Charles Moore

‘What would Margaret Thatcher do about Brexit?’ people keep asking me. Why do they think I would know? If I have a ‘USP’ with my book, it is that I tend to know what she did do. I have no more idea than anyone else what she would have done. The speculation is idle, except to the extent that it might make people reflect on the contemporary relevance of what she thought or did. In this respect, her approach to the electoral importance of the idea of a referendum is suggestive. At the end of October 1990, when she had just returned, in a rage, from the Rome Summit which pushed forwards towards Economic and Monetary Union, I attended a reception at 10 Downing Street.

So what should Boris Johnson do now? Obviously the law officers are twitchy. They defer to judges and their later careers may depend on them. But as the Supreme Court judges make much of not impugning Boris’s motives before going on to savage him, he is perfectly entitled to employ the same technique. Boris can say that the Supreme Court and Mr Speaker between them have contrived, in the name of democracy, an arrangement by which democracy cannot operate. Parliament has no confidence in the government, but refuses to vote to say so because that would provoke the election which Labour and Remainers fear. I come back to that spider’s web. Boris resembles Sam Gamgee in Shelob’s lair, and only he, armed with Frodo’s dagger Sting, can cut their way out.

In the debate on Tuesday, the standard of speaking was high. As well as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Nick Boles, Liam Fox and David Cameron’s replacement in Witney, Robert Courts, were all excellent. On the whole, the rebels were the more eloquent, as rebels usually are. Their one false note, however, was that of self-pity. There was too much — from Boles, Soubry and (though humorous) Clarke — about how they had suffered for their faith. This exemplified one of the main reasons millions feel alienated from parliament: so many MPs are ‘up themselves’ about a decision made by the people. Poor Rees-Mogg was much abused for lying prone on the government benches, as if this were a mark of disrespect. Not so.

Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of news, last week told the Edinburgh television festival: ‘Here is what we all need to decide: what do we do when a known liar becomes our prime minister?’ Yet she is surprised when Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn — both of whom she calls ‘cowards’ — do not come on her programmes. She regards it as their democratic duty to be interrogated by her journalists. If you watch her deliver her lecture, you can see she is positively proud of her character assassination of both men. It does not seem to cross her mind that she is breaking her public service obligation of fairness, and therefore has no moral hold on them. Broadly speaking, it is the duty of elected politicians to explain themselves to the public.

We do not yet know which 100 citizens will make it to the ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ to be chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which will look at ways of preventing a no-deal Brexit. So we cannot yet judge whether the organisers have come up with a system of selection which improves on the representative powers of parliament. But really we do not need to, because we know already that they will not be able to bring the ‘reconciliation at a time of national emergency’ which the Archbishop seeks. This is because the idea that a no-deal Brexit must be prevented is not an irenic proposition around which people can unite, but an intensely political one over which they inevitably divide.

In the London Review of Books this month, James Meek wrote a long article about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ‘curious duality’ in being both a high Catholic, fogey Brexiteer and a founder of Somerset Capital Management, which the author sees as globalist and ruthless. The piece is elegantly done, but entirely sneery. It makes not the slightest attempt to enter into the Mogg’s (or any Brexiteer’s) mind with any sympathy. I was thinking about this because the LRB’s publicity emphasised that Meek is an Orwell Prize winner. How we need an Orwell on the subject of Brexit.

We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue is Hong Kong. As then, the Chinese government longs to kill protestors, but it hesitates because it fears global reaction. It therefore matters greatly that the ‘rules-based international order’ strongly assert that breaking the 1984 Sino-British Agreement would put China beyond the pale. No international discussion of Brexit is complete without a reverent invocation of the Good Friday Agreement (which in fact has almost nothing to do with EU membership). The Hong Kong Agreement should command such reverence, and its pledge of ‘One country: two systems’ should be the test of whether China is a law-abiding international partner.