Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson have been dubbed the Thelma and Louise of Brexit. Like the characters from the 1991 Hollywood film, the two candidates say they are prepared to end the Brexit adventure by driving us over a cliff. In the movie it was two women on the run who lost their lives. With the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, a country is at stake. It beggars belief that both men are prepared to plunge the economy into the abyss with apparent disregard for people’s jobs; or that they would stress-test to breaking point the union between the country’s biggest nations; or put the hard-won peace and security of Northern Ireland at risk.
The problem is that the Conservative party membership does not reflect the UK, yet it will elect a prime minister to lead the country. Tory members predominantly are elderly, wealthy and concentrated in the southern half of England. They are also more rightwing than the population as a whole and seriously deluded: they are unconvinced, despite their own government’s best recent efforts, that a no-deal Brexit would cause serious disruption. In a survey earlier this year, three-quarters of them said such warnings were “exaggerated or invented”. Little wonder that Nick Boles, a former Conservative MP who became an independent after failing to convince fellow Tories to compromise over Brexit, thinks only exposure to the disaster of a no-deal exit from the EU would shake former colleagues out of their stupor.
Instead of challenging their electorate, the two prime ministerial candidates have pandered to their worst instincts. The result has been an arms race in no-deal rhetoric that has revealed the outlines of a state-shrinking, low-tax, deregulatory Brexit project that is inimical to the interests of the country and seeks to strip protections hard fought for in the fields of employment, environment and consumer rights. Both men appear to be selling the idea of a managed no-deal. This introduces big problems that – despite claims to the contrary – WTO membership can’t address, and EU crisis negotiations are unlikely to. It also suffers from the very same flaw as Theresa May’s deal – of being dependent on the EU’s goodwill, which would have been exhausted by the determined foolishness of whoever is prime minister.
It looks almost certain that Mr Johnson will win the race to Downing Street. Mr Boles worries that there is no easy route for MPs, even in a parliament that the Tories do not control, to block Mr Johnson taking the UK out of the EU without a deal. He thinks Tory MPs would not vote to bring down their own government to prevent a no-deal Brexit. The former Conservative minister believes Mr Johnson would probably enact a no-deal Brexit and then call an election, a strategy which has the attraction of outflanking Nigel Farage.
The process of choosing the next PM has given greater weight to party interests than those of government or country. With Brexit this is not a good thing. Trouble is being stored up for the future by mainlining nationalism into post-Brexit politics as well as bringing up immigration constantly. The choice of populism as a narrative frame – with an out-of-touch elite intent on depriving a sovereign people of a decision they voted for – is as dangerous as it is trite. Britain’s political crisis has already reached new lows; it ought not to plumb even greater depths.
