“As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave,” he wrote, lost in reverie. “The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours.”
When something is a success, people generally like to associate themselves with it. But this week was noticeable for how quiet the Daniel Hannans of the world were. They seem awfully keen to change the subject.
What we did not know at the time was that Hannan was not unusual. Some strange mania had overtaken the right. It had burrowed into their brain and started to turn them mad.
These dreamscapes were only marginally more fantastical than the material put out by the official campaign. Vote Leave promised “tariff-free trade with minimal bureaucracy”.
The Leave.EU campaign video from the time might as well be a sci-fi film. “You’ll benefit from better care provided by our NHS,” it said. False.
“Your weekly food shop will become cheaper.” False.
“Politicians both local and national will become more accountable.” False.
Even after the vote, as the nation stood in a state of shock, the proponents of Leave were still offering impossible promises. Boris Johnson took to The Daily Telegraph to insist everything would be fine. “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down,” he wrote.
Elsewhere the failure was not so much about imagination or consistency, but self-regard. “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” Michael Gove said. In fact, the EU had decisive leverage over the UK. If time ran out of the Article 50 exit process, Britain would fall out without a deal and into a regulatory black hole. The EU would be in the same position it was originally.
This dynamic defined the black comedy that came next, as the UK was battered around by a superior, better-prepared negotiating partner. Figures like Gove either did not understand this, or were not honest about it.
Friendship is a 21st century problem – but Bridget Jones can help us
Read More“We have to establish the ground rules,” he said. “The first crisis or argument is going to be over the question of sequencing.” He caved on the first day of talks, 19 June 2017.
“There will be no border down the Irish Sea,” Johnson promised on 13 August 2020. Six months later he insisted that “there will be no checks on goods going from GB to NI, or NI to GB”.
It was left to Rishi Sunak to fix the deal when he was prime minister. And even then, as others tried to patch up his own catastrophically flawed work, Johnson voted against it.
No wonder they don’t like to talk about it any more. Because if we do talk about it, we start to recognise the gulf between their words and reality. If the world made the slightest bit of sense, we’d never take anything else they say seriously again.
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