A new poll on Brexit is out today, commissioned as ever by the Remainers. This one tells us, like many polls on Brexit are telling us at the moment, that Labour Leavers are switching to Remain in significant numbers. Given some Tories are all over the media talking up the idea that Brexit equals some sort of libertarian utopia that may take half a century to feel the benefits from, this isn’t all that surprising. Of course, what emerges from all of this that is particularly tiresome is the thought that Jeremy Corbyn is just waiting for public opinion to turn before showing his true Remainery colours.
“We need the Opposition to step up and give a real alternative to government’s Brexit deal, starting with a people’s vote with an option to stay, lead and thrive in Europe,” says Eloise Todd, CEO of Best for Britain. Yeah, except he’s life long Eurosceptic and pretending this isn’t the case may possibly lead to disappointment.
Meanwhile, the Eurosceptics in the Conservative party bash the Chequers deal this way and that – but never seem to have a really bad word to say about the prime minister, as if her Brexit plan and her premiership had absolutely no connection to one another. She is the best choice for prime minister, don’t get them wrong – she’s just completely wrong about Brexit, that’s all. And probably most other things, but let’s not delve into that at present. At least I have some sympathy with those projecting onto Corbyn – he’s there for the foreseeable future, so you have to work with what you have. The Tories can get another leader, fairly straightforwardly. Leavers within the party don’t like May because they feel that Chequers is a betrayal; Remainers don’t like May because she’s committed herself to far too many red lines and now can’t roll back into anything sensible. Yet there she remains.
British politics appears to be caught in a Mexican standoff. Everyone is scared to make a move lest it put them in an even worse position. But someone has to move sometime.
Until then, people on the left will continue to insist Corbyn goes to sleep every night with an EU flag draped around him, while people on the right will persist with the belief that Mrs May is the perfect prime minister, if only she wasn’t wrong about every single thing in the entire universe.
We may go over the cliff with both parties dragging us to oblivion but is it also possible that the voters who are deeply loyal to their parties go down with them like lemmings to the slaughter?
What I still can’t work out is what May intended to do if she got her massive majority last year. Clearly her instincts are for as soft a break as possible, cf Chequers. So was her plan to get a big enough majority that she could pursue a soft, stay-in-the-customs-union-for-ever Brexit without caring that fifty of the ERG rebelled, because she had a majority of seventy? That seems the most likely explanation.
But in that case what was the Lancaster House speech about? Was that just to get Leavers on side so that she could then stab them in the back later when they couldn’t do anything about it?
The Tories can get another leader, fairly straightforwardly
Well, ish. The Remainers can’t get another leader because they know no Remainer can win the run-off when it goes to the party membership. So they have an incentive to keep May, who they presumably see as weak and bully-able into having another referendum (which will come up Leave again, but that’s by the by).
For the Leavers the problem is how to do it without accidentally letting Johnson slip through the middle.
If the run-off is any Remainder versus any Leaver, it’s the Leaver by a landslide.
If it’s two Leavers, and one of them is Boris… well, I wouldn’t want to call that one. Boris is a terrible human being but for some reason a lot of the party members, who who would hope would have a better moral compass, seem to be fooled by him.
So the Leavers have to be sure, when they make their move, that they can engineer things so that the final two are either a Remainer versus a Leaver who isn’t Johnson, or two Leavers who aren’t Johnson. That’s not straightforward, as if the Remainers can get their act together behind a single candidate and the Leavers split, Johnson could sneak through.
So, yeah, getting rid of May is easy… but only in the sense that getting rid of Saddam was easy. It’s the decade afterwards that’s the trouble.