This week in Brexitland, March 9, 2023

How this week ended the Tories last gasp hope of winning the next general election

It is hard to believe that it was only a little over a week ago that Rishi Sunak stood on a stage with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and announced that a new deal on Northern Ireland had been struck between the UK and the EU. For perhaps the first time since taking the job, Sunak looked and sounded prime ministerial.

More than that, the Conservative party had concluded an international agreement as opposed to threatening to break one. This made for a change. The Tories came close to making us consider them competent once again.

That lasted a whole 24 hours. Then came the Matt Hancock WhatsApp leak, Boris Johnson being a public idiot again, and the whole edifice crumbled. Sunak decided to get into the game of looking childish himself a couple of days ago, standing in front of an embarrassing looking sign reading “Stop the Boats”, followed up by some messaging around how slavery might be all right to inflict on refugees, you know, so long as they are the wrong kind of refugee.

That’s before we get to the sustained Tory attack on all the things they once claimed to support and even love, the civil service being in the firing line this week. Starmer hiring Sue Gray kicked this off, sending the Tory ranks into a mad froth about the “Blob”.

There was a time when I might have got uppity about Starmer hiring Sue Gray in the way that he has, at the time that he has. Yet I don’t feel this way, for a simple reason. This government has become so terrible, so retrograde in terms of setting even the minimal standard to anything whatsoever, that I can’t get upset about what Labour is doing. You can’t have a government full of people who smash things and then have to hear them moan about the results of the smashing. For instance, it would be easier to care about the Sue Gray thing if the Tories hadn’t spent the last few years trashing the ministerial code beyond recognition.

Putting that aside, you might ask: doesn’t this demonstrate that Labour are just as bad as the Conservatives when it comes to this sort of thing? I know this is probably not what a lot of you want to hear, but this is the conclusion I have come to after a decade and a half of working in Westminster: both parties are fairly rubbish. In fact, all of the parties with any sort of representation in the House of Commons are pretty much rubbish. There are some excellent people in every party, but on the whole, the parties themselves are fairly dire. Once you see that clearly, you can wipe the stain of righteousness from your eyes and become practical about it all. It then boils down to a straightforward question: Who is it that offers us the best in practical terms, in other words, the best possibility of a decent government, Labour or the Tories?

It’s not any sort of contest at the moment, and that’s why Labour are so far ahead in the polls and despite what Westminster pundits assert, the Tories will find it all but impossible to close the gap. Starmer is miles better than Sunak and astronomical leaps and bounds better than Johnson, Truss or any of the Tory also rans. He is practical and just the right amount of cold-blooded needed to get the job done without lapsing into psychopathy. The country demands a solid centrist dad at the wheel right now and the Tories are all out of them. Sunak failed the audition at the first point of calling, when he reinstated Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. He’s then hammered that home this week with his “Stop the Boats” nonsense.

Rachel Reeves will be better in the Number 11 role than Jeremy Hunt. I’m not even certain Jeremy Hunt would disagree with that assessment. From there, it starts to get even worse for the Tories. I mean, comparing Yvette Cooper to Suella Braverman to each other in terms of ministerial quality is like comparing the Rolling Stones to Westlife. You could in theory do it, but the whole thing is such an embarrassment to everyone involved, why bother.

McMahon versus Coffey at DEFRA is another no contest. I’m not sure Therese Coffey has ever been to a farm, or at least, that’s the impression she manages to create. Reed is a slam dunk over Raab, although to be fair, that isn’t difficult either. Sure, one could pick holes here and there - Wallace is almost certainly better than Healey in Defence, but not in any material sense. For instance, do I think support for Ukraine would be weaker under a Labour government? No, and that’s what actually matters here.

The Conservatives are being badly beaten by Labour in the quality stakes because they have made a habit of over-promoting useless wastes of space for reasons that are often baffling to anyone outside of the Conservative parliamentary party (this is also known as “Gavin Williamson syndrome”). Brexit and its ramifications have turned the Tories into a party that most of the country either feels alienated by or underwhelmed by. Another way of putting it is, you either don’t like the Tories because Brexit happened, or you don’t like them because you don’t think they did enough with Brexit.

In conclusion, if you want to destroy everything and start again, which is essentially what Brexit was about in the end, don’t come crying when you reap what you sow. Senior Tories can’t wail “But the constitution and the role of each institution!” when they have spent the last half decade at the very least assaulting said institutions and rendering conventions meaningless. You want to destroy the House of Lords, the NHS, the Church of England, the civil service - well, all right, but after you’ve done all that, you don’t get to moan about the after affects of the disaster you created. This is what you all explicitly wanted. Vive la revolution!

Thanks for reading. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, please subscribe. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, even better. This is all the extra stuff you get with a paid subscription:

1. A country by country report on how each of the remaining EU27 see post-Brexit Britain now, released piece by piece over the course of the next 18 months. I will interview key people in each EU country and try and present the most balanced view I can from each.

2. Sections from a book I partly wrote - and will complete for my paid subscribers over this year - entitled, How Brexit Gets Reversed. It is about what happened pre-referendum, during the referendum and then after it but pre-Brexit itself, with some inside stories about Farage, Vote Leave, and the Remain campaign, as well as what I think will happen in the coming decade(s) that leads to Brexit being slowly reversed - and most importantly, what pro-Europeans can do to help the process along.

3. I will provide a running technical explanation about elements of the Retained EU Law Bill, how EU law translated into UK law works and how it may affect you personally.

Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.