Voices: The secret Brexit summit was an exercise in self-delusion
Ditchley Park is a grade 1-listed building, so it may very well be that a crime has been committed. Are you even allowed to bang your head repeatedly against its specially selected Burford stone for a full weekend in a futile search for “How to make Brexit work better”?
It is hard to see what else can have happened at the “secret cross-party summit on Brexit” that took place last week, attended by Michael Gove, Peter Mandelson, and most of the big names on both sides of the Brexit divide – particularly as no one who was there is especially willing to tell anyone.
But we do know that, despite the attendance of Gove, Norman Lamont, Michael Howard, and the de facto Vote Leave deputy campaign leader Gisela Stuart, the Daily Mail has already concluded it was a “secret plot to unravel Brexit”.
It is hard to know what “unravel” means in this context. Gove, apparently, was very “honest” about Brexit’s many shortcomings, and there is certainly no doubt that nothing can unravel Brexit faster than the H-word.
Being honest about Brexit is the very worst thing you can ever do, which is precisely why no one in favour of it has ever been honest about it (apart from Gove, who we now know is happy to be “honest” about Brexit – as long as that honesty happens in private, and no one is allowed to be told any of the details).
It is seven years since Gove, in the face of conclusive analysis by absolutely every mainstream bank, economist and think tank that Brexit could only ever do harm to the economy, birthed the pre-Trumpian phrase: “The people of this country have had enough of experts.” It was a moment of staggering shamelessness (although Gove, to his credit, has intimated on several occasions since that he is at least ashamed of it).
And yet it is only a week since his apparent protege, Kemi Badenoch, dismissed concerns about Brexit-induced damage to the UK economy as a “fake conversation”: the sort of comment The Donald would have been proud of.
No, it turns out that asking why there are absolutely no economic benefits to Brexit – only enormous costs – is, according to Badenoch, “Like asking a couple who’ve just got married: ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?’”
Perhaps what she meant to say is that it’s like asking someone who’s just got divorced whether he’s absolutely sure he’s happier now he’s living out of his car.
We can only imagine quite what honesty Gove deployed in the secret meeting. But, in the Thucydidean sense, we can imagine it went something like this: “OK, yes, everything we said in the campaign we completely made up. All of the Facebook ads about Turkey joining the EU were strategic lies, carefully directed at the people most susceptible to them, whose data we gathered through a moody football-prediction game with a £1m prize we knew no one would ever win. And what do you know, it worked! But now the economy is completely banjaxed, and we don’t have a clue what to do about it, so maybe you guys could help?”
But the trouble is, they can’t. Brexit has gone entirely according to plan. It’s hard to recall now, but back in early 2016, very large numbers of people who voted for Brexit were in no doubt that it would make them and their country poorer, but thought it was worth it to get their sovereignty back and then to use it to tell immigrants to go away.
That is precisely what’s happened, but now the government finds itself struggling to get from day to day, managing the inevitable, foreseeable, and indeed very much foreseen consequences of its own actions.
Having to solve massive economic problems with massively less money than it would otherwise have had. Knowing that it can’t turn round and tell the voters that, yes, it’s a shame about the enormous waits in A&E, but come on, you did vote for Brexit – because they might very well turn round and point out that it told them to. That’s why they regret it, and have changed their minds; but the government can’t possibly admit the same.
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, imagines that the best strategy is to remain as close to silent on the subject as possible, or to otherwise repurpose the “Take Back Control” slogan to create a kind of post-Brexit intellectual fantasy-land where he and a Brexit-loving factory worker from Sunderland were really always on the same side.
The short answer is, there are no answers. The little secret summit, which was apparently called “How to make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?”, might just as well have been titled “How to keep your cake after you’ve eaten it.”
There’s only one man who’s ever tried to claim such a thing was possible, and you may recall what happened to him. He was kicked out of 10 Downing Street because his party correctly calculated that the British public would never believe a word he said, ever again. It was right to do so.
But it would have been far wiser for no one ever to have believed him in the first place.
