MPs trash their office and promises with another Brexit delay

Only someone as clever as Oliver Letwin, pictured in the House of Commons yesterday, could do something so stupid. Picture: AFP

Exactly 185 years ago last week, in 1834, a great fire burnt down the House of Commons. Apparently, onlookers cheered at the sight (and not because they were aesthetic critics of the perpendicular gothic). If such a conflagration were to occur today, a similar response should be expected.

For on Saturday (Sunday AEDT), after more than three years of obfuscation, prevarication and wilful obstructionism — principally by a Labour Party that swore over and again that it would honour the result of the 2016 referendum — a meaningful parliamentary vote on a Brexit deal agreed between the UK government and the EU was, again, denied. Yet the main facilitator of this latest prevarication, with his motion to delay approval of that deal in such a way as to force the Prime Minister to ask the EU for yet another extension of our membership, was someone re-elected as a Conservative MP in 2017, Oliver Letwin.

David Cameron’s unworldly former problem solver-in-chief is widely regarded as the brainiest member of the house, a former academic philosopher, himself the only child of two professors. Yet only someone as clever as Letwin could do something so stupid. Unlike all the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party MPs who piled in behind his motion, which was ostensibly to stop a no-deal Brexit in possible circumstances he did not elaborate upon, he thinks the Prime Minister’s deal is terrific.

That’s right: he had earlier told the Commons that its text “looks admirable and I shall be supporting it, and indeed voting for the implementation of it in legislation all the way to completion”. I’d be astounded if anyone who accompanied him in the “aye” lobby, on the first Saturday sitting of the house since it debated the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, was of the same intention.

No, the MPs I could see pumping their fists in delight on the opposition benches when the tellers announced the result of the vote were those who had vehemently expressed the view that Boris Johnson’s deal was terrible in every possible respect, and who see the extension of our membership — for a third time — as the best chance of somehow engineering a second referendum to overturn the result of the first one. Not only are they deluded if they believe this would lead to anything other than such national bitterness and division as to make the past three years or so appear blissfully serene: it would only further increase public contempt for the Westminster system — for them as politicians, that is.

Perhaps the best example of such an MP, given her contribution in yesterday’s debate, is Anna Soubry, the former Conservative MP who now represents something called Change UK (the much hyped new anti-Brexit political party that failed to win a single seat in the June elections to the European parliament).

She told MPs that the 2016 referendum was nothing more than a “snapshot on a single day, a photograph distorted by false images”. Soubry said she had voted (along with 90 per cent of MPs) to hold an in-or-out referendum “only because I thought we would win”. She was one of another overwhelming majority of MPs — 498 to 114 — who in 2017 voted to invoke the EU secession article 50.

As former prime minister Theresa May observed in yesterday’s debate, those who had voted this way in parliament, and all those MPs — that is, more than 80 per cent of them — who had been re-elected in 2017 on manifestos promising to honour the referendum result, but who “didn’t mean what they said”, were guilty of “a most egregious con trick on the British people”.

We can include in May’s list of political con artists another former Tory prime minister, John Major. Not only has Major been in the forefront of campaigning to set aside the referendum result, he at the weekend argued the original result was made less legitimate “because there are 2 million people who voted in that referendum who sadly are no longer with us”. Creepy. That “sadly” has all the sincerity of a funeral director lamenting a sudden outbreak of winter flu at his biggest neighbourhood retirement home.

The figures simply don’t bear out the claim that there has been a marked swing in the electorate’s mood on the matter that parliament, scandalously, has still not resolved. Last week, the firm ComRes , commissioned by news broadcaster ITN, released the results of far and away the biggest opinion poll on Brexit since the 2016 referendum.

The survey of 26,000 adults (between 500 and 1000 is the standard size of opinion polls) showed 50 per cent in favour of Brexit, versus 42 per cent for remain. Asked whether the result of the 2016 referendum should be honoured or whether a second plebiscite should be organised, excluding “don’t knows” the figure was 62 per cent in favour of sticking with the initial verdict, and 38 per cent in favour of a second referendum (the so-called people’s vote, presumably to contrast with the vote of the undead in 2016).

Anyway, owing to the genius of Letwin, Boris Johnson is now obliged by law — the Benn bill, which he terms the “Surrender Act” — to request another “negotiating” extension of at least three months. But there is nothing left to negotiate, as European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and such leaders as France’s Emmanuel Macron and Ireland’s Leo Varadkar have all said in the past few days.

As Portugal’s former secretary for European affairs Bruno Macaes tweeted in aftermath of the vote in Westminster: “I suspect the EU which broke the Remain heart last week … will now proceed to crush it.”

Let’s hope he’s right. That would save parliament still more dreadful self-harm.

The Sunday Times