We hardly need reminding that Brexit is barely living up to the ideal of the buccaneering “global Britain” we were promised. Right now, it’s more like a clown show.
Leaving the European Union was the malign gift that keeps on giving. It has caused the social and economic damage we see around us, cramping living standards, public services, and even the defence of the realm for want of the prosperity we once took for granted. It has had a baleful effect on investment and growth, and left Britain a meaner, poorer, grubbier place. Indeed, it may well be said that Brexit broke Britain, and created a new wave of grievances for Nigel Farage to exploit. It’s his Ponzi scheme.
So won’t someone spare a thought for those who got us into this mess? Those like Michael Gove, and his now-former wife Sarah Vine, who has written a memoir of her life as a Westminster Wag.
Always a fluent writer, trenchant and not especially likeable, Vine makes it clear in the extracts published thus far that not only did Brexit break Britain, it also broke her and Gove’s somewhat one-sided and demi-mercenary “friendship” with David and Samantha Cameron. It doesn’t seem to have done much good to the Goves’ own relationship, either (albeit as only one of the many strains inherent in being a political couple).
At any rate, Vine still despises Cameron. This is personal. Her illusions about the true nature of their friendship were shattered when she felt the “abyss of class” between them.
Gove was havering about which side to back in the EU referendum, torn between his genuine Euroscepticism (unlike Boris Johnson’s) and the loyalty he felt to his party leader. Cameron, pink-faced and charming but always with the whiff of Flashman about him, barked at Vine to “get her husband under control”: “For f***’s sake, Sarah, I’m fighting for my political life here.”
But it’s political contempt, too, that Vine feels, so she also charges Cameron with cowardice – being a “man baby” when he lost the Brexit referendum and immediately resigned as prime minister.
As she puts it: “What an impossible, irresponsible child, throwing his toys out of the pram because he hadn’t got his own way. It felt a bit like he would sooner bring the country down than let Leave have its victory. Et tu, Pontius Pilate.”
Fair? Certainly, it was childish. But in many ways, it feels like it no longer matters. Aside from a brief and, in the end, futile return as foreign secretary under Rishi Sunak, Cameron’s political career was over the moment David Dimbleby declared “We’re out” on the television.
Same for all of them. Gove is now an elder statesman, a peer and editor of The Spectator, and a one-time Svengali to Kemi Badenoch – but his party is in the toilet. A return to power for any of the people concerned looks about as likely as Elvis Presley being found alive on the moon.
The chumocracy was as broken by Brexit as was Britain. Johnson, never that close to Gove, fell out with him shortly after the referendum vote, when Gove stabbed him in the front during the post-Cameron leadership election. Only George Osborne seems to have emerged from it all without serious PTSD.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Cameron did certainly break his promise to the British people – that whatever the result of the referendum, he would carry on as prime minister. But on that grim June morning when everything changed, that felt like a ridiculous idea.
It was his referendum. It was his idea. Osborne had cautioned against it, and Gove might have preferred that it hadn’t happened, because, in the end, it finished off his chances of ever getting the top job, and of his missus becoming Britain’s “first lady” as opposed to just First Lady of Fleet Street.
It would have been impossible for Cameron to carry on and negotiate Brexit. Farage would have claimed he wasn’t a “true believer” (correct, obviously), and Cameron would never have been safe from Johnson’s unquenchable ambition.
Vine’s weakest argument is that Gove and Johnson had solemnly sworn, in writing, to serve Cameron even if Leave won. From Johnson’s point of view, the whole point of the EU referendum was that it would be lost but still weaken Cameron, strengthening his own claim to a senior cabinet job and installing him as the heir apparent, elbowing Osborne and Gove out of the way.
With the Leave win, Johnson overachieved. At that point, he wanted the premiership more than Cameron did, but it was Theresa May, not Johnson, Gove or Cameron, who became the first post-Brexit premier (of five, amazingly, so far). After it was her turn to foul up, she was followed by the successive failures of Johnson, Liz Truss (last seen promoting Irish whiskey with a cage fighter) and Sunak, who may yet prove to have been the last Conservative prime minister in every sense.
What these flawed personalities all have in common is an iron will to avoid the blame for what they and their political movement visited upon the country. Badenoch is their legacy.
Soon, the 10th anniversary commemorations of Brexit will begin, and the old wounds will be opened up once again, just as they were, briefly, with the recent modest “reset”. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems very obvious now that, apart from the economy and those who rely on what’s left of the welfare state, the biggest loser of all from Brexit has been the Conservative Party.
Fractious and fractured as ever, it is now electorally smashed, rudderless, assailed by Reform UK, with its last generation of leaders not on speaking terms – cry babies all. In her own bitter way, Vine is the ideal chronicler of their pathetic, self-pitying decline.
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