Grand Brexit project turns into comic opera

I wrote last week about how embarassed I feel over the calamitous disintegration of the Brexit negotiations and the manifest incompetence of the British Government. Theresa May told her cabinet this week that the House of Commons had become a “laughing stock”. In fact, of course, this is more precisley true of her administration, which has lost all sense of direction and is falling apart before our eyes.

What has since become clear is that the European Union shares my sentiment. The attempt by the prime minister, imprisoned in office like one of Bacon’s Screaming Popes, to persuade the 27 that her twice-rejected withdrawal agreement still has life in it when the smell of death is everywhere apparent shows not only that she is finished as a serious leader, but that she has completely lost touch with reality. Donald Tusk isn’t alone in rejecting her pitiful pretence that she is still in control of events. Throughout Europe, and in Washington, politicians and commentators alike have been shaking their heads in sorrow, mindful that a once proud nation has been reduced to a combination of comic opera and beggary.

But it is not just embarrassment I feel. I am also deeply, deeply ashamed of our political Establishment, Labour as well as Tory, which over the last two years has demonstrated again and again how little it understands of the European Union, how it functions, its values and the nature and scope of its power.

It is as if the momentous changes in Europe over the last 45 years have to the British ruling class been nothing but noises off, irrelevant to what is actually important.

As a consequence, ministers and the bulk of Tory MPs have been exposed to the world as vainglorious, hopeless and – worst of all – stupid. They thought they had the whip hand. They believed they held all the cards and that the EU would fold overnight. It never occurred to them that they were supplicants and that Brussels would bring its full weight to bear on a dispute that it had to win, and win big, if the European Project was to survive and move on to the next phase of its development.

We were assured on a daily basis that Germany would rush to our aid, desperate to hold on to its share of the UK car market. That didn’t happen. We were told that in the final days and hours of the Brexit talks Jean-Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier, desperate for a resolution, would cave in and give Britain pretty well everything it wanted. That didn’t happen either. The reverse was true. Europe’s leaders are sick and tired of listening to the British. They have had enough and want shot of us. And who could blame them?

What we were not told was that the Irish border would become an issue so big as to dwarf just about every other consideration. No one – no one – in government had the slightest inkling that Dublin would have more clout than London in the talks and that the EU would coalesce around the needs of a member state no matter the cost to an increasingly Disunited Kingdom.

So much for the Mother of Parliaments. So much for Global Britain. The inescapable reality is that, in the eyes of the world, we have ceased to be a serious country. We are like Brazil or Mexico, but without their potential.

A large measure of responsibility for what is happening lies, it should be said, with the 17.4 million people who opted for Leave in the first place, plus the 13 million who couldn’t be bothered to vote. Leavers were arrogant, prejudiced, entitled, uninformed and credulous. Remainers were equally arrogant, but at least knew enough to sense that unravelling Britain’s membership of the EU after 43 years was not going to end quickly or well. But that is not to exonerate the political class. They are ready enough to claim credit for success. They must also accept the blame for failure,­ most obviously when the failure is of historic proportions.

If there was any justice, every past and present member of Theresa May’s administration would be barred from office on the basis of their performance since the referendum. May herself deserves to be impeached and barred from the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, convicted, by the Supreme Court if necessary, of wilful neglect and gross misconduct. The Tory Right has equally disgraced itself. It could have supported efforts to achieve a workable compromise with Brussels, just as David Cameron could have persisted with his campaign to make the EU less bureaucratic and more responsive to the member states. Instead, taking advantage of the rise of Ukip, the Tory zealots successfully projected onto voters feelings and fears over immigration that were essentially baseless, only to admit later that, post-Brexit, immigration would continue much as before, except with fewer arrivals from Europe and more from Africa and the Sub-Continent. And while this dark farce was playing out, the rest of the party looked on helplessly, not believing a word of it, but too scared to say so lest they be deselected by their hardline constituency associations.

Ask yourself, did you ever hear anyone outside the ranks of Ukip and the Eurosceptic Right complain about rulings of the European Court of Justice, on which two British judges currently sit? Why would they? The ECJ only pronounces on matters within its competence, most of which relate to trade, treaty obligations and legal disputes between member states. Yet if we were to listen to Michael Gove, now biding his time like Nosferatu in advance of taking ship for Whitby, the court is the most intrusive institution in Britain, bent on subverting our constitution and reducing us to vassalage.

Or take the European Commission. All the nonsense (much of it traceable to Boris Johnson) about straight bananas, the standardisation of potato crisps and the abolition of imperial weights and measures was exactly that: drivel;­ gobbledygook. It had no basis in fact. Did we object to the cleaner beaches brought about by regulations enacted in Brussels? Did we grind our teeth in fury when the Commission fined America’s mega-corporations for abusing their power or failing to pay billions in tax? If so, I must have been elsewhere at the time.

What, then, of the European Council, the EU’s ultimate decision-making body, on which, until 2016, the UK prime minister sat as one of the most influential members? Britain didn’t always agree with the Council’s decisions on how the Union should progress. We wanted Europe strictly à la carte. But in a number of key instances the result was that we were left free to go our own way. We were not forced to join the single currency. We were not obliged to participate in the Schengen agreement on open borders. Famously, in respect of our contribution to the EU budget – judged by the UK to be too high due to our smaller farm sector – we were, uniquely, awarded an annual 30 per cent rebate, worth close to £6bn a year. Together with Poland, we were even granted an opt-out from the Treaty of Fundamental Rights that arose out of the Lisbon Treaty. So we didn’t even have to endorse a swathe of our partners’ re-stated core beliefs. Could Europe have been more generous to us, and could we have been more ungrateful?

But never mind. Along the way, and in spite of our loutish behaviour, we were accepted as part of the European family, like the crazy uncle who complains about everything at his niece’s wedding. Goods were able to flow between the UK and Europe without interference from customs officials or the imposition of tariffs. British citizens could enter the Eurozone with their European passports and move around the 27 without let or hindrance. The City of London was accepted as the Continent’s local bank, making it the most profitable financial hub in the world. There were generous exchange schemes for students and academics wishing to study in other member states. We were welcomed as a valued contributor to the European Space Agency and the Galileo Project. We were a leading member of Europol and a beneficiary of the European Arrest Warrant which, like the Single Market (and the European Convention on Human Rights), might not have existed in the first place without sustained pressure from UK officials.

In the end, none of this mattered, or even registered, such was voters’ ignorance of what was really going on. Instead, it all came down to immigration. The anti-immigrant hysteria whipped up by Nigel Farage, with the collusion of the Tory Right, was what finally did for Britain. Never mind that during our membership of the EU we had risen from being the Sick Man of Europe to being the world’s fifth-largest economic power. What mattered was that Farage felt “uncomfortable” hearing Polish spoken on his train ride home to Kent.

Farage. The man with a French name, who used to work for Crédit Lyonnais and has lived half his adult life in Brussels and Strasbourg, where his reputation is that of a South London barrow boy who insults all and sundry and speaks no other language than English. The man whose first wife was Irish, second wife German and later moved in with a French woman with an Italian name. The man all four of whose children have either Irish or German, as well as UK, passports. The man who couldn’t be bothered to take part in his own March on London, leaving others to vote with their feet while he hosted his LBC radio show. Yes, that man.

If only W.S. Gilbert was still with us.

Yet in the end it all comes back to Theresa May. For it was up to her to rescue sense from chaos. The right honourable member for Maidenhead would have us praise her for the grim determination she has shown while trying, and failing, to achieve an agreed Brexit. But might it not equally be said that she has given her all in the mistaken belief that she is the new Boadicea, albeit that she secretly believes that life under Roman rule is preferable to the alternative. She used never to mention the EU. She was too busy creating her “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants.  But then, after the referendum, her mantra became “Brexit means Brexit,” which, as things have turned out, means whatever is left – basically an oil slick – after the ship of state has sunk and most of us are in the water trying to inflate our lifejackets.

Mrs May has learned nothing from her experience. She has simply reinforced her ignorance. Speaker John Bercow may be a Remainer, openly biased in his Brexit rulings, but he was absolutely right to prevent the Prime Minister from bringing her discredited withdrawal agreement back to the House for a third, and possibly fourth, time in the forlorn hope that MPs would say yes just to hasten her departure and bring to an end the political nightmare in which, clearly, they are lost.

I won’t waste time on Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Davis,  Iain Duncan Smith, John Redmond, Peter Bone and all those belonging to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s absurd and self-important European Research Group. Every one of them has been discredited. Every one of them has been revealed as knowing nothing about a subject that defines them and about which it would have been reasonable to assume they were expert. None of them is of any use to man or beast. Be gone, I say. In the name of God, go!

Nor will I dwell on the Labour leadership, the examination of whose role in the gross mismanagement of Brexit could fill several satirical volumes, and probably will. Jeremy Corbyn is a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of the EU. He has been ever since Britain joined in 1973, though for the life of him he can’t remember why. He just about managed to conceal his true feelings throughout the referendum campaign and in the years since, only letting slip in the last few days that he would “probably” vote Leave if, over his dead body – don’t tempt me – there should be a second referendum. The old scoundrel isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. Does anyone truly believe he didn’t vote Leave first time round?

In spite of Corbyn’s cult of personality – in which he comes across as a combination of Captain Mainwaring and Lenin without either the brains or the revolution – there remain some honest men and women in Labour’s ranks. Kier Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn are probably the best of them. But most members of Her Majesty’s Opposition are useless, and cowards to boot. Only now, as the shambles threatens to leave Britain up Foecal Creek without a means of propulsion are they stirring themselves. But too late, I say, too late. Their ineptitude and lack of guts are there for all to see.

So, given where we are today, is there a way forward, or do we just have to do what the DUP – an Irish party built on the premise that it is not Irish – tells us? I have no idea. The EEA might work. Norway-Plus might work. Switzerland-Minus might work. A lengthy extension of Article 50 would at least give us time to think again. But where there is a way, there must first be a will. Is there a Churchill, or a Moses, somewhere in the wings, who warned us what would happen and must now be listened to and given charge of our destiny? I hope so. I really do. But I couldn’t begin to tell you who that individual might be.

All I can suggest, rather desperately, is that we hold a general election in which, against all experience, the Old Order is somehow swept away, to be followed by a second referendum in which the electorate, having scourged themselves, vote to beg the 27 to take us back, suitably shriven and ready to play a modest part in building a better Europe. But I’m not holding my breath. For all I know, the biggest winners would be Farage’s back-of-an-envelope Brexit Party. God help us all! And God save us from ourselves. Though He does not exist, he is more real to me now than any of the knaves and buffoons who in these Last Days strut the stage as champions of British liberty.