I don’t want to spend all my time arguing about Europe,” said the Plymouth MP Johnny Mercer today. “That’s not why I joined the Conservative party.” Really? This is like downloading a movie called Reservoir Dogging and feeling like the dialogue wasn’t as crackling as everyone said it was. Still, have you been mis-sold Conservative party membership? Are you shocked – shocked! – to find that arguing about Europe is going on in here? Do you read Playboy for the interviews? If so, there’s a job going at the David Cameron Institute for Settling Issues for a Generation.
Another week, another masterclass from the self-styled natural party of government. The prime minister’s trip to China saw her forced to claim “I am not a quitter”, before being humiliatingly congratulated in a Chinese state newspaper editorial for not bringing up human rights with the regime. (Bit disappointed they didn’t headline it “May, you live in interesting times”, but I am available for advice next time they send a subeditor to the labour camps.)
Despite giving off the vibes of a Swansea manager who’s just been given the full confidence of the board, May still appears to have a somewhat rosy view of the future. Britain would not have to choose between trade agreements with Europe and the rest of the world, she told the BBC, because “I don’t believe that those are the alternatives”. I mean … I don’t believe that I won’t open the batting against Pakistan at Lord’s in May, but it’s possible we’re both going to have to get used to disappointment.
Thank God for the fortnightly column in the Telegraph by her former chief of staff, Nick Timothy. Do you ever read this curiosity? I don’t see it so much as a newspaper article as a hand shooting up from a grave, holding a schlock-horror message. This week’s bloody scribble reads: “Tories who are tempted to move against the prime minister must know the alternative is chaos.” Thanks, Nick! See you in a couple of weeks, where the piece of paper will say: “You can’t win anything with kids.” (If you haven’t updated your records, please note that the de facto slogan of the Conservative party is now “It’s this shitshow or chaos”. Things have certainly evolved since Cameron’s classic statement of 2015, where he warned: “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice: stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband.”)
The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that in no more than a couple of months, we will look back on this period of abject misrule as one of comparative stability. After all, the week’s other highlights included Brexit minister Steve Baker airing a conspiracy theory at the dispatch box, and an orca talking more sense than Iain Duncan Smith. These gentlemen have the whip hand in the Conservative party.
It’s always great to hear from IDS, whose analysis is several leagues less sophisticated than the England fan who thinks the problem with the national side is that they aren’t playing with enough “passion”. “The problem with these forecasts,” explained IDS of government analysis showing that Britain would be worse off in all three Brexit scenarios, “is it depends which forecast you use. They [economists] did not forecast the crash of 2009 – the only thing you can trust is what happened in 2016.”
And yet the search for the Rosetta stone of the Brexit vote continues. The fact that the government wouldn’t yet like to say what it means is a game of chicken sure to end in a multi-fatality pile-up. Again this week, the PM’s spokesman claimed May would set out her vision for the UK’s relationship with the EU “in due course”. Due Course? We passed Due Course three towns ago. We are now in a sort of Brexit wild west, where lawless Tories are saying and doing as they please.
Stop me if I’m getting too technical here, but this is now a government where economists explaining that a “trade barrier” is a “barrier to trade” are accused of sabotage. It is a government where a minister who suggests policy should be led by “evidence, not dogma” is disciplined. So arse-about-tit is the notion of public service that the dutiful Phillip Lee was formally warned by the whips for the latter, while Steve Baker has escaped punishment for floating his dangerous rubbish, proving the old adage that a complete tool always blames his workmen.
The last time we saw this sort of fact-free messianism in government was around the Iraq war, where a whole host of people who should have known better discounted all serious evidence and did the thing they wanted anyway. They made zero plans for what would happen after, and retroactively claimed it had been done for entirely different reasons than those it had. Within a year of the glorious moment of “liberation”, Tony Blair was reduced to making a speech whose central thesis was: “I only know what I believe.” (Again, the idea that he should now be lecturing leavers about evidence and being straight with the nation is the eyeroll of the decade.)
Today, it is impossible to escape the judgment that the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, IDS and now Baker only know what they believe, whatever the facts and figures say. IDS, incidentally, was exactly the same over a damning National Audit Office report on his universal credit policy, for which he also blamed his own civil servants, dismissing detailed expert arguments with religious fervour: “The reality is, I believe it to be right.” And so with Brexit.
Is there a passage in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that explains how believing things about how trade or economics works makes them come true? Or did I read that in Noel Edmonds’s seminal text on cosmic ordering – the practice of asking the universe for things you want? Either way, there must be some weapons-grade good news about Brexit buried out there in the sand. If we bomb a little harder for it, I’m sure it’ll turn up in Due Course.