The Tory leadership race and Brexit
The current contest to anoint the next leader of the Conservative party and thus our next prime minister is the best display yet of what Brexit has done to the Tories. It has eaten away at their collective soul, leaving nothing but dreams of a Brexit that one day has to come good. It’s less clear now than it has ever been how exactly that will happen, but they believe that if we all believe hard enough, utopia will arise. Only the bad thoughts of an imagined Remainer elite have the power to thwart it all.
Not one of the candidates in the race says they will ditch the NI Protocol Bill. That’s astounding. This means that believing the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative party ran the last general election on enacting should continue to be implemented in full and not subject to any change or renegotiation is considered a Remainer position within the current Tory ranks. This is the nature of Brexit - it keeps moving, all the time. What was peak Euroscepticism one day will be liberal elite Remoanerism a few days later.
Boris Johnson’s legacy will soon be terrible with everyone, especially Tories, not because Remainer liberals hate him (even though they do) but because there will be no way to continue to believe in the Brexit fairies unless you decide he either ruined Brexit, or at the very least was completely lax in taking advantage of the myriad opportunities it offers. Either way, Boris = bad if you love Brexit. And as we know, Brexit always wins whenever it is put up against else within the modern Conservative party - capitalism, free trade, sacred British institutions, they all must crumble if they are seen to be standing in the way of the free, holy Brexit that is just over the horizon.
There isn’t any good sense anywhere else about anything Brexit related in the campaign either. It’s all the same fantasy rubbish that has haunted the Conservative party since 2016. We can have it all without any sacrifice, even though that’s already verifiably untrue. Even as some of the candidates talk a big game about the need to tell the public the truth, that sometimes explaining the trade offs involved in public policy is necessary, none of this is allowed to apply to Brexit.
I suppose in retrospect, I don’t know how any of us expected anything else. And I’m sorry if I sound so spectacularly down about it all but I can’t see anything in this Tory leadership contest to feel positive about, Brexit related or otherwise. Jeremy Hunt talked about bringing fox-hunting back and even that wasn’t enough to keep him in the race past the first round. Tom Tugendhat’s campaign isn’t even all that sane considering he’s now the sanest one left in the bunch.
What will probably prevent Rishi Sunak from being the next Tory leader will be that he isn’t Brexity enough. Which is patently absurd - he has always been a Leaver and has never given over a scintilla of regret about having backed it. The problem the Brexiters have with him is that Sunak approaches Brexit as a real piece of public policy and they can’t stand that. What they really want is for Brexit to continue to live on as a fantasy, one in which the tide is about to turn via magic. As soon as you take Brexit seriously, it falls apart, and deep down they know that. Which is why they like Truss and Braverman so much - those two aren’t so much in love with Brexit as they are fundamentalist jihadist Brexiters. The rapture is coming, any day now, and trying to apply logic to any of this is just going to bring the mood down.
I really wanted to find something to like in and amongst this Tory leadership contest. I know some of you will think that I’m posing as I say that, but I truly mean it. For instance, I tried to get into what Kemi Badenoch was saying for a few days. Unlike the rest, she seems to actually believe the stuff she says as opposed to playing to the membership and feeding them whatever old bullshit they want to hear. But ultimately, I just found Badenoch’s pitch empty. There isn’t that much more to it than re-heated culture war bullshit, which isn’t to say she doesn’t have a point in amongst all of that from time to time, but I don’t get any sense of consideration or real thought having been put into how we curb the insane excesses of the culture wars. I just hear stuff any old GB News hack could regurgitate most of the time; confected outrage for the gallery.
I had hoped that after Boris Johnson stepped down, the Tories might try and rediscover their true secret weapon - being sensible and reasonably non-ideological, particularly when it comes to the nation’s finances. Instead, we’ve seen madness on all fronts, with promises to cut taxes in ridiculous ways given the circumstances we are facing as a country. There is no reality at all in any of this, just the feeling reiterated in different ways that if we curb critical race theory, slash corporation tax and finally find that heap of EU-derived regulation that’s been holding us back (but no one ever seems able to locate), we’ll be in line to be the world’s biggest economy by 2050.
The only good thing about it all is how fragile Brexit seems to be already, so soon after leaving. And not because of a Remainer liberal elite trying to tear it down but because of the mismanagement of it by the Brexiters themselves. Admitting that “We probably should have stayed in the single market” but then turning around and saying we shouldn’t go back in now because, well, just because, isn’t going to wash forever. It probably won’t even wash for another couple of years. Brexit is melting as the Tories double down on it, going ever deeper into the rabbit hole.
The Tory right could have bedded in Brexit for at least a generation, maybe longer, but they have already blown it. Messing with the NI Protocol was the worst thing they could have done. It exposed the structural weaknesses of both the Withdrawal Agreement the Tories managed to get and Brexit itself. I feel certain that their messing about with the Protocol endlessly is a prime factor in the polls now turning against the very idea of Brexit. And not a moment too soon.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next week again with the worst of Brexit.
Whoever becomes the next leader (or rather bleeder) of the Tory Party, one thing is for certain. Brexit WILL consume them, just as it did Cameron, May and Johnson. From 1997 -2010 we saw two Labour PM's and the same number of chancellors. From 2010, we have witnessed three, soon to be FOUR Tory PM's and so far FIVE chancellors - mostly from 2016!
Brexit for the Tories is a gigantic, all consuming meat grinder of their own making from which there is no escape.
Is there really all that much talk about critical race theory amongst right wing culture warriors on this side of the pond? I thought that was more of an American Trumpian thing.