By any measure, it has been a bad week for hard Brexiters and Theresa May’s government. Problem is, the two have become all but synonymous. Thursday’s shock byelection result in Richmond Park showed that the pro-Europe convictions of nearly half the country’s voters cannot wisely be ignored. Conservative supporters were alienated by May’s “pandering” to hardline party zealots and Ukip fellow travellers, the victorious Liberal Democrats claimed. “One of the things that concerns a great deal of people in this constituency is… the Conservative government seems to be shifting very rapidly towards the right,” said Sarah Olney, the unashamedly Europhile winning candidate.
There is a widely shared perception that May, far from reuniting the country in the wake of the EU referendum, as she promised, is cementing and entrenching divisions. It would be wrong to see in the byelection outcome definitive proof that the national mood has radically shifted in the past six months. Most Richmond voters favoured Remain in June. But the scale of Tory defections suggests deep unhappiness with May’s subsequent, lopsided approach. It is as though she and her ministers have wholly dismissed the views of the 48% who rejected Brexit, just as they arrogantly rejected last month’s impartial, legally sound high court judgment that parliament must be consulted prior to the triggering of article 50.
May’s political positioning seems designed, first and foremost, to keep the parliamentary Tory party together, not the country. Even so, her slim majority is now further reduced. A second consideration, which also has nothing to do with the national interest, is to woo traditionally Labour voters who favoured Leave. This is not leadership. It is partisan opportunism. Yet worse still, from May’s point of view, it is not working. Every day brings more evidence that a hard Brexit is not supported by most voters – Leave and Remain – and that it would be unworkable and massively damaging.
Ministers may belatedly be coming to understand this latter point. The confusion within government ranks is palpable. David Davis, Brexit tsar, has moved from initially implying that Britain will willingly quit the single market to admitting, last week, that it may pay to stay in it – a stunning reversal. Having refused to offer up-front guarantees on the rights of EU citizens living in Britain, May is now reportedly affronted that her proposal to do exactly that, in exchange for similar guarantees for Britons living in the EU, was privately rejected as premature by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor.
Ministers are likewise all over the place on freedom of movement, which, with single market access, is the key Brexit negotiating issue. Using sophistry, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, who cynically misled voters by dangling the spectre of millions of Turks descending on Britain, now says he “personally” believes all immigrants should be welcome – and champions Turkey’s EU membership. This volte-face was described by one European diplomat as typical of the government’s “shambolic” diplomacy. Johnson is a very unfunny disgrace. He plainly has no idea what he is doing or what he believes from one day to the next.
All this flailing and flip-flopping is the direct result of an unyielding European stance. The past few days have seen a significant hardening of opinion in reaction to the hard Tory Brexiters’ chaotic and high-handed behaviour. There is also incredulity, mixed with dismay, that May and her allies seem incapable of grasping that when the EU leaders, singly and collectively, say there can and will be no compromise on the union’s four founding principles – freedom of movement of goods, services, people and capital – they really mean it. Even Donald Tusk, the normally unflappable, anglophile president of the European council, lost his cool last week when Tory MPs accused Brussels of obstruction.
Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and other backbench Little Englanders really should get out more. There is no option to have one’s cake and eat it, as a Brexit departmental aide’s notes optimistically suggested. When Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, says the UK’s Brexit demands are “intellectually impossible and politically unavailable”, he speak for all of Europe. When Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, Manfred Weber, chair of the largest centre-right group in the European parliament, and Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, all say there will be no fudging matters of principle and no face-saving transitional arrangement, either, they must be taken very seriously indeed.
From Europe’s perspective, these are the immoveable rocks on which the credibility of the hard Brexiters’ case is foundering. Yet, if May keeps blindly steering in her current direction, a super-hard Brexit pile-up – meaning a total, sudden, economically unstructured, financially calamitous and politically acrimonious divorce from the EU in 2018 – may become unavoidable. From a domestic perspective, May’s populist policy, unless swiftly rethought, will mean deepening national divisions, more revolts such as Richmond, more and worsening damage to investment, jobs and living standards, more of the vicious bullying and public name-calling of which the Daily Mail has become chief exemplar and more constitutional chaos.
This is a fraught moment for Britain and Europe as a whole. Tomorrow, the supreme court will start to hear the government’s appeal against the high court’s article 50 ruling. A repeat of last month’s crude attempts to intimidate the judges is already under way. Already, the legitimacy of their eventual ruling is being placed in doubt. Already, the mob is baying, denouncing the “enemies of the people”. In Italy and Austria, meanwhile, the forces of an ugly nativism are again on the march. Last week was a bad week for Brexiters. This week may be rocky for us all.
