Boris couldn’t deliver his own ridiculous Brexit demands

Gloves on. Face masks at the ready. Nose pegs for those of you that have them. We all knew this business would turn odorous before it was over…

As the new week began, so ended the Brexit unity, agreed at Chequers where every interested party emerged with a different idea as to how we go about solving the big problem of our day: just how do you go about polishing a turd? Excuse the indelicate question but it was raised by Boris Johnson and there has as yet been no easy answer. Are we even sure it’s a soft turd or a hard turd? Will it involve sandpaper or do we move straight to the Turtlewax?

The fact that Boris chose scatology to describe Theresa May’s Brexit strategy probably says more about him than it does any Brexit strategy. He’s always been gifted with the juicy metaphors that grab the headlines even when they say something that has been self-evident from the very beginning. Brexit was always going to end with something unpleasant sitting in the middle of the Downing Street rug and it obviously couldn’t be blamed on Larry the Cat. This mess has been gestating for a very long time and has been causing a stink in British politics for the best part of fifty years. The Referendum simply delayed the need to call a cleaner.

That cleaning began in earnest this week. Social media is alive with people talking about “traitors” and, as Gerald Warner so forcefully argues, the “suicide” of the party, yet, any Brexit settlement was always going to involve compromise. As Mark Fox rightly points out: “There is no Brexit deal that will appeal to everyone […] There is no perfect answer, no magic bullet, no silver lining – no unalloyedly happy ending.” Any compromise will be too messy for staunch Brexiteers who believe that the issue should resolve itself cleanly. The same compromise would also be unnecessary in the view of strong Remainers who think the best deal that can be struck with Europe is the one that’s already in place.

Put it another way: the Brexit deal will require so much polishing that it will probably never shine.

We reach, then, the point where it simply has to glisten enough to be acceptable to most people and that is the reality our Prime Minister seems to have accepted, albeit too late. As Iain Martin has described it, any compromise “required May to own it; it required emotional intelligence and team-building, not juvenile threats by backroom staff and trainee grandees. It required levelling with the country and leading.” Leadership is the mechanism by which the rhetoric of Brexit should have already detoxified the debate and de-escalated it back to the level of ordinary politics where deals are hammered out through negotiation. This is the leadership that was sorely lacking when Cameron gifted the Referendum to the Eurosceptics and it is the leadership that’s been absent as the reality of Brexit started to bear down upon us. It the leadership now required of Theresa May if she’s to make the ordure shine at all.

There’s nothing to say she will succeed. Whilst May emerges from Boris’s departure looking stronger, the reality remains that an unpleasant job needs finishing and it’s not entirely certain she has the required elbow grease. Given the inflexibility at the extremes of the Brexit spectrum, it remains to be seen if enough moderates are able to shift their positions in order to make a deal possible. On that score, the mini-reshuffle has slightly empowered the Remainers. But this is the reality that was always most likely given that, in general, Tory Remainers are less committed to some ideological purity that Tory Brexiteers. That was especially true of the departed Foreign Secretary who disappointed the most when it mattered. Boris boasted in his resignation letter that Brexit was a chance to be “nimble” and “dynamic” but, really, both were lacking when it came for him to make his play. Even as he posed, signing his resignation letter from behind his trademarked jaw clench, it was a gloss on a rather pitiful spectacle. The great irony of the week is Boris made headlines because he refused to polish a turd yet it was Boris himself who lost most of his lustre.