Theresa May's demise

Almost within minutes of launching her ‘bold new offer to MPs’, in the form of the revised Withdrawal Agreement Bill, last Tuesday it was clear that it had failed and that Theresa May was finished. The only question was when, and now we know the answer. She will resign as Party leader on 7 June.

It was a fitting end in that, far from being bold or new, it was yet another tactical gambit to survive of the sort that has characterised her premiership. She wanted, yet again, to buy a little more time, but there was no more time on sale. Again typically, its proposals were convoluted but, on decoding, amounted to little of substance. Worse, what substance there was alienated those on all sides of the debate.

It was also revealing, in that her statement that she had not realised that Brexit would be as hard as it has proved to be goes to the heart of her failure. There’s really no excuse for this. There were countless warnings of the complexity involved and it is inconceivable that her civil servants did not brief her on this from the beginning. It is clear that Sir Ivan Rogers did just that, and was pressured into resignation for his pains.

Insofar as it’s possible to make sense of this naivety, it seems May thought at the outset that Brexit would be like the negotiations she had had with EU whilst Home Secretary. Then, her approach had been to opt out of everything and then opt back in selectively. That could work in the limited – and, within her own party, relatively uncontentious - area of security and policing cooperation, an area, moreover, where the UK has the advantage of significant capabilities, and in the context of being an ongoing member. As a blueprint for Brexit it was woefully inadequate.

May’s core mistake

Her worst mistake – worse, even, than the ill-fated decision to call an election in 2017, and certainly less forgivable – pre-figured in her 2016 conference speech was to line up with the hard Brexiters to insist in the Lancaster House speech that Brexit meant no single market, no customs union and no ECJ in any form. From that decision – taken in consultation with no one except her closest advisers at the time, not even the Cabinet – almost everything that has happened since has flowed.

In particular, it meant, first, that the bitter divisions of the referendum have intensified to the point of a cultural civil war, the manifestations of which (‘Enemies of the People’, ‘Crush the Saboteurs’ etc.) she never repudiated and often stoked. She made no attempt to create a consensual approach to Brexit. For sure, that would have been incredibly difficult, and might not have succeeded. But she did not even try. It was an epic failure of political leadership at the time when the country most needed it.

Secondly, it meant that she was doomed to be accused of betrayal. For she failed to realise that no matter how much red meat the Brexit Ultras were given it would never be enough. They would always want more. Moreover, they would never accept that – as she eventually found out – Brexit wasn’t as easy as they had claimed. It would, at best, be a long, complex process entailing multiple compromises.

The attempt to turn lies into policy

As soon as she began to even slightly acknowledge that – with the Chequers Proposal in July 2018 – they turned on her and ever since then her job has been in peril. In trying to operationalise all the lies they had told, she gave the lie to them. For it is crucial to understand that what became May’s deal was not a ‘compromise’ between hard and soft Brexit. It was (the first step towards) what hard Brexit looks like when put into practice. The Ultras haven’t been asked to compromise but to accept the practical realities of what hard Brexit means.  But they have refused to do that and, instead, have doubled down on the lies and insisted that she betrayed them, and that her failure was a lack of true belief.

The latter accusation has a kernel of truth. It is indeed remarkable that for all her determination to deliver hard Brexit May has never evinced any enthusiasm for it, except to the extent that it will end freedom of movement. Notably, she has always refused to say whether, were there to be another referendum, she would vote leave. The implication is that she would not. That is truly peculiar: a Prime Minister enacting a complete resetting of national economic and foreign policy apparently believing that doing so is harmful. But that certainly does not mean that had she been a true believer the practical realities of delivering hard Brexit would have disappeared. On the contrary, precisely the same realities await her successor.

That is going to matter hugely in the coming weeks as the contenders to replace her will be making exactly the pitch that, armed with true commitment to the cause, all obstacles to the sunny uplands will disappear. In particular, the pretence will be that the Irish border backstop can be entirely removed, or substantially truncated, in the Withdrawal Agreement. As Rafael Behr noted in a recent article, “it is remarkable that the whole period of government striving to extricate the UK from the EU has left so little imprint on public debate about what Brexit involves”. Certainly, it has left no imprint at all on the Ultras.

The structural flaw in Brexit

So in the end she was left stranded, making a solitary last stand on a hill of her own making. As strident as the most extreme Brexiters about ‘the will of the people’, and implementing precisely what they had called for, she treated remainers with contempt and entrenched their opposition to the destruction that was being wrought on the country. But the Brexiters reviled her as ‘Theresa the Remainer’ even so.

To an extent her travails have been caused by her now well-known personal flaws: rigid, narrow, stubborn, unimaginative, tetchy, lacking all social skills and most intellectual ones. But fundamentally her failure arose from the structural flaw of Brexit. Doing it is claimed to be the will of the people. But it can only be done at economic and geo-political costs that range from high to horrendous, which the people will not accept. Brexiters claim it can be done without any costs and, even, with benefits and persuaded a majority to vote for it on that basis. May tried to prove that true, but it was a lie. Because it was a lie, it couldn’t be delivered.

Her successor will have exactly the same choice: face up to the lie, or face failure. To be elected leader by the Tory Party it will be impossible to do the former. So the consequence will be the latter. The only question is whether that failure will mean abandoning Brexit to avoid its costs, and facing the populist accusation of betrayal. Or agreeing the kind of deal that May came up with in order to somewhat mitigate the worst costs of Brexit, and facing the populist accusation of betrayal. Or proceeding with no-deal Brexit with all its horrendous costs, and facing the populist accusation of betrayal.

If she had tackled head on the structural lie at the heart of Brexit in her early weeks in office, when she was at her strongest and the meaning of Brexit was in flux, May had a chance – admittedly only a small chance - of avoiding that poisonous politics of betrayal. No doubt this was always the most likely consequence of the 2016 Referendum. Her legacy is to have made it inevitable.

Brexit redux

Beneath the headline drama of possible leadership challenges, and whether May’s deal will make it through the House of Commons, the Brexit Ultras are making a concerted fightback against what Dominic Raab calls the “dictated terms” of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA).

That diagnosis conceals the uncomfortable truth that those terms were indeed dictated – by the government’s own red lines about the single market and customs union which the Ultras enthusiastically support, and about the Northern Ireland border having to be free of any physical infrastructure, which the Ultras have never been able convincingly to rebut, and having no customs border in the Irish Sea, which they share. It also arises from the consequences of the timing of the Article 50 notice, which the Ultras absolutely insisted upon.

Return of the zombies

Thus the Ultras are now engaged in the pretence that a different outcome could derive from those same preconditions. One version is the familiar one of needing no exit deal and just reverting to trading on WTO terms ‘as we do with the rest of the world’. This zombie claim refuses to die, despite the fact that the UK does not trade with any country on WTO terms alone and that, in any case, there are numerous non-trade issues, such as aviation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the WTO.

The other version, at its most general, is that what is needed is a Canada +++ Free Trade Agreement (FTA). But that idea, apart from the limitations it has in its own terms, confuses the eventual agreement on future terms with the WA. An FTA cannot substitute for, and requires as a pre-condition, a WA.

The most peculiar twisting together of these two arguments came from David Davis, who wrote on the Conservative Home website this week that “if we need to leave with no deal and negotiate a free trade agreement during the transition period, then so be it”. But self-evidently the transition period only exists as part of the WA. If there’s no deal, there is no transition period. This is hardly some abstruse, technical detail and it is truly extraordinary that someone who was for two years the Brexit Secretary apparently doesn’t understand it.

That a lack of understanding abounds amongst the Ultras was shown by another very bizarre episode this week in which Owen Paterson (of ‘only a madman would leave the single market’ fame) bemoaned the fact that UK-Oklahoma trade deals were precluded by the WA. Perhaps he just meant commercial deals – in which case he is wrong because neither EU membership nor the WA prevent that. But if he meant an FTA it is nonsense since of course it is the USA, not individual states like Oklahoma, which makes FTAs.

Or perhaps, to be charitable, he was referring to the UK-USA FTA dream so beloved by Brexiters. If so, it is a rather unexciting dream: the estimated long-term benefit of such a deal is 0.1-0.3% GDP compared with a Brexit cost of 1-12% GDP. There’s never been a ‘trade’ justification for an independent trade policy, only the symbolic justification of its being ‘independent’.

Friction about facts

Meanwhile, the ERG produced two documents this week. One was a direct response to the WA in which the strangest in a litany of complaints is that it means the UK “will become a ‘rule-taker’ and will have surrendered our sovereignty”. But the central Brexiter criticism of EU membership is that we have already lost our sovereignty. If so, how can the WA surrender it? To lose sovereignty once might be regarded as misfortune; to do so twice looks like illogic.

Mixed in with this was the predictable moan about having to pay the financial settlement without getting anything back in terms of a trade deal. This, another of the lexicon of zombie Brexiter ‘facts’, again shows the failure to understand the difference between the WA and the future terms agreement.

Perhaps most tellingly, the document makes repeated references to the WA not honouring “the spirit of the 2016 Referendum”. This is significant as it acknowledges, by implication, that the letter of the vote could be met in numerous different ways – including the form it has taken – but arrogating to the ERG the high priest’s role of interpreting the votes of 17.4 Million as a mysterious ‘spirit’ which – amazingly – turns out to be their own interpretation of it.

The second ERG report, fronted by Peter Lilley (he of ‘a deal can be done in 10 minutes’ fame, a line he shamelessly repeated this week) and launched by a veritable ‘Manel’ of ageing Brexiters sought to ‘explode the myths’ of what leaving the Customs Union means. The document was entitled ‘Fact – NOT friction’ (even in the Brexit high command there appears to be a belief that writing something in capital letters makes it extra true) and contained still more confusions.

Throughout it, features of the Single Market and Customs Union are conflated, and whilst some of the points about customs checks are valid, a series of cherry-picked assertions and half-truths simplified and distorted the deeply technical issues involved. The overall problem, as trade expert David Henig identified, is that whilst identifying ways that customs costs and checked can be reduced, these do not amount to their entire removal, which is what is at stake as regards the Northern Ireland border in particular.

When some of these problems were put to Peter Lilley during a BBC interview he reacted with anger, accusing Chris Morris, the BBC’s Brexit fact-checker, of arguing for remain. But whilst there is plenty of room for opinion in the Brexit debate there are plenty of facts too, and dismissing them because they are inconvenient is the kind of confirmation bias which has made that debate so intractable. It is evident in the Ultras’ dismissal of the Treasury, and of the civil service in general, as remainer propagandists.

Of course this creates the difficulty that Brexiters like Bernard Jenkin promptly decried the fact-checker’s facts as being no more than remainer opinion. Our opinions are facts, your facts are just opinions is a logic doomed to infinite circularity. And whilst it proved very successful for the Brexit campaign, it is hopeless when it comes to delivering policy.

The only way out of this impasse is to go outside the very tiny coterie of economists and lawyers upon whom the Ultras rely for advice, mostly affiliated with the Institute for Economic Affairs. For within the wider world of economists, business people and trade experts there is broad agreement on the core facts of how trade and supply chains actually work. Ignoring that is a bit like basing policies on smoking only on the advice of the tobacco industry, on the basis that the medical profession has an anti-smoking bias.

What if the Brexiters were in charge?

How can we explain the rehearsal of all of these, to be charitable, misunderstandings? Given that there is nothing new in them, it’s unlikely that the Ultras really expect the government to change policy. More likely, they are setting the stage for years of culture wars to come in which they will disown the problems caused by Brexit by saying – rather as diehard Marxists say of actually existing communism - that all would have been well if only it been done ‘properly’.

Which leads to a thought experiment, for which a rather strong stomach is needed. Imagine for a moment that the Ultras had been given their head, and we play the whole of the last 2 years again, redux. Rees-Mogg would be PM and, say, Peter Bone the Chancellor, with Nadine Dorries as Foreign Secretary. For Brexit Secretary – why not? - David Davis could bring valuable energy and diligence to the role. And every other ministerial position would be filled with true believers – Bridgen, Rosindell, Jenkyns – truly a government of all the talents. The civil service would have had to be cleared out, of course, to give the dream team a clear run, but they could be replaced with, say, Patrick Minford, Melanie Phillips, John Longworth and Tim Martin. After all, they all appear convinced that the perfect Brexit would be easily delivered.

This is an extension of an idea in Robert Shrimsley’s recent FT column (£) where he considers the complaint that ‘it would all have been different if a leaver was in charge’ – this, of course, arising from the persistent refrain that May is a closet remainer. Shrimsley’s excoriating view is that we know how that would work out because we’ve seen in the last two years that the record of the Brexit hardliners is “an uninterrupted litany of cowardice, incompetence and blame shifting”. And, indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that a government of the sort I’ve described would be an unmitigated, catastrophic disaster.

And yet it is at least plausible that such a government would actually end up delivering something remarkably similar to the Withdrawal Agreement that May has come up with, and which they so despise. For, as I said at the beginning of this post, it is from the decisions that May took with the full approval of the Ultras that the present situation has arisen.

I don’t think that she was being dishonest in embracing their hard Brexit, always intending to backtrack somewhat. At the time of the Lancaster House speech, which they were so happy with, I am quite certain that she had believed it to be workable.

It was the ineluctable logic of the negotiations, of the Good Friday Agreement, and of the concerted business lobbying that spelt out the economic consequences of her approach that led her away from that position, whilst stubbornly retaining many of its core features. Whoever was in charge would have faced that same logic had they made the same initial decisions. Which is another way of saying that although Brexiters can shout down the fact-checkers, they can’t shout down the facts.