version of ‘sovereignty’. In short, as with Johnson’s predictably self-serving stance, this is all about buying time during which it’s possible that the initial momentum Sunak got for the WF may stall whilst that of a rebellion grows in advance of the promised vote.

For what it’s worth, my sense is that as this week has progressed the opposition to the WF has slightly hardened, with an increasing cohesiveness in the attack lines the Ultras are running and, though that might simply reflect the way the deal was revealed, the more time that passes the more opposition to it will consolidate. Certainly if the DUP were to reject the deal it would do so.

The other aspect of the fate of Brexitism is the question, assuming the WF does go ahead, of how ruthlessly or consistently Sunak will then follow-through. In particular, is he really willing to heap further coals on the ERG’s head by scrapping, or at least slowing the time frames of, the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL)? If so, that would be a fresh blow for the Ultras (though it might also galvanize them to re-group). If not, then, apart from being yet another Brexit hit to business (£), the rapprochement with the EU that the WF presages will falter and, conversely, Brexitism will be given a new lease of life.

What does it mean for remainers/re-joiners?

So much for the Brexiters. What about remainers and re-joiners? In general terms, they should welcome the WF as, at least potentially, a return to some kind of realism and pragmatism. If nothing else, if the outcome is to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly to operation, and to help stability there, then that is something everyone should be pleased about. Many of us, not just in Northern Ireland, though of course especially there, have dark memories of the decades before the peace process and the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.

Beyond that, there’s a degree of relief in an improved tone in UK-EU relations after all these years of hostility, a hostility that was totally unnecessary even given Brexit. Moreover, to the extent that it may create something like a scenario of ‘rapprochement’, that would be, as I’ve argued before, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the possibility of joining the single market, a customs union, and even the EU itself.

Against that, it would be unhelpful to remainers, and simply untrue in itself, if either the WF or the improved relations that could flow from it were widely regarded by the public as having ‘got Brexit done’ or having done anything to redeem the damage of Brexit other than to have sanded some of its very roughest edges. It just undoes some of the worst, most egregious and most unnecessary harm of Brexit, whilst serving as a reminder of the utter incompetence of the way it was done. The core, irreducible damage of Brexit continues.

However, it’s important not to be trapped into a version of the Leninist maxim that ‘it has to get worse before it can get better’ or, to put that differently, it may be that it had got as bad as it is going to and we are now on an upward curve. In particular, it is highly notable that within a few hours of the WF announcement numerous people, including the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, were beginning to ask the question that if this was indeed a good deal for Northern Ireland then what about the rest of the UK? It is a question that has gained salience during the week with Sunak’s repeated argument that being in both the EU single market for goods and the UK single market is a huge advantage.

We’ve been here before. In the early days of the NIP Michael Gove repeatedly stressed that Northern Ireland had “the best of both worlds” for exactly that reason. But that was before it was actually implemented and the idea got lost as the NIP became mired in rows. Now it has returned, and with new force given that there is so much evidence of how economically damaging leaving the single market has been. And if it is accepted that the single market for goods is advantageous, then why not services?

The same reasoning applies to non-economic issues. If Horizon, why not Erasmus? If science and education, why not climate and environment? If energy security, then why not security in all its aspects? If sanctions, then why not foreign and defence policy? If ‘small boats’, then why not replicate Dublin 3 regulations? Ultimately, once the basic premise of co-operation, as outlined in the WF, is established then all of these questions become re-opened. In this way, the UK might discover through painful experiment the principles of co-operation that are ingrained into, and institutionalised by, the EU. Of course, this is exactly the path that the Brexiters fear the WF leads to: which is all the more reason for remainers and re-joiners to support it.

But there is also a conundrum in doing so. It could be that Sunak reaps political rewards for the WF, either directly, for the agreement itself, or, more likely, indirectly, in the sense of having shown he can ‘solve problems’ and control his own party. If that yields improved opinion poll ratings for the Tories, then it will do much to keep the Brexit Ultras under control, which should cement his more cooperative approach to the EU. However, it is all but impossible to conceive that his approach would go beyond friendly cooperation to, say, joining the single market, still less the EU. So if, along with other things (e.g. reduced inflation), the WF contributed to him to winning the next election, unlikely as that currently seems, then ‘friendly co-operation’ might become the end-state for the medium-term. There could be worse things than that, of course, but there could be much better.

So what about Labour?

It's here that Labour policy becomes crucial. If the WF is significant in potentially re-setting UK-EU relations, it is also significant in its potential to recalibrate the domestic politics of Brexit. For what Sunak has done with the WF is, in effect, to adopt the entirety of Labour’s current position as government policy, which is why Labour had no choice but to support it (and, anyway, were right to do so). Labour, as Keir Starmer and David Lammy have made clear, propose improving the tone of relations, resolving the NIP row, extending co-operation, and making full use of the possibilities of the TCA for a closer trading and security relationship. All that is now, explicitly, Sunak’s policy.

Assuming that policy holds, it is both a challenge and an opportunity for Labour. A challenge because it deprives them of a distinctive policy and makes their offer to erstwhile remainers look even more puny. An opportunity because it creates a political space, and arguably a political necessity, to be more ambitious. That space was opening anyway, because of public disaffection with Brexit, but the WF makes it larger. It will be harder for Sunak to ridicule that for being too soft on Brexit when it is not only the logic of his own position but also the same critique as the Brexiters make of him.

Of course it’s possible, as Rafael Behr’s column argues, that Starmer will now simply park Brexit as a ‘non-partisan’ issue. But there’s likely to be considerable pressure from within his own party to do more than that.  It’s of note that within hours of the WF being announced the senior Labour MP Chris Bryant raised the point that if Northern Ireland benefitted from the EU single market then the same should be true for the rest of the UK.

Arguably Starmer has prematurely boxed himself into a corner by setting red lines against the single market or a customs union, but there is some wriggle-room since he has generally couched things in terms of there being ‘no political case’ for the single market. It would be just about possible to use that as cover to say that the politics subsequently changed, and apart from its electoral appeal to most Labour voters that would burnish Starmer’s increasingly positive relationship with business. It’s not likely, but it’s more likely than it was because of the WF, and may become still more so before we get to the next general election.

A moment of hope?

So, after all this, has Britain’s Brexit fever broken? It’s a little too early to be sure – and even if it has, further relapses are to be expected - but I think it is possible. It would have been almost unthinkable before now that the UK Prime Minister and the European Commission President would have given the kind of joint press conference that we saw this week, either in substance or in tone.

It would have been still more unthinkable that it could have happened without an immediate, overwhelming outpouring of angry opposition from Tory Brexiters and the Brexit media. That may still come, but so far it has mostly had a strangely weary and resigned quality. But perhaps a better sign of whether the fever has broken will be if, indeed, Labour develop a more ambitious policy, since this would show that the fear that Brexit is too hot to touch was subsiding.

If there has been a shift, it isn’t simply because of the Windsor Framework, or even just because of Sunak’s consensual approach. It is a result of many things – Ukraine and the Truss mini-budget fiasco, as I mentioned earlier, but also sheer exhaustion and boredom. More fundamentally, it reflects the growing realization, over many months now, of just what a disaster Brexit has been. Even Brexiters now offer only the most lacklustre of defences for their project and, crucially, defences are all they are. The grand national liberation they once proclaimed has turned to ashes.

So although it is a moment for a modest amount of hope, it is a hope which is the bitter fruit of failure. After all, if the Brexit fever has broken, it was the fever of a self-injected malady. And if a corner has been turned, it is only to the long road of re-building from those ashes, the legacy the Brexiters bequeathed, and their monument too.

Enter Sunak, the fifth Brexit Prime Minister

So the brief interruption to his seemingly permanent holidays from the MP’s job he is paid for was all for nothing in the end, as Boris Johnson’s bid to return to the leadership failed. It was yet another testimony to his egotism and entitlement and even in making it added to the long list of damage he has done to the country, this time by making Britain’s political crisis an even greater source of international disrepute than it would otherwise have been. “A country in free fall” as an Austrian paper put it last Sunday.

Little will Johnson care about that, any more than do the media organizations that breathlessly hyped his every word and movement last weekend as if he were the Prince returning from over the water to free his people, rather than a disgraced grifter coming back from the seaside to stick his snout into the trough again. He may yet be back for another go, but his first complacent and then demeaning conduct this time may have made that less likely. If so, it is one blessing. Meanwhile, Liz Truss stomped off with a defiant final speech, suggesting she still doesn’t even begin to understand why it all went so wrong, so quickly, for her.

Had Johnson succeeded, the prospects of immediate political crisis and further economic damage would have been much greater than they are: tellingly, sterling rose and gilt yields (i.e. the cost of government borrowing) fell sharply on the news that Johnson had decided not to enter the contest. That continued as Rishi Sunak began to form his cabinet. He is also likely to enjoy at least as brief period of respite from internal attacks from his MPs, and perhaps a bounce in the opinion polls, although there is very little sign of that yet.

However, as the fifth Prime Minister since the Brexit referendum (and the third in the last seven weeks) takes office, continuing political crisis is assured for the reasons I discussed in last week’s post and several others over the summer. It may not quite be “inevitable that Sunak will be politically ripped apart by the same contradictions that plagued his predecessors”, as Nick Tyrone puts it in his latest Week in Brexitland newsletter, but it’s certainly highly likely, and what is inevitable is that Brexit will play a central role in his administration and its ultimate fate.

Sunak, Brexitism and Brexit

Sunak may well be more ‘realistic’ and more ‘competent’ than either Johnson or Truss, and, low as the bar is, he can hardly fail to be more ethical than the former or less maladroit than the latter. He may also, as Timothy Garton Ash and many others believe, be less prone to ‘Brexitism’ than either of them, with one index of that being his good relations with the civil service (£), in sharp contrast to his predecessors and most of the Brexit Ultras. Nor does he seem especially interested in fighting the Brexitist anti-woke, culture war, although some silly digs during his first PMQs about ‘North London’ and Labour’s supposed attempts to reverse the Brexit referendum suggested he’s not completely immune to it. He also seems fairly free of the vapid boosterism of the two previous incumbents and of their ‘magical thinking’ that true Brexit belief can trump reality. And he made an early, and apparently well-received, phone call to Ursula von der Leyen.

However, ultimately he won’t be exempt from the charge of Brexitism unless he is honest about the damage of Brexit itself, as suggested in a robust intervention this week from long-time Tory donor Guy Hands, and addresses how to reduce or even reverse it. As the leading businessman Juergen Maier also argued this week, that means seeking to rejoin the single market and a customs union. The economic logic is impeccable, especially for a country in desperate need of growth. The costs of being outside are high whilst the benefits are small, if not non-existent. On the customs union, in particular, trade expert Sam Lowe makes it clear that the UK’s ‘independent trade policy’ has faltered having hardly begun. And Maier’s proposal would also effectively solve the Northern Ireland Protocol issue.

The politics are an entirely different matter though. As Maier points out, his proposal involves a “brave shift” to face down the ERG in the way that no Tory leader since, to an extent, John Major has done. It’s true that if Sunak were going to do that then now is the time, since the Tories can hardly depose yet another leader, and he could threaten them with a General Election. But I suspect, and I expect Sunak does too, that there are sufficient ‘Spartans’ who are simply beyond caring about the consequences, and would prefer to crash the government and the Tory Party than accept a reversion to ‘soft Brexit’ (or even some milder easements of Brexit’s effects).

No doubt there will continue to be calls to do so, and Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has been making them for some time now, but it’s all but unthinkable that Sunak will heed them. Even so, in the past, unlike most Brexiters, Sunak has actually admitted to some of the damage to trade. And although in his first ‘address to the nation’ he briefly mentioned ‘embracing the opportunities of Brexit’ he said no more. Arguably, he could hardly have said less. Perhaps the very most that can be expected is that he might stop adding to the damage, for example through pointless and costly regulatory divergence.

The post-Brexit political constraints on Sunak

Of course if Sunak went even that far it would add to the roster of political opposition he faces within his own party. Even before his victory had been announced there were signs of it, with Christopher ‘upskirt’ Chope, conceivably the most odious MP not just of this Parliament but those of many decades, warning that he faced an “ungovernable party”. The reason, at least in the first instance, is that, like rainmakers forecasting the weather, MPs such as Chope will make it so. Indeed there is a sense that, quite apart from any disputes about personality, policy or ideology, there are some Tory MPs now addicted to the drama and chaos of rebellion, plots and coups. Within that, some, most obviously the ludicrous Mark Francois, appear to revel in the pompous self-importance that such drama allows, like a latter-day Captain Mainwaring but with less good scriptwriters.

However, the opposition Sunak will face goes much deeper than that, and the reasons all root back to Brexit. One is the fragile nature of the electoral coalition that delivered Johnson the 2019 ‘get Brexit done’ General Election majority which Sunak inherits, a fragility which feeds through into a highly factionalised body of Tory MPs. Now, those voters, and especially the fabled Red Wall voters, are leaching away from the Conservatives whilst the factions are more entrenched than ever. It is not the case that, just because Johnson assembled this coalition, he and only he could manage the factions it gave rise to. In fact, despite being, on paper, a comfortable majority, right from the outset of the 2019 parliament Johnson faced repeated actual or threatened rebellions, resulting in numerous policy U-turns. So Sunak will have a majority which is large, but is inherently unstable, with many factions able to mobilise the 40-odd votes needed to defeat any particular piece of legislation.

That instability will be all the greater for Sunak because the consequence of Truss’s disastrous mini-budget is to make significant public spending cuts his first priority, whereas part of Johnson’s 2019 pitch was to airily banish ‘austerity’ to the past. It remains to be seen whether the Red Wall MPs, especially, will condone its return. Equally, others will oppose any tax rises he may introduce. It’s even possible Sunak’s government may fall early on, if it cannot pass its finance measures, but that’s the one thing that may force rebel MPs to approve them: the potential rebels on fiscal policy, unlike ‘the Spartans’ on anything Brexit-related, are not immune to reason.

The other reason he will face opposition goes deeper still, and derives from the incoherent and now fissured support for Brexit itself. In particular, although Sunak was himself a Brexiter in 2016, albeit not a very high-profile one, for many of those who were high-profile he is the ‘wrong sort’ of Brexiter. Indeed that is the inevitable corollary of him being less ‘Brexitist’ than the last two Prime Ministers. Thus, already, his premiership, and the demise of Truss, are being represented by Nigel Farage and others on the populist right as being a victory for the ‘globalist Establishment’ and a ‘remainer coup’. Likewise, he is seen as having been too ‘conciliatory’ to the EU when he was Chancellor, especially as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol. Notably, his candidature was not endorsed by the ERG which, despite its pledge of loyalty to whoever became the leader, looks set to pounce on any deviation from what it takes to be Brexit orthodoxy. Yet at the same time as being denounced as an Establishment ‘globalist’, and despite being very much on the free market, deregulatory right, in the bizarre world of Brexiter politics Sunak is regarded as a ‘socialist’.

Everything about this is difficult to decode, since it comes from supporters of Johnson, who was neither a deeply committed Brexiter nor a small-stater, as well as from supporters of Truss and the Patrick Minford-IEA libertarians, from whom Sunak is not very ideological distant except to the extent that he didn’t endorse their ‘anti-Establishment’ idea that borrowing money to cut taxes would promote growth. Indeed he is likely to be closer to Truss’s version of Brexit with respect to being relaxed about immigration levels than to that of Suella Braverman, and this cuts directly across the Farage line that Truss et al were anti-Establishment insurgents and yet not genuine Brexiters on immigration in the way Braverman is. It’s yet another example of the total incoherence of the Brexit project.

Sunak and deregulation

That incoherence also wrongfoots some critics of Brexit, so that the fact that the Trussonomics libertarians despise Sunak and vice versa rather confounds those who, when he was Chancellor, insisted that he was in the vanguard of an extreme libertarian plan whereby Brexit would pave the way to the creation of ‘Charter Cities’ across the UK. Although that idea was always nonsense, it remains the case that Sunak is ideologically committed to deregulation, and that means that it would be wrong to assume that that part of Truss’s post-Brexit agenda has disappeared. In fact, she never even got round to unveiling the ‘supply-side reforms’ that were to be the counterpart of the tax cuts as part of the plan for growth. Sunak may very well do so, even though the tax-cutting part of the plan is dead, as is the idea of ripping up employment rights, which even Truss realised was too extreme (£).

However, as I’ve written about in detail before, those deregulatory reforms are also likely to encounter significant opposition from some groups of Tory MPs, especially as regards planning laws, whilst the ‘bonfire of EU regulations’ to be created by the EU Retained Law Bill will run into major practical problems and has already encountered opposition from business and other lobby groups. This legislation was initially sponsored by Jacob Rees-Mogg until his resignation – which itself provided another instance of his trademark pretentiousness, dated as it was ‘St Crispin’s Day’. It was a suitable end to a Ministerial career which he would never have had but for Brexit, and should never have had – not because of his Brexit views but because his Pooterish didacticism marked him out as the worst kind of middle-management drone, more concerned with exerting petty authority than providing effective leadership.

The Bill continued its passage this week, with Rees-Mogg now on the backbenches spitefully denouncing as anti-Brexit those Tories raising concerns about it. Yet already it is reported that Sunak is considering slowing or even abandoning this legislation, and also that it runs counter to what he promised the ERG. So this a very possible flashpoint for a Brexit-related rebellion.

Another Brexit fissure was re-opened by Sunak’s controversial re-appointment of the politically and morally grotesque Suella Braverman to the Home Office, itself apparently the price of getting her endorsement, as a high-profile ERG Brexiter, of his candidature rather than Johnson’s. This appointment can be seen as his ‘first mistake’ but is really just the first consequence of the necessity for Tory leaders to try to placate the unplacatable ERG. In turn, it will have the consequence either that relaxation of immigration controls to promote growth is off the agenda, or that there’s going to be a reprise of the almighty Truss-Braverman row about it (£) and a wider row with other anti-immigration Brexiters. Another possible flashpoint.

It’s not even clear whether the Sunak government will be able to afford the tax breaks (£) to make meaningful the plans for Investment Zones, assuming he continues with that proposal from the Truss-Kwarteng period. What is clear, from an answer he gave Green MP Caroline Lucas at PMQs on Wednesday, is that he will not continue Truss’s attempt to revive fracking, which had already prompted bitter division amongst Tory MPs.

At all events, despite being elected unopposed by a party under ‘existential threat’ if its dysfunctionality continues, Sunak’s political position is not strong. Indeed, amongst party members, who rejected him as leader during the summer leadership contest, and would prefer to still be led by Boris Johnson, it is decidedly weak. So too is it weak in the country generally, presented with yet another mid-term change of Prime Minister without a general election, raising questions about the legitimacy of his mandate. There may be little they can do, at least directly, but the various factions amongst the MPs certainly can, and there must be every chance that a vengeful Johnson will take every chance to stir the pot. So whether on spending cuts, deregulatory reforms, EU retained law or immigration he may well face significant opposition.

Northern Ireland Protocol: the first crisis for Sunak?

However, it could be the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) which creates the first real crisis for his premiership. The dynamics of the NIP situation have actually changed remarkably little since I wrote about them in detail in July, when Johnson was still Prime Minister and the NIP Bill was starting its passage through parliament, which is continuing now. If things are different to how they were then, one reason is just because the passage of time has brought the non-functioning of the Northern Ireland power-sharing institutions to a point of urgency, with fresh Assembly elections now in prospect as of today.

The situation has also changed as regards negotiations with the EU because Truss proved to take a relatively conciliatory approach, and seemed to have managed to get the two ERG hardliners she appointed as NI Secretary and Minister – Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker – on board with that approach. We will never know how that would have developed had she continued in office, and it remains to be seen what happens under Sunak. It is certainly important that he has kept Heaton-Harris and Baker in their posts, but what that importance is remains unclear, as it did under Truss. Does it betoken a refusal to make any compromises with the EU, as their hardliner credentials might imply? Or is it that those credentials are to be used to ‘sell’ a compromise deal to the Brexiters including, conceivably, the DUP?

For the fundamental question for Sunak, as it was for Johnson and Truss, persists: if he does any deal that the EU is remotely likely to accept, will the Brexiters also accept it? Despite Baker’s surprising and potentially game-changing recent apology over how the Brexit process as regards Ireland and Northern Ireland had been handled, last weekend he issued an uncompromising warning to Sunak that the ERG would not accept any role for EU law in Northern Ireland and would collapse the government rather than do so. Yet it seems inconceivable that the EU would, or even could, agree to such an arrangement.

So either there will be no deal, the NIP Bill will pass and be used, causing a crisis in relations with the EU, and with serious implications for relations with the US; or a deal will be done with the EU, the NIP Bill abandoned or its powers not used, and there will be a political crisis within the Tory Party. Moreover, both have economic consequences. A crisis with the EU could ultimately lead to trade sanctions or even a trade war. A fresh political crisis will indicate further instability which impacts on the price at which markets are willing to fund government debt. Plainly either will be damaging to Sunak’s core focus of restoring international credibility and financial stability.

The unfolding legacy of Brexit lies

The NIP situation is the most high-profile reminder that, along with any other problems the government and the country face, those of Brexit persist. Some of these are the now entrenched ones, like the higher costs of trade and disruption to holidays in the EU. Others, like the NIP, are issues still unresolved from the exit process, and reflect both the lies told during the referendum campaign and the dishonesty and incompetence of the agreement made by Boris Johnson and David Frost.

There are numerous examples of the latter sort. One, which has received remarkably little attention, can be seen to symbolise all of them: the UK’s continuing failure to impose post-Brexit import controls. I’ve written in detail before about why this matters, especially as regards animal and public health, primarily because the UK no longer has full access to all the relevant EU databases, but also due to lack of staff with the necessary skills, as highlighted by a recent report from the Public Accounts Committee. The consequences of that were revealed this week when, within a 24 hour period, 21 out of 22 lorries inspected coming in to Dover from the EU were found to be carrying illegal raw meat products.

The reason this example is symbolic is because, like the NIP, it shows the ongoing consequences of the lies and incompetence of the Brexiters since 2016. Repeatedly they denied that (hard) Brexit entailed borders. Repeatedly they declared versions of ‘if the EU want to erect borders, that’s up to them’, demonstrating a total failure to understand the consequences of what they were advocating, not just for Northern Ireland but for all borders with the EU. That in turn meant that preparations were not begun until far too late, and the chance to extend the Transition Period to give more time to prepare was rejected as ‘backsliding’ on Brexit. So here we are now, in 2022, with a whole swathe of persistent, unresolved, ongoing problems, ranging from fishing quotas, to agricultural subsidies, to participation in Horizon, to the introduction or otherwise of the UKCA mark, to, indeed, the introduction of full import controls.

It is important to emphasise this because, as time goes by, it becomes easy to treat Brexit as if it were a past event, at most something with consequences we must now live with. Or to see the NIP issue as the last hanging thread of the Brexit process. But that is not the situation at all. Rather, in all sorts of ways, we are still in the process of ‘doing’ Brexit even though, apart from, sometimes, Northern Ireland, that is no longer headline news. And, in that process, we are still uncovering the criminal irresponsibility of the ways the Brexiters lied.

It will be especially easy to forget this given that the immediate political focus of the Sunak government will be the economic crisis, with the full fiscal statement now scheduled for 17 November. That would be wrong because all these ongoing Brexit problems are also important. But it would be doubly wrong since Brexit is embedded at the centre of the economic crisis itself. Inflation is higher, the trade deficit is larger, the labour shortage is greater and growth is lower than they would have been but for Brexit. To the outside world it is so obvious. As leading French journalist Sylvie Kauffman, writing in the Financial Times (£), puts it “for many Europeans, the only surprise of the British political and economic mayhem of the last few weeks is the lack of debate about its real cause: no one involved seems to blame Brexit”.

TL;DR

For all that Sunak may be hailed as a ‘serious’ and ‘realistic’ Prime Minister, the fact that he cannot admit these obvious facts about Brexit without being destroyed by his own party means that he cannot seriously or realistically address the economic crisis. As I argued at length in last week’s post, the same goes for Starmer unless he does so. And for all that, as also discussed in that post, the ignominious collapse of Truss’s government may mark a turning point in the entire Brexit saga, the corner has not been turned by the arrival of Sunak. Nor will it be until the poison of Brexit lies has been drained from the body politic.