I recently met several people who said they were beginning to feel sorry for Theresa May. Well, up to a point, I should have thought. She apparently wanted to be prime minister from an early age, and is now a victim of what her predecessor from the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harold Macmillan, referred to as “events”.
Macmillan’s celebrated remark about “events” has gone down in political history. But, as with so many famous sayings, its full meaning has been lost. When asked what he feared most, he replied “the opposition of events, dear boy”. This was a clever dig at the weakness of the Labour party in the 1950s, which was riven with deep resentment between the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites. Macmillan was not fearful of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
In the present case the “event” – the referendum result – occurred before the present prime minister assumed office; indeed, that event precipitated her into No 10. And May is not fearful of the opposition, but of her own party. Everywhere I go, I meet people – many of them Conservatives – who sigh for an effective opposition.
May could be playing a clever game in which she declares at the 11th hour that she has done her best but has realised that, for the good of the country, the result of the referendum – conducted under false pretences – should be reversed. Unfortunately, while hoping that this might prove the case, I doubt it.
Every time she grinds on about the need not to let down the 37% of the electorate who voted Leave, I feel the need for what we moderate drinkers call a “sharpener”. What about not letting down the majority 63%?
The apparent agreement between the US and EU to defuse Trump’s tariff wars shows the benefit of being part of a bloc
At the very least, she has a divided country. With the potential post-Brexit economic horrors mounting by the day, I find it difficult to credit that a second referendum would not show that the nation had come to its senses.
Indeed, a recent YouGov poll put remaining in the EU at 54% and leaving with no deal at 46%. Things seem to be moving the right way for those champions of a second referendum, who include everyone from Labour peer Lord Adonis and Conservative MP Anna Soubry to the increasingly statesmanlike former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major, with the one and only Gary Lineker emerging as striker in their midst.
I myself have been hesitant about a second referendum, believing with the long-departed Edmund Burke that, as he said in his famous speech to the electors of Bristol, parliamentarians are our representatives, not just our delegates, and should be allowed to exercise their own considered judgment in these matters (it being common – indeed Commons – knowledge that the vast majority of MPs regard Brexit as an act of self-harm, not to say economic suicide).
However, if our prime minister, cabinet and other elected representatives cannot grasp this Churchillian opportunity for national leadership, the only hope is that they delegate the final say, once again, to the people: by which time one can only hope that the message has got through.
There is something truly ridiculous about the government preparing to stock up for a hard Brexit on 29 March 2019 – facing the prospect of wartime shortages of supplies, not least of the vast quantities of food we import daily from “the Continent” – when it is not 1914 or 1939 and the only war we are preparing for is a war on ourselves.
All this stuff propagated by Liam Fox, Jacob Rees-Mogg and co about the wonders of the free-trade agreements we could negotiate after Brexit is pie in the sky. We already enjoy countless free-trade agreements via our membership of the EU. And, as the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman recently pointed out, being a member of a customs union is much more important than being party to a free-trade agreement.
There are no customs checks within the EU, but there are under the North American Free Trade Agreement that operates between the US and Mexico. Businesses are concerned about the bureaucratic friction that, after Brexit, would impede the “just in time” flow of goods that is an integral part of the modern economy.
The apparent agreement last week between the US and EU to defuse Trump’s tariff wars shows the benefit of our being part of a wider trading bloc. The American business executive David Rosen, who has had experience of dealings with Trump, says that the main reason why the mercantilist president wishes to break up the EU is so that he can weaken the bargaining power of the EU in trade negotiations. Given Trump’s behaviour, this sounds all too plausible.