by John Crace
Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for. Brexit was meant to be the crowning achievement of Davis’s career. A personal and national liberation from all those Brussels bureaucrats who had made his life a living hell for the past 44 years. Not that he could quite remember what it was they had done that was so bad, but he was sure they must have done something simply because they weren’t British.
But then Theresa May messed things up completely by putting him in charge of all the complicated Brexit stuff that he had never really properly understood. To make things worse, with both Liam Fox and Boris Johnson reckoned to be total liabilities by the prime minister, he was always the one sent out to do all the tricky media stuff. So by the time he had spent several hours touring the TV studios and radio stations trying to explain why the threat to let foreigners die if they didn’t do a deal wasn’t really a threat, he was half-asleep by the time he had to present the great repeal bill to the Commons.
‘Exciting opportunity … going forward … embracing change,’ he said in a barely audible monotone. It was one thing to remember Theresa’s advice of accentuating the positives but beyond him to do so as if he meant it. ‘The great repeal bill will,’ he continued, searching frantically for the right words. ‘Will … will … make all EU law UK law.’ What happened after that was anyone’s guess. He didn’t have a clue how much EU law was already UK law, what laws the government might want to change, how they would be changed or who would get to do it. But no one would be too interested in those sort of details, surely?
Davis looked horrified when Keir Starmer homed in on precisely those areas. Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary can sometimes be rather awkward at the dispatch box but as a lawyer, today he was in his element. Starmer wanted to make sure no fundamental rights were going to be revoked and that the government wasn’t looking to do away with some laws on the sly without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
‘I ask the minister to look again at this,’ said Starmer. Davis almost burst into tears. Please no. Anything but that. He’d given it all a quick glance before he had come out and surely that was enough.
‘We’ll put things right if we’ve missed anything,’ said Davis. ‘I promise.’ Scout’s honour. Though he couldn’t extend that promise to necessarily allowing MPs to have a vote on anything because some of them – he was looking at the SNP now – might try to block it. After all, what was the point of the government making life any more difficult for itself? Things were going to be tricky enough now that Article 50 had been triggered and the Germans and French had the upper hand without having to worry about attacks on the home front.
Nick Clegg began by congratulating the Brexit secretary for not pandering to the hard-line Eurosceptics in his party. Davis looked concerned. Praise from a committed Europhile was not the response he had been expecting. ‘I’m delighted to see you have kept the jewels in the EU crown, such as the working time directive. But why, if we are to keep them, are we going to the effort of leaving the EU anyway?’ Davis said nothing. All that was well above his pay grade.
A few Eurosceptics woke up at this point and started mumbling about ‘the ghastly EU’ and ‘a glorious return to parliamentary sovereignty’. Albeit a return without a return to parliamentary democracy. Davis happily acknowledged their wisdom. We were getting rid of all European Court of Justice legislation, he insisted. Apart from the bits we weren’t, which would be called the British European Court of Justice legislation. Satisfied everyone was now as confused as him, Davis went for a lie-down.
* * *
During the nine months that she had been in office, Theresa May had repeatedly insisted that she wouldn’t be calling an early general election. ‘There should be no general election until 2020,’ she had said in June 2016 as she tried to present herself as the continuity candidate in the Conservative leadership race.
In September 2016, she had told Andrew Marr, ‘I’m not going to be calling a snap election. I’ve been very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020.’ The following month, she gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which she said a general election before 2020 would bring unwanted instability to the country.
Amid mounting speculation in March 2017 that the Tories would be fools not to take advantage of their 20-point lead over Labour in the opinion polls to win themselves a landslide majority, No. 10 categorically denied that Theresa May was planning on calling an early election on at least two occasions. ‘It is not going to happen,’ the prime minister’s spokesman said.
But then, on the first day back after the Easter break, it did happen. The official version was that Theresa May had been reluctantly talked into it by her husband, Philip, while they had been walking in Snowdonia over Easter. The rather more believable version was that she had had her arm twisted by her two advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, along with some of the more hawkish members of her cabinet, and had come round to their way of thinking that an opportunity to kill off the Labour party for a decade or longer was just too good to pass up.
Dead-eyed Theresa May puts the Tories’ interests first
18 APRIL 2017
Right to the end, Theresa May was unable to keep to her own timetable. For the past six months, the prime minister had repeatedly insisted she wouldn’t be calling an early general election because it wasn’t in the best interests of the country. Sometime over Easter, Theresa was blessed with a divine revelation – there are advantages to being a vicar’s child – and came to the conclusion that her own party’s interests were rather more important than the country’s. So shortly before 10 a.m. her office announced that she would be making a statement in Downing Street at 11.15.
Worried she hadn’t caught enough people on the hop, Theresa darted out the front door of No. 10 nine minutes early and made a dash for the wooden lectern that had been hurriedly placed outside. She paused to clock her surroundings. Satisfied that comparatively few journalists had made it in time, she got straight to the point. After overdosing on elections in recent years, the country was now going through cold turkey. People were literally crawling up walls out of desperation to vote, and to satisfy their cravings she was going to give everyone another fix on 8 June.
Not that she wanted to be seen as a prime minister who didn’t keep her word. The problem was the opposition. They were doing the wrong thing by opposing her. Never mind that they weren’t being very effective, the problem was that they existed at all. They were a nuisance. Come to think of it, President Erdog˘ an had a point in clamping down on any dissent. ‘At this moment of national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division,’ May said. She had changed her mind over Brexit when she had spotted the opportunity to become prime minister and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why other people couldn’t be so flexible with their principles.
‘The country is coming together,’ she continued, waving away the inconvenient truth that no one could remember a time when it had been more split. ‘But Westminster is not.’ Labour MPs had said they might vote against a deal with the EU if they thought it wasn’t good enough. How very dare they!
The Lib Dems – all nine of them – had threatened to grind government business to a standstill. The SNP had promised to be the SNP. Life had become just impossible for her. Her opponents had tried to take advantage of her small majority, so now she was going to punish them by wiping them out completely.
At this point Theresa almost imagined herself to be a latter-day Winston Churchill. Only her enemies weren’t the Hun lining up to push the British Tommies into the Channel at Dunkirk, they were the enemy within. Those MPs who had dared to raise concerns on behalf of the 48% of the country who had voted to remain in the EU would be ruthlessly crushed.
‘Our opponents believe our resolve will weaken and that they can force us to change course,’ she said, unaware of how sinister she sounded. And looked.
Her eyes were almost as dead as her delivery: only by disconnecting from herself could she accommodate the cynicism of her position. ‘They are wrong. They underestimate our determination to get the job done and I am not prepared to let them endanger the security of millions of working people across the country.’ Quite right. If anyone was going to endanger the security of millions of working people, it would be her and her alone.
I. I. I. The longer Theresa went on, the more the statement became all about her. Her leadership. Her party. Her ego. Towards the end she made passing reference to the fact she had only last month declared she wouldn’t be calling a snap general election. That had turned out to be just a resolution she had made for Lent. She had tried and tried to resist the temptation of capitalising on the desperate state of the Labour party, taking the opportunity to force through a hard Brexit that almost no one in the country had voted for and guaranteeing a Conservative government for the conceivable future.
But when push had come to shove, the spirit had been willing but the flesh was weak. In what was left of her heart, she knew that no one in the country really wanted another election and that this was being played out for her own vanity and insecurity, but she just couldn’t help herself. ‘Politics isn’t a game,’ she concluded severely. But it was and it is. Her actions spoke far louder than her words.
May convinces MPs that Brexit requires her strong and ignorant leadership
19 APRIL 2017
‘To Brexit and beyond,’ announced a monotone Theresa May, the hollow sockets that pass for eyes giving nothing away. It didn’t have quite the ring of ‘to infinity and beyond’, but then the prime minister doesn’t have the charisma of Buzz Lightyear. Theresa can only aspire to the empathy levels of a cartoon character. She attempted a grin to try to prove she can do emotion but her mouth merely assumed a death-like rictus.
Theresa began the formalities of the parliamentary debate to approve her call for a general election where she had left off the day before. How dare anyone suggest she couldn’t be trusted to keep her word? When she had said she wasn’t going to call an election what she had really meant was that she wasn’t going to call an election until she changed her mind. No one could reasonably expect her to be any clearer than that.
The country was more united than it had ever been, she insisted. That was, united as in united in its divisions. And it was high time that Westminster fell into line. All this democratic dissent was getting on her nerves. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. What this country needed to see it through Brexit was a strong and ignorant leadership. And because she didn’t as yet have a clue what kind of deal she was going to be able to negotiate with the EU, no one was better equipped to provide that strong and ignorant leadership than her.
‘Now is the time for the country to decide,’ Theresa concluded. Several SNP MPs interrupted to enquire why now was also not the time for a second Scottish referendum. The prime minister just stared back blankly. Because the Scots couldn’t be trusted to vote the right way. Wasn’t that obvious? What was the point of having an election in which you didn’t already know the result?
Jeremy Corbyn breathed in deeply, channelling his inner Gabriel García Márquez. ‘We welcome the opportunity to have an early general election so we can give the country the Labour government it deserves,’ he said, going on to insist that the election would be fought on Tory cuts to the NHS and schools rather than Brexit and his leadership skills.
At times like this, magical realism comes into its own. Though not enough to impress his own backbenchers. Only a couple had bothered to cheer him when he had stood up to speak, and both of them looked as though they had regretted that support by the time Corbyn had finished his opening sentence.
The only moment of real Labour party unity had come earlier in the day when Yvette Cooper had deftly skewered Theresa at prime minister’s questions by pointing out that by effectively lying about the reasons for holding an election she had made it impossible for anyone to believe a word she said in the future. Theresa had tried to respond but had given up when she realised no one would believe her.
Corbyn’s willingness to vote for a general election he seemed almost certain to lose, rather than give the prime minister the headache of a no confidence vote, prompted the Conservative Desmond Swayne to conclude: ‘Turkeys really do vote for Christmas.’ It was hard to fault the logic.
Though Swayne shared his leader’s outrage that the views of the 48% who voted to remain in the EU should be represented in parliament, he did have one gripe. This was the second time he had taken Theresa at her word and made the mistake of assuring his constituents in the local paper that something wouldn’t happen that was now happening. Did she have anything else she wanted to tell him before he went for the hat-trick?
As it happened, she might. After accusing the prime minister of gaming the system for her own partisan, political advantage rather than in the national interest – Theresa hastily crossed herself several times – the SNP’s Angus Robertson wanted to know why she was so doggedly avoiding a televised debate. ‘I have some breaking news,’ he declared. ‘ITV have announced they are going to have a debate regardless.’
Could the prime minister confirm whether she was still not planning to take part?
Theresa giggled awkwardly. Part of her longed to say the real reason she didn’t want a televised debate was because she was worried she would be so brilliant that she would end up with too big a majority. There again, if she was to do a reverse ferret and give in to the broadcasters, then no one would hold it against her. Changing her mind was what she did.
* * *
A week into the general election campaign, the polls were still predicting the Tories would win a landslide majority. This prompted Theresa May and her team to believe they could conduct the election campaign entirely on their own terms. This included the prime minister insisting that she would not be taking part in any of the televised debates that had been a feature of the past two general elections. The reason that was given for Theresa May’s no shows was that they were an unwanted distraction and that what she really wanted to concentrate on was going round the country having real conversations with real people.
This might have been more believable if the prime minister had had a track record of getting out and meeting people. Her actual style was rather more akin to that of North Korea’s supreme leader – hence my giving her the nickname Kim Jong-May. She would be driven in to closely guarded locations to address a few local party activists for five or ten minutes in a series of meaningless soundbites. It was the ultimate in cynical, echo chamber politics. Not least because the TV cameras would be carefully placed to make a community hall that was three-quarters empty appear as if it was full.
A case in point had been her visit to Bridgend – a Labour heartland – the previous week. The Tory drill sergeant had been arranging his troops. ‘Present arms,’ he shouted. Several dozen activists held up their Strong and Stable Leadership placards. After about five minutes, almost everyone had had enough. One bloke near the back complained that his arm was aching. The drill sergeant wasn’t happy. He had told everyone to keep their placards up until after the Supreme Leader had left and that heads would roll if her reception wasn’t anything other than ecstatic. Starting with his.
Eight minutes earlier than planned, a commotion at the main entrance put everyone on full alert. Once again the placards, all of them identical, were thrust into the air and this time they stayed there as Kim Jong-May was greeted with rapture. She smiled awkwardly. The Supreme Leader isn’t entirely comfortable meeting ordinary people, even when they have been hand-picked for their devotion.
‘This is the most important election in my lifetime,’ she began. Primarily because it was the only one in which she had ever stood as Supreme Leader. Kim Jong-May told herself to relax and try harder to engage with her people, but she wasn’t entirely sure how to do so. It was so hard to do empathy when everyone in the room was weak and u
nstable. She willed her eyes to convey warmth, but they remained ice-cold. ‘What this country needs is strong and stable leadership,’ she continued. ‘And only I can provide that strong and stable leadership.’ Anything less was unthinkable.
A few minutes in, Kim Jong-May began to switch off. She had said all she had come to say and really wanted to go home, but she understood there were niceties to be observed so she went through the motions. ‘This country needs strong and stable leadership,’ she said again, her voice now stuck in a metronomic loop. ‘And I am what strong and stable leadership looks like. People say the country is divided, but everywhere I go I see a unity of purpose.’ It helps if you only go to places where you are assured of a warm reception.
Strong and stable leadership. Every sentence began and ended with strong and stable leadership. That’s all the country needed. Other than a plan. ‘We need to have a plan,’ she confided. ‘And that’s why we have a plan.’ Though she wasn’t prepared to reveal what that plan was. Only that the plan was to have strong and stable leadership. With strong and stable leadership, Brexit, the economy and cuts to services would look after themselves. Because when you had strong and stable leadership it invariably turned out that your plan was the right one even when it was the wrong one. Just under 10 minutes after she had started, the Supreme Leader drew to a close. Five minutes later she had left the building.