What everyone knows but no one says about Brexit

Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if often embarrassing, interlude. Liz Truss has gone in short order. The threat of a comeback by Johnson has been lifted. What a rollercoaster.

Each of these events, in its time, took centre-stage in our politics and each prime minister became for a while the object of contempt, suspicion and rage. I called Mrs May the death star of British politics; I called Mr Johnson a moral toad; I called Liz Truss a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering on a pinhead of a political brain. Invective comes easy and, though I’ve been at the shriller end of the range of media wrath, I was far from alone among British media observers in the energetic expression of reproach.

There will now follow a pause before, one fears, Rishi Sunak finds himself in the crosshairs of a nation and its Greek chorus of media commentary looking for someone new to blame. The wailing will resume.

As a former culprit, I can hardly complain. But this respite is at least affording me the chance quietly to review our (and my own) open seasons on all Sunak’s immediate predecessors, and ask – calmly and with the benefit of hindsight – just this: what big thing did any of these unfortunate souls actually do wrong? What mistakes were any of them guilty of that we’re sure made things a lot worse for Britain than they’d otherwise have been?

I have to conclude that, though you or I could compile a long list of stupid little blunders and regrettable utterances, and though the moral or political or presentational failings of each incumbent might spring easily to our lips, few glaring examples of a great unforced error that cost our country dear suggest themselves to me. Except one, to which in a moment I’ll come.

Take those most recent comedians of errors, Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. I know, I know: that notorious mini-Budget. Yes, of course it was ill-judged. And of course it did spook the international markets; it did trigger an increase in borrowing costs; it might have added to inflation; cutting taxes on rich people while threatening to cut benefits for the poor was insulting. All this is true. The mini-Budget was a political debacle, let’s agree on that. It cost us – a bit.

But was it in any important sense the cause of the fiscal and economic dilemmas our government now faces? No, it only sharpened and brought them to a head. Did it, of itself, create the awful tension between what’s needed to curb inflation, and what’s needed to kick-start economic growth? Again, no. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt turn, now, to the same problem. In a sense Truss merely crystallised it.

In the months ahead there will be a temptation to demonise her, to represent her short and silly moment in the footlights as a cliff’s edge that she nearly took us over before we were rescued by Rishi. Well, I admire Mr Sunak and have been a consistent advocate of his ascendancy. I think he’ll make the most intelligent fist possible of the job we’ve given him. But Truss was more an annoying distraction than the author of our woes. The woes are still there, and they’re not mostly her fault.

How about Boris then: another PM I’ve railed against? Amid a waste of unedifying little things he did wrong – the parties, the dissimulation, the false promises, the wallpaper – is there any big thing? I struggle to identify one. You may say that signing the Northern Ireland Protocol then insisting it didn’t mean what it plainly does mean was a huge error. Maybe – but an unforced one? Johnson had to get Brexit done; the country demanded it; it couldn’t be achieved without some kind of a fix to the problem of the Irish border; his predecessor, Theresa May, had failed to find one.

Her fault then? Absolutely not. Logic said that the United Kingdom couldn’t leave Margaret Thatcher’s European single market without some kind of a border somewhere, either on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea. So again I ask: where during these recent, turbulent years, can we identify any big wrong turning that – under any of our last four administrations, from David Cameron’s to Liz Truss’s – Britain took?

The answer is lurking beneath this little history, and beneath every shenanigan, every twist and turn, that our politics has faced. Lurking, but never quite surfacing. It is there in the collective unconscious of a nation but hardly acknowledged because its acknowledgement is just too painful, too ready to take us to war again – to war with each other and with ourselves. It is among the reasons the dream of an uptick in economic growth eludes us. It is the reason half the Conservative party feels resentful towards the other half, and the other half feels bruised and angry. And it is the doing not of our politicians, but of the British people.

Brexit isn’t working. We should never have left: and if we were implacably resolved to leave, we should have stayed in the single market. We didn’t, because remaining as rule-takers while ceasing to be rule-makers looked silly – and was silly. So we plumped instead for something that turned out to be even sillier: the dream of a buccaneering Britain, slashing regulations and making great new trade deals around the globe. In our hearts we all now know this won’t happen, but Leavers don’t want to acknowledge it and Remainers see no point in rubbing it in.

There is an answer: turn again. Seek some kind of associate membership of the single market. The thought dare not yet speak its name, but is beginning to take shape in our national unconscious political mind. It will fall to a Labour government to articulate it. But not yet.