Voting Brexit to punish the PM would be self-defeating | Matthew d’Ancona
Like Thelma and Louise gripping each other’s hands as they speed over the cliff’s edge, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are powering towards the lip of the canyon marked “Brexit”. What will become of the fugitive twosome?
Though the formal referendum campaign does not begin until 14 April, the fate of the London mayor and the justice secretary has provided the first week of unofficial skirmishing with a gripping soap opera arc. Will David Cameron ever forgive his friend Mike? And what about George Osborne, whose alliance with Gove was thought to be unbreakable?
As for Boris, it was good to find him in the Times on Saturday declaring, yet again, that even if he is defeated in the referendum “the prime minister should remain” as leader. This is the rhetorical device of apophasis, in which the speaker or writer gives stealthy prominence to an idea by seeming to reject it. The purpose is to draw attention to the prime minister’s supposed political fragility, while asserting notional loyalty. Cunning.
Thus far, the Brexiteers have been on the front foot. It’s not that the remainers had an especially bad week. On Wednesday, Conservatives In, the official Tory party campaign for continued membership of the EU, was launched in London. Letters from military and security grandees and from 197 business leaders appeared in the press, insisting that leaving the EU was too great a risk.
The leavers intend to campaign with a promise of the glory that awaits once Britain is liberated from Europe’s chokehold
All the standard ordnance of referendum battles is being deployed, and doubtless it will have some effect. Yet the in camp – under the umbrella of Britain Stronger in Europe – needs to remember how much has changed since 1975, when the British were last consulted on membership of what was then the Common Market. It is not just that the last vestiges of deference to the establishment have been swept away. In this age of “anti-politics” – whatever that truly means – the establishment’s espousal of a cause or a principle can contaminate it.
There will be wavering voters who decide to vote for continued membership because they trust Cameron to make the right judgment. But there will be many others who opt for Brexit precisely because the prime minister wants Britain to stay in. This is an age of scorn and sneering, in which all politicians are expected to be liars and all institutions are assumed to be corrupt. It is what the American writer David Foster Wallace called the tyranny of irony.
Already we can see how the leavers intend to frame the campaign: not as an apocalyptic warning of what will come to pass if we stay in the EU, but as a promise of the buccaneering glory that lies ahead of Britain once liberated from the European stranglehold. It is, to say the least, a numinous vision of collective emancipation. One only has to read Isaiah Berlin’s essay Winston Churchill in 1940, to grasp where it draws its inspiration. This was no time, Berlin wrote, for “tacking and bending and timid compromise” but for men of the war leader’s character: “He knows with an unshakeable certainty what he considers to be big, handsome, noble and worthy of pursuit.”
Churchill himself urged Foreign Office officials not to try “to be too clever, to enter into refinements of policy unsuited to the tragic simplicity and grandeur of the times and the issues at stake”. This, I think, is how “out” will present the referendum: not as a means of averting disaster but as a key that opens the gate to national greatness.
It is no accident, therefore, that the leavers hate what they call Project Fear – the in camp’s warning that Brexit is at best a “leap in the dark” and probably much worse. Uninspiring? No doubt. But also highly effective. At the risk of “entering into refinements of policy”, an out vote on 23 June would activate article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union, the clauses that set out the protocol for a member state leaving the union. The bad news for the Brexiteers is that the representatives of “the withdrawing member state shall not participate in the discussions of the European council or council [of the EU, technically a different body] or in decisions concerning it”.
David Cameron launches Tory campaign to stay in the EU
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I simply cannot see why the remaining 27 member states, recently rejected by the British electorate, should give us a new, improved trade deal as a leaving present. On Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, Iain Duncan Smith, one of the most committed and principled cabinet Brexiteers, was conspicuously incapable of giving a straightforward answer to this straightforward question. For IDS, departure from the EU is “a stride into the light”. But that’s the problem: he sounds like a true believer reciting an article of faith, not a cabinet minister announcing an evidence-based policy.
On Sunday it was reported that Cameron faces a leadership challenge after the referendum – whatever the result - if he does not “call a halt to ‘blue on blue’ attacks on fellow Conservatives”. In other words, the Brexiteers assert the right to say what they like about the deal negotiated by Cameron and the EU policy of the party and government of which they are members, and to speculate about Cameron’s future – but the prime minister and his colleagues must not return fire.
This is plainly preposterous. The prominent Brexiteers have all worked with Cameron for years and know that he is inclined to conciliation and an enemy of faction. But if they think he does not value loyalty to his leadership and to government policy, they have not been paying attention. The prime minister suspended collective responsibility on this matter out of political necessity, not a longing for four months of internal dissent.
This is no time for a purge (that will come later). But what Cameron must do, by any means necessary, is to dissuade the voters from exploiting the referendum as a safe opportunity to give him a kicking. On 5 May there will be mayoral, town hall, Scottish and Welsh elections, all of which will enable the electorate to express displeasure with the government, with austerity, with Eton, with anything. But the vote on 23 June should be different, and Cameron would do well to say as much, explicitly. It cannot be spelt out too often that those who go into the polling booths minded to hurt the prime minister by voting out will only be harming themselves.