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Bye, Bye Britain. Party is over - you are on your own |
Boris Johnson, Brexit, Britain, Divorce, EU, “If we are victorious in one more battle … we shall be utterly ruined.”
Like
the good intellectual that he’s vigorously pretended not to be of late,
Boris Johnson will probably know that line. It’s from the Greek
historian Plutarch’s account of the battle that gave us the phrase
“pyrrhic victory”, the kind of victory won at such cost that you almost
wish you’d lost.
In theory, Johnson woke up on Friday
morning having won the war. After David Cameron’s announcement that he
would step down come October, Johnson is now the heir presumptive –
albeit at this stage very presumptive – to the Tory leadership, perhaps
only four months away from running the country.
He has
everything he ever wanted. It’s just that somehow, as he fought his way
through booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an
uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it
didn’t really look that way.
One group of Tory
remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather pale
Johnson said leaving Europe needn’t mean pulling up the drawbridge; that
this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow “take the wind out of
the sails” of anyone playing politics with immigration. Too late for all
that now, one said.
he scariest possibility, however,
is that he actually meant it. That like most of Westminster, Johnson
always imagined we’d grudgingly vote to stay in the end. That he too
missed the anger bubbling beneath the surface, and is now as shocked as
anyone else by what has happened.
“People talk about
reluctant remainers, but I think there have been a lot of reluctant
Brexiters around, people who voted leave thinking it wouldn’t happen but
they’d be able to vent and to tell all their friends at dinner parties
they’d done it,” said one Tory minister.
“He thought
what all those reluctant Brexiters thought: it would be a vote for
remain, he would be seen as having stood up for a principle.” After
which leave’s newest martyr could simply have bided his time for a year
or so before being triumphantly installed in Downing Street.
It’s
perfectly possible, of course, that the Tories on both sides who
suspect Johnson was never an outer in his bones are plain wrong, that
the anonymous Labour MP who hotly accused him on Friday of jeopardising
thousands of ordinary people’s jobs just to secure one for himself was
doing him a terrible injustice.
Perhaps Johnson really
did have a last-minute epiphany, declaring for leave in the sober
realisation that this was always how it might end – Scotland demanding
independence, Northern Ireland’s fragile political settlement at risk,
Marine Le Pen jubilant, the Bank of England stumping up £250bn to
stabilise the market. Perhaps he’s still convinced all will be fine
eventually.
And let’s hope to God he’s right. Any
remainer who doesn’t pray to be proved wrong about Brexit is callous,
wishing disaster on people who are unable to afford it. But right now,
what scorched earth Johnson stands to inherit – a nation febrile and
divided, teetering on the brink of economic and constitutional crisis.
It’s all over for David Cameron now. But it feels, too, like the end of a
broader modernising movement to which both he and Johnson belonged.
Johnson
is far from a buffoon. He’s an agile thinker, gifted communicator and
natural opportunist who made a reasonable fist of governing London after
recruiting some reliable deputies (enter Michael Gove). He’s smart
enough to have learned from the recent Labour leadership campaign – in
which managerially competent candidates were slaughtered for being on
the wrong side of a visceral grassroots argument – that elites only
survive in this febrile climate by pleasing the masses. Perhaps somehow
it will all come together.
It’s just that on Friday
morning Johnson didn’t look like a man with a plan that’s all working
perfectly. He looked more like a king unable to take more such
victories.
Note Almere-Digest: Following Brexit the EU must make sure not to sign any agreement with
Britain which gives them preferential treatment.on Trade,Visa,Tax
excemptions and immediately treat their Government and Citizens exactly as they
would any other non EU country.
In doing so it will also send a clear
message not only to Britain but also to other EU nations that if you are
a member of the EU you can't have your cake and eat it also.
Read more: A pyrrhic victory? Boris Johnson wakes up to the costs of Brexit | Politics | The Guardian