Hammond’s miserable wittering shows why the Tories need to deliver Brexit quick sharp

The contrast was too stark. On Monday evening the BBC screened the latest part of its astonishingly good five-part Thatcher documentary. We hear a lot about Americans such as Ken Burns (Vietnam, and much else) taking documentary-making, via large budgets provided by the streaming giants, to new heights in recent years. Well, the team on Thatcher: A Very British Revolution have outdone them all in storytelling terms, with their use of offcuts from television news footage, stills, crisp interviews and sharp editing . Executive producer Steve Condie and director John House have remade the political documentary and created a mini-masterpiece.

The third episode dealt with Thatcher at her peak – seeing off enemies, triumphing but creating casualties, and developing the warrior persona that would in her third term mutate until intransigence brought her down. It was a gripping portrait in leadership of someone brilliant, human, complex, flawed.

Half an hour later, on the same channel, Chancellor Philip Hammond was interviewed on BBC Newsnight.

What a contrast! After an hour of Thatcher, viewers had to sit through 15 minutes of Hammond that felt like five hours. Talk about uninspiring.

Hammond wielding power is the ultimate indictment of Theresa May’s premiership and the disgracefully low quality of this cabinet (surely the worst, barring a few more creditable members, since the American War of Independence). Hammond was lucky to be made shadow anything by David Cameron. Thatcher had Geoffrey Howe, responsible for the transformative end of capital controls, and then the reformer Nigel Lawson. Hammond would have been fortune in the 1980s to have got a gig making the tea.

Under the new and lesser dispensation, in our reduced politics, he has been a cabinet minister for nine years, yet it has never been clear why he is in politics at all. Hammond is clearly an intelligent man with a head for business who should have stuck to that.

On Newsnight he once again showed he has a terrible tin ear when discussing poverty. He’s right in that the recent report by the UN – the UN! – into British poverty was a travesty, but as Chancellor he should be able to communicate a good deal more empathy for those up against it and convey some passion on improving the lot of the poorest on low pay and benefits. You might not like Thatcher, but give her credit. Her eyes burning with righteous indignation, she would have explained that the answer is more growth, prosperity, and enterprise, so we can lift the fortunes of those struggling. Instead, Hammond came across as understudy for the part of Scrooge in the Runnymede and Weybridge amateur dramatics rendering of A Christmas Carol.

On Brexit, he then laid it out. What a miserable display it was, and so far removed from Margaret Thatcher’s style. There cannot be no deal, because it will be the end of the world, he indicated. Hammond didn’t seem to hold out much hope that a deal could pass either. It has been smashed to bits by the Commons, three times. May and Hammond – he’s Chancellor, he’s not a bystander, he’s been involved in the farce – were disastrous  failures when it came to selling their deal and persuading MPs to vote for it and the country to back it.

The mess all pointed, Hammond suggested, to a further extension, if the EU (and Macron) will grant it.

The Chancellor is also up for a second referendum, but of course he is because he wouldn’t have to run it or fight the campaign. He’s peculiar in being someone at that level who has never really had any experience of planning or running a general election or a major campaign. Under Cameron and Osborne he was a drone pointed at the Today programme to deliver a reassuring soundbite.

How would this Tory Remainer second referendum if it came about even be fought or contested? Granted, there are other routes to Tory destruction, that involve the party splitting, the government collapsing, millions in dormant donor money going to the Brexit party rather than to the currently bust Conservative party  – but a second referendum is the sure-fire way to make it happen.

It is only a few weeks since the Tories came fifth in a national election. In the European elections, when the Brexit party polled 32% and the Tory party scored 9%, former Tory voters who are overwhelmingly pro-Brexit put the party on a final warning. Incredibly, some senior Conservatives such as Hammond seem to have deduced from this that the answer is May’s deal, with a customs union and a referendum bolted on.

Those non-Brexity parts of the leadership class of the Tory party have also decided that there must now be another extension to Article 50. Indeed, Theresa May’s final terrible act was to agree an extension that ends on October 31st, just as the old European Commission is leaving office and there is no-one to negotiate with.

The Tories are trapped. Even if a new Prime Minister tries to renegotiate in September and October, it looks undoable. Parliament won’t agree to anything. Barnier and Juncker will still be in post, but they have no interest in moving the EU’s position. Incidentally, I now see quite a few anti-Brexit Brussels watchers saying that there might – might – be some movement by the EU on the question of the Irish border backstop. I don’t buy it, I wish I could. The hopeful claims are not worth the paper they are not written on. Many of us hoped the EU would be flexible, but it isn’t going to be. The deal is the deal and if it cannot be changed and cannot pass, the choice narrows.

This sets up a terrible clash this autumn in parliament between the forces of Brexit (leave without a deal if necessary) and Revoke (Remain). Sadly, the choice  is binary.

For now, the serious contenders in the Tory leadership contest are for the most part skirting round the central issue, because they are at this stage hunting only for the votes of Conservative MPs. In that spirit, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt tweeted his support of the Remain Tory MP Philip Lee, who at a meeting of his constituency association lost a vote of confidence the other day.

Hunt’s note (in tweet form) was a nice but delusional gesture that overlooks the enormity of what has changed since the European elections. Of course, the Tories must be a broad church and all that, but it is daft to continue operating as though there is going to be a place as a Tory MP for someone who wants to overthrow the result of the 2016 referendum. All the evidence shows that the clear majority of Tory members  (and they are the Tory party at root) will tolerate a diversity of views on how Brexit should happen, but they are not up for supporting or enabling MPs who want to stop Brexit and stay in the EU. That game is up.

In that context, and with the Tory party getting eaten alive by the Brexit party, no-one can hope to become Tory leader advocating an extension. Imagine the message it sends to the voters the Tories must win back just when parliament could easily – by accident – collapse into an early general election: “Good news! The EU has kindly given us another six month extension!” That would be an early Christmas present for Nigel Farage.

I can see only one narrow set of circumstances in which a new Prime Minister could get away with a little more time. Assured in September by the EU that a few extra months of talks will produce the breakthrough, a leave leader might – might – be able to say that it is worth six weeks or so . Other than that, another extension equals the death of the Conservative party. And is the EU going to move in that way? Nope. The deal is not up for any renegotiation. I wish they would shift, yet the chances are remote to non-existent.

You may well say, as Hammond and other Brexit-phobic MPs do, that this situation – no deal looming unless the Commons tries to revoke – is all too terrible for words and an event equivalent in economic terms to the Black Death. Is it? The uncertainty of delay for business is already increasingly terrible, and a bitter second referendum and an extension into next year will only make it worse. This cannot go on.

That means the winner of the Tory leadership contest is going to have to – Thatcher style – tell his or her colleagues and the CBI to stop blubbing and to get on with it. Try for a quick renegotiation in good faith, and then face up to leaving – deal or no deal.