Brexit

By sticking to the ‘art of the possible’ and accepting Brexit, Keir Starmer is doing the nation a disservice

His false claims about the withdrawal agreement reveal an utter lack of interest in Brexit’s consequences for Belfast and Dublin

The difficulty for other governments in dealing with Boris Johnson is to figure out whether he is lying or merely ignorant. There was so much weirdness in the general election campaign that it was easy to miss a moment that would have once caused something of a sensation. But in this new era, it was barely remarkable that a friendly foreign government had to intervene to say that important statements by a British prime minister were patently untrue.

Brexiters lament the fact that Big Ben will not ring for Brexit. But isn’t being thwarted just how they like it?

Next Friday, Britain officially leaves the EU but it’s difficult to see who or what is being liberated. Perhaps an England without London?

We know what the week running up to the glorious day of Brexit is supposed to be like. A few nights before the original chosen date of 29 March 2019, Boris Johnson was “in conversation” with his old boss at the Telegraph, Charles Moore, at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. Johnson was out of office then, and free to indulge himself without constraint.

Boris Johnson’s first response was at odds with the rest of the world. But this virus does not respect his delusions of national character

There is now the terrible possibility that Britain may match or even overtake Italy and Spain as the country in Europe that suffers most from the coronavirus pandemic. This tragedy has a political, as well as a biological, epidemiology. Those seeking to trace its path may look back on a telling moment – paradoxically the one at which the government finally changed course and fell into line with most of the rest of Europe. On 20 March, Boris Johnson announced the closure of pubs, clubs and restaurants. Even as he did so, however, he made it clear that this decision was an assault on the national character.

Suggesting Britain could sign the withdrawal agreement with its fingers crossed makes perfect sense for a government of liars

Everybody knows Boris Johnson can lie for England. To his supporters, it was one of his best assets. They believed he could bamboozle the European Union into giving him the only Brexit deal that is really acceptable – one that gives Britain all the advantages of being in the EU without any of the botheration of being a member. The problem is that congenital mendacity isn’t just for foreigners. If you lie for England, you will also lie to England.

This week, these two streams of fabrication finally became one. In openly admitting that it signed the withdrawal agreement with the EU in bad faith, Johnson’s Vote Leave government also implicitly confessed that it lied wholesale to the electorate in December’s general election. The cross-contamination of domestic politics by the deceit that is Brexit’s DNA is now complete.

Now that a deal has been done, the end of Britain’s life as a member of the European Union can be decently mourned. As funeral orations go, the one William Shakespeare put into the mouth of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar is, well, world-beating: “The evil that men do lives after them,/ The good is oft interred with their bones.” Before we throw the last handful of earth on the corpse of Britain’s membership of the European Union, we might briefly disinter the good things about the relationship.

A bad ending gets projected backwards. A messy divorce obliterates the years of reasonably happy marriage. Brexit has projected into the future a sour story of resentment and rancour. Almost 50 years of history are squeezed into a deterministic story of irreconcilable incompatibility. The evil lives on; the good rots in the earth.

Now that it’s a reality, can an esteemed historian produce convincing arguments for the UK’s departure from the EU?

They may have triumphed in politics, but in academia, Brexiters are an embattled minority. Perhaps the most combative of their tribunes is the emeritus professor of history at Cambridge, Robert Tombs. Beyond the innate value of dissent, Tombs’s own position is also intrinsically interesting. As a brilliant historian of 19th-century France, he can hardly be written off as a Little Englander. As a French citizen by marriage, he presumably continues to enjoy the benefits of EU citizenship as well, so he has less skin in the game than most.

A short, punchy, eloquent statement from such a distinguished historian on the case for the kind of very hard Brexit that has now become a reality raises hopes for some genuine illumination. But The Sovereign Isle will, for varying reasons, disappoint both many of Tombs’s fellow Brexiters and anyone looking for a cogent statement of what this great disruption means for the economic and political future of the UK.