Brexit quitters have only themselves to blame

The fantasies promoted by Leavers have left Theresa May’s government in chaos and a PM no one dares kill off.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to speak at the formal opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in April.

In normal circumstances a prime minister would not survive seven cabinet resignations in as many months. Theresa May has lost — among others — her foreign secretary, defence secretary, home secretary, de facto deputy prime minister and the Brexit secretary who was responsible for delivering the policy of greatest importance for the government and the country.

She has also squandered her parliamentary majority and the respect of her MPs by calling an unnecessary election. It is incredible yet she muddles on, “held hostage and chained to the radiators in No 10”, as one former cabinet minister puts it, by her party’s inability to decide who should replace her.

Even if 48 MPs do write to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, demanding a vote of confidence in their leader — the number required to trigger a ballot — Mrs May would almost certainly win it. The party is frozen between the extremes: the Brexiteers fear that her successor would be a more pro-European figure, while Remainers are equally anxious that a leadership contest might be won by a hardline Eurosceptic.

“They can wound her but they can’t kill her,” is the assessment of a well-connected Tory MP. Another insists that “only the lunatics want a leadership contest”.

Yet Mrs May’s authority is utterly destroyed at the very moment when she needs the credibility to assert herself in the negotiations with the EU. The declaration that “cabinet collective responsibility has been restored” by the Chequers summit just sounded ridiculous as Boris Johnson followed David Davis out of the government. The prime minister’s demand that Brussels “get serious” about the negotiations seemed desperate, when she will surely have to make further concessions to get a deal.

One senior figure in the City says the whole thing looks “farcical” and the behaviour of past and present cabinet ministers is “demented” as the Tory party yet again puts internal politics before the national interest. Other EU countries are astonished by the anarchy in the UK. “It’s very confusing for us,” says one diplomat based in London. “We thought you Brits were pragmatic and sensible but now everything has gone a little crazy.”

The chaotic scenes at Westminster highlighted the fundamental Brexit paradox: that this is a revolution being implemented by a deeply reactionary prime minister, a risky policy being driven through by one of the most cautious politicians ever to get to No 10.

A combination of video grabs of Prime Minister Theresa May giving a statement to the House of Commons on Brexit overnight.

In his resignation letter, Mr Davis said the government needed a Brexit secretary who was an “enthusiastic believer” in the policy, not “merely a reluctant conscript”, but Mrs May gives every impression that she is an uneasy convert to the Leave cause who is doing all she can to minimise its damage. This is an extraordinary position for a leader to be in at such a momentous time. It’s not just a conundrum within the Conservative leader herself: departure from the EU is an anti-establishment plan that must be delivered by bureaucrats in Whitehall and Brussels; a radical idea being pursued by a party whose very identity is based on the idea of conserving, not ripping things up.

The real Tory divide is between disruptors and managers. Mr Davis once told me that the leaders he admired were “outsiders who made it”. The son of a single mother, who was raised on a council estate, he has always seen himself as a natural rebel. “The Roman emperors always had somebody behind them whispering in their ear, ‘You’re only mortal’,” he said to explain why he had not been afraid to make trouble for successive leaders. Even though Boris Johnson went to Eton, he likes to stress that he was a scholarship boy and therefore somehow semi-detached from the fee-paying elitists.

Politically, the Brexiteers want to “stick it to the man” — in business, Westminster and Brussels. They rail against experts and bureaucracies because they are symbolic of the establishment they want to smash up. For them, short-term pain is a price worth paying for long-term gain. Although Mrs May wants a “smooth” departure from the EU, as she put it in her letter to Mr Davis, the Brexiteers would be quite happy with a spiky severance. After years in which technocratic pragmatism has dominated at Westminster, theirs is an ideological populism. As David Cameron once said of Michael Gove: “He is basically a bit of a Maoist. He believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction.” There is a clash of mindset as well as of policy underlying the Tory split.

British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Council of the European Union on the first day of the European Council leaders' summit last month.

Already the betrayal myth is taking hold: anyone who questions how Brexit is panning out is condemned as an “enemy of the people” or a “mutineer”. In his resignation letter, Mr Johnson warned that the “dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt”. The truth is that the fantasies promoted by the Leave campaign are running up against reality. There is no £350 million a week for the NHS. It will not be possible to “take back control” without suffering economic consequences that could mean factory closures and job losses. On immigration, the cabinet Brexiteers are increasingly uneasy about the anti-foreigner rhetoric they deployed to win the referendum. Politicians can campaign in poetry but have to govern in prose and now the emotional slogans must be translated into the hard-headed clauses of legal texts. One senior MP says: “It’s back to 1066 And All That — the Remain establishment is right but revolting and the Brexiteers are wrong but romantic.”

The Leave campaign was a protest movement that suddenly found itself in power but disruptors are more comfortable in opposition. You could see the fear in the eyes of the Brexiteers on the morning after the referendum — they only intended to shake things up, they never really meant to win. But they did and with power comes responsibility. Mr Davis and Mr Johnson may complain that they were sidelined by Mrs May but they were given the chance to deliver Brexit and could produce no workable plan. Although they will try to portray themselves as victims, they are in fact the vacuous villains who failed to keep their promises.

This week it looks more likely than ever that the eventual result of all the political shenanigans will be deadlock between parliament and the executive over Europe. The only solution to that would be for MPs to throw the question back to the voters in a new referendum on the terms of the final deal. How ironic that the resignations of Mr Johnson and Mr Davis could have increased the chances of Brexit being overturned.

THE TIMES