In the wake of the
seismic EU parliamentary election results in the UK, Received Wisdom has
settled on these conclusions:
- The Brexit party’s victory means
that, unless the new Conservative party leader promises to deliver a
no-deal Brexit, he or she will preside henceforth over the total
destruction of the Conservative party;
- That means Boris Johnson is
self-evidently an absolute shoo-in as the next party leader and prime
minister;
- What’s needed above all is someone
who can heal the nation’s wounds, map out common ground and bring a
fractured society together once again;
- What absolutely cannot be allowed
to happen is a general election before Brexit since the Conservative
party, having come fifth in the EU elections (fifth!) with just over nine
per cent of the vote (nine per cent!!) and a mere four MEPs (four!
Compared with Brexit party’s 29!!!) would be totally slaughtered and
Jeremy Corbyn would become prime minister.
As so often,
Received Wisdom is out to lunch. Of the above, only the first is correct. The
rest don’t follow at all.
Boris has been
loudly saying he would take the UK out on October 31 with or without a deal.
People therefore assume he will take the UK out with no deal. This is an
optimistic assumption.
For Boris has also
said throughout he would reopen negotiations with the EU and would get them to
compromise on the backstop. The EU, however, have consistently said no
renegotiation or compromise are possible. Every move they took from the start
of this process was designed to make Brexit as awful as possible. They will
never agree to any compromise in the UK’s interests. If they wouldn’t
compromise previously, why would they do so now when the British parliament is
still stuffed with Remainer MPs and the new UK prime minister would be yet
another hapless supplicant?
Boris Johnson took
several months to stop praising Mrs May’s terrible deal. He then voted against
it only when shamed into doing so. He knows perfectly well the EU won’t
compromise. Therefore one has to assume that any compromise will be on his
part, not theirs.
Received Wisdom
will soon agree that most of the ever-lengthening list of candidates for leader
must be regarded as eminently disposable: too soft-Remainy, too hard-Brexity,
too shrill, too dull, too divisive, too boring, too excitable, too ambitious,
too ridiculous and so on.
And so Received
Wisdom will soon rest its eyes appraisingly upon Michael Gove, Boris Johnson’s
original apotheosis in the act of mutually assured destruction that led to
Theresa May becoming prime minister in the first place.
Now Gove murmurs
modestly that he’s learned from his mistakes. Wonderful! What mistakes? Well,
the, er, disaster of his time as Education Secretary when he, er, correctly
took on the teaching profession as a conspiracy against the interests of the
nation’s children and the transmission of the culture, and had to be removed
from this absolutely crucial project – which requires above all not just
personal courage but the backing of a courageous prime minister – by a
tunnel-visioned, conservative-in-name-only prime minister who got frightened by
the prospect of losing all those teachers’ votes.
And so Gove
decided to redeem his vote-losing heroism in trying to restore to the education
system knowledge, reason and the transmission of western culture down through
the generations. He sought redemption by embracing instead the repudiation of
knowledge and reason and subscribing to the demonisation of progress, western
culture and the human race in the scam known as anthropogenic global warming
theory.
And then Gove
sought to redeem his sin of knifing Boris in the back (and himself
simultaneously in the front) by displaying unwavering loyalty to Mrs May, thus
knifing his party and his country by supporting her
Brexit-in-name-only-Remain-by-stealth deal and reportedly arguing strenuously
against leaving with no deal.
And yet despite
(or because of) all this, despairing of the spectacular unsuitability of Boris
Johnson and the third-raters of the rest of the pack, Received Wisdom will
surely look upon Gove’s unflappable courtesy and undeniable intellect and his
gravitas and his awesome ability to speak in perfectly formed paragraphs
without deviation, hesitation or repetition and the fact that he was after all
(a long time ago) the original Brexiteer; and it will hear him saying, as he
reportedly did a day or so ago, that there’s a time for being a warrior and a
time for being a healer; and Received Wisdom will close its eyes and wet its
finger and wave it in the air and say yes, yes, just as Gove says, Gove can be
both a warrior and a healer at the same time, so he’s the leader we
seek to guide us all to a place of safety and make the whole nightmare just Go
Away.
Which brings us to
the Great Compromise Fallacy, the belief that now’s the time to bring the
nation together and bind up its wounds. But that denies the fact that, over
Brexit, it’s a fight to the death for both sides. It’s either Brexit or Remain;
just as it always was. It can’t be a bit of both. And so now is absolutely not
the time for healing. The battle for Brexit has yet to be won. Anyone who tries
to bring the country together before it makes a clean break from the EU will be
doing so through some kind of compromise –and so will not be delivering Brexit.
Who knows, though:
maybe the logic of Britain’s transformed political landscape will convince one
of these candidates — or one who has not yet declared him or herself — that
Received Wisdom’s fourth conclusion misses a key point about what has happened.
For it wasn’t just
the Conservative party that got pulverised by Nigel Farage’s no-deal
Brexiteers. It was Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, which fell neatly into the
crevasse that was obvious to all except them – that trying to keep on board
both the Brexiteer working-class and the Remainer prosecco socialists meant the
former deserted to the Brexit Party and the latter to the LibDems, which as a
result has been miraculously revived as the party of Remain by coming second to
the Brexit Party with 16 seats.
And so it follows
that, while a new Conservative party leader delivering a no-deal, clean Brexit
would be able to pull many if not most conservative Brexiteers back from
Farage, if Labour now tries to become the party of Remain it will lose those
working class Brexiteers for good, while if it tries instead to become the
party of Brexit it will lose its Prosecco socialists to the LibDems.
In other words,
while (only) a no-deal Brexit Tory leader would rescue the Conservative party,
Labour is stuffed. Because in a general election, while that no-deal Tory
leader will bring back the Brexiteers, the Remain vote will be fatally split
between Labour and the LibDems.
Which is why what
I have written here, here and here –
that the way to deliver Brexit and rescue the Conservative party is for the new
leader to declare the UK will leave with no deal and, if parliament still
objects, fight a general election on the issue of democracy and listening to
the people – has suddenly become eminently doable.
Melanie
Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her
work on her website HERE.
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