The Brexit Effect 2016-2026 edited by Anthony Seldon
“On no question of this period,” Hugo Young remarked in 1998 at the start of This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair,
“did more people in British public life change their minds than on Europe. There were conversions from one side to the other, and sometimes back again, each position often being held with a passion summoned from the realm of faith more than reason, where there are secret uncertainties that only the loudest voice can mask.”
In the EU Referendum of 2016, loud voices masked secret uncertainties. There was no debate: just the repetitive exchange of noisy and implausible assertions.
I recall thinking at the time it would be a good thing if we never again held a referendum.
The only prominent figure to admit to uncertainty about which side he would support was Boris Johnson, who wrote two columns for the Daily Telegraph, one making the case for Remain and the other the case for Leave.
There was an element of performance in this: no one has a greater sense of political theatre.
But there was also something genuine about it. Johnson recognised the plain fact that there are arguments both for and against Brexit, and knew that whichever way he jumped, he would appal people close to him, which he hates doing.
Voters who were themselves unsure what to do could feel an affinity with him.
Few contributors to the volume under review are willing to admit to having felt uncertain. Nigel Biggar is a rare exception: his thoughtful account of the reasons why he voted Remain, but now supports Leave, was reprinted in shortened form earlier this week in The Daily Telegraph.
Biggar was put off by the “frothing inarticulacy” of Remainers who were unable to explain to him why they were so dismayed by the referendum result.
He also observes that although some economic damage was caused by Brexit, the doomsday predictions of the Remain campaign were not fulfilled, and there have indeed been economic gains as well as losses.
But one gets few glimpses in this book of what Brexit actually felt like, or why voters and politicians behaved as they did. Self-justification generally precludes candour.
We are presented with a collection of essays by 43 contributors, a large proportion of whom are senior civil servants, the constituency with which Anthony Seldon, editor of the collection, has the closest links.
Senior civil servants are honourable men and women who acquire habits of professional discretion which render them incapable of the self-sabotaging honesty shown by the great political diarists: in modern times such figures as Chips Channon and Alan Clark, candid about their own vanities and blunders as well as the vanities and blunders of those around them.
Simon McDonald, the senior Foreign Office official from 2015-2020, declines to cast any light on his part in the downfall of two of the four Foreign Secretaries in that period, Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson.
McDonald testified that Raab was a bully and that Johnson had issued, and then failed to correct, misleading assurances about Chris Pincher.
In his essay in this volume, McDonald provides none of the detail of what actually happened, but is instead concerned to demonstrate the purity of his own motives:
“what can you do if you know ministers are not telling the truth and refuse to correct themselves when reminded of the truth?”
His priggish tone reminds us of one of the reasons why Leave won.
Here was a chance for neglected, fallible, unfashionable England to kick the pharisees, the Establishment figures who take pleasure in showing no mercy to those who fall below their own immaculate standards.
There is an unselfconscious priggery in many of the contributions to this volume. Few concessions are made to human weakness, as shown by Pincher: the prig proclaims instead that he is acting on behalf of the victims.
One of the problems with the insistence on justifying whatever one has decided to do in moral terms is that it leaves no room for other motives, such as the perfectly natural desire to defeat one’s opponents.
The referendum was held because David Cameron, in his Bloomberg speech in 2013, promised to hold one, as a means of thwarting the threat from UKIP.
Party political considerations were to the fore. The Right was split over Europe, and this was Cameron’s attempt, in the manner of a bridge player conducting an audacious finesse, to conceal the weakness of his own cards and rout his opponents.
His manoeuvre succeeded so well that he led the Conservatives to victory in the 2015 general election, fought on the promise of an EU referendum which could not then be traded away in coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems.
One of the merits of Young’s book is that it reminds us the first referendum on Europe, fought in 1975, was likewise an expression of weakness, on that occasion inside the Labour Party.
In November 1970 Tony Benn became the first considerable Labour figure to suggest a referendum on Europe. James Callaghan, who in 1976 would go on to become Labour leader and Prime Minister, realised this device was “a rubber life-raft into which the whole party may one day have to climb”.
Harold Wilson, at the time Labour leader, was at first strongly opposed to a referendum, but came round to the idea when he realised it would with any luck enable him to see off the Left’s demand for withdrawal from Europe.
Great play was made by Wilson of the reforms to the EEC which he would achieve by renegotiation. So too Cameron: he promised great reforms from his renegotiation, but was unable to persuade people he had got very much.
How easy it is to scoff at these party manoeuvres, but how essential they are to the working of our democracy. Labour’s pro-Europeans, led by Roy Jenkins, went off in 1981 to set up the Social Democratic Party, which helped keep Labour out of power until 1997.
We do not yet know how long Reform will keep the Conservative Party out of power, but the same dynamic is at work. Just as the SDP were the lost Labour tribe, and could only be won back by adopting most of their policies, so Reform is the lost Tory tribe, and will be defeated only by rendering it superfluous, because its aims can better be achieved by voting Conservative.
The most entertaining essay in this otherwise platitudinous volume is by Conor Burns, the Tory MP who acted as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Boris Johnson from 2016, when the latter found himself placed by Theresa May in the gilded cage known as the Foreign Office.
Burns observes that Johnson failed, after winning the referendum of 2016, to become Conservative leader and therefore Prime Minister, in part because he neither knew who many of the Tory MPs were, nor was capable of getting to know them on a one-to-one basis:
“A little-understood part of his character is that he is shy.”
Burns testifies that Johnson’s supporters and Michael Gove’s supporters “hated each other”, and that a majority of the parliamentary party was determined the next leader would be “ABB – Anyone But Boris”.
Theresa May, who became leader and therefore Prime Minister in 2016, “was the blank canvas onto which MPs could project whatever they wanted her to be”, but was actually an empty vessel:
“She suffered not from communication issues, but from the absence of anything noteworthy to communicate.”
Burns goes on to insult various other Tory MPs. Bernard Jenkin is “stunningly stupid”, Tobias Ellwood is “universally known as ‘Wooden Top’ in the tearoom”, and Steve Baker, close to tears in a late-night phone call to Burns, says he is prepared to become Prime Minister in order to save Brexit.
Here is politics as it is practised, a rude, self-seeking activity where public opinion is harnessed to personal ambition and even a briefly popular figure like Johnson soon outlives his usefulness to his fellow Tory MPs.
In the table of contents, Cambridge University Press includes the titles of the contributors, and adds insult to injury by doing so in an incorrect manner: Lord Simon Case instead of Lord Case.
In the republic of letters, peerages and knighthoods are superfluous: distinction springs, if at all, from the use of words.