Charles Moore

The trouble with Mr Speaker, even when he makes the right decision, is his motives. Fame is the spur and so is his love of hurting the Conservative party which nurtured him. However natural these feelings, they are completely wrong for the Speakership. The occupant of the chair is supposed to be a pillar of the constitution, not its talking gargoyle. A sad feature of the Brexit story has been how so many people with important official roles have not seemed to understand or, in some cases, even to care, what those roles entail. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England are supposed to assist the British economy, not invest in its collapse.

Angela Merkel says disdainfully, ‘I admit I was not on top of the British parliament’s 17th-century procedural rules.’ Her implication is that they are absurdly out of date. Yet the old rule invoked by Mr Speaker Bercow is surely one that can hold up its head in the 21st century. It is that the executive should not keep putting the same question to parliament until it gets its way. Therefore Mrs May cannot just keep reheating her terrible withdrawal deal. If there were no such rule, there would be no end to the bullying. Isn’t there something quite impressive about the fact that we have an elected assembly which had already thought of this more than 400 years ago? Habeas corpus is a pretty old idea too, and jury trial is even older. Does Mrs Merkel mock them?

The trouble with Mr Speaker, even when he makes the right decision, is his motives. Fame is the spur and so is his love of hurting the Conservative party which nurtured him. However natural these feelings, they are completely wrong for the Speakership. The occupant of the chair is supposed to be a pillar of the constitution, not its talking gargoyle. A sad feature of the Brexit story has been how so many people with important official roles have not seemed to understand or, in some cases, even to care, what those roles entail. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England are supposed to assist the British economy, not invest in its collapse.

A besetting sin in this process has been over-cleverness. As so often in our history, the ‘stupid’ people are right. The Brexit question is a classic example of something which is simple but not easy. It is ‘Do you want to be ruled by those you can choose, or by those you can’t choose?’ Voters understood this, and gave a clear answer. Clever people keep complicating it. Three leading examples of this, I am afraid — Oliver Letwin, Nicholas Boles and Michael Gove — are good friends of mine. Precisely the qualities which endear them to me in private conversation are proving a menace to the public weal.

Obviously the Prime Minister herself bears chief responsibility for Brexit mistakes, but she must have been terribly badly advised throughout, not only by political staff — who always get it in the neck when things go wrong — but by the professional civil service, which tends to escape censure. I have been genuinely surprised by the bureaucrats’ uselessness in the negotiations. In my Thatcher studies, now drawing peacefully to their close, I find that the mandarinate, though out of sympathy with Mrs Thatcher, did, on the whole, do its best for her. It was excited by the possibilities she opened up, and enjoyed surmounting the various crises.

I feel particularly sorry for Michael Gove, because there is psychological torment here. His understandable reasoning for not resigning over Theresa May’s Chequers proposal was that he had been accused first of betraying David Cameron, then of betraying Boris Johnson. He could not face being accused of a third betrayal by walking out on Mrs May. This meant that he unintentionally betrayed the cause of Brexit. He is now the government’s media apologist for whatever piece of contortion comes out of Downing Street, and is humiliated when the line he has just peddled collapses a few hours later.

A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express, a steam train, on 30 March, the day after Brexit. The train will traverse Wales and England, starting at Swansea and ending in Sunderland. In an unspoken rebuke to the metropolis, it will not travel via London. The train will, says the invitation, commemorate ‘the UK’s exit (or non-exit) from the European Union’. This is the opposite, I suppose, of the European train which people like the late Sir Geoffrey Howe constantly exhorted us to climb aboard. What to do? The most likely situation on the day is that we still will not know our country’s fate.

One could smell a rat in the fact that so many ministers have recently been allowed publicly to break with government policy and condemn ‘no deal’ flat-out, and even threaten resignation. Three ministers co-wrote an article in Tuesday’s Daily Mail (over the undead body of Paul Dacre) in this sense. They would never have dared to do so unless they had been sure that they would go unpunished by the government. If you follow the sequence of how a variety of ministers emerged on this subject, you will see orchestration. Mrs May’s spin doctor, Robbie Gibb, ex-BBC, briefs programmes like Newsnight all the time: the official line was to say how ‘troubling’ the behaviour of the ministers was.

Jeremy Corbyn never ceases to attack Mrs May for trying to run down the clock. She has certainly done that, but she is also quite capable of running up the clock. This she is now doing with her threat of an extension of Article 50. She is like the mouse in the nursery rhyme, with its order reversed. As has been true at least since her disastrous general election of 2017, she will do absolutely anything to avoid a clean break with the EU and keep us in some approximation to the Customs Union. Hickory, dickory, dock: that’s the policy. One could smell a rat — or rather, that mouse — in the fact that so many ministers have recently been allowed publicly to break with government policy and condemn ‘no deal’ flat-out, and even threaten resignation.

Where will these nice Independent Groupies end up? If the SDP example applies, they will wander through the political wilderness, some of them coming to rest in existing parties. All the following were in the SDP. Greg Clark is a Tory cabinet minister. Danny Finkelstein is a Tory peer, excellent journalist and wordsmith to David Cameron. Andrew Cooper, the political strategist, is the Conservative Baron Cooper of Windrush. Adair Turner is a crossbencher peer with a quiverful of business and pro-bono positions. Sir Vince Cable is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. They are all likeable, friendly, able and successful men. Yet all of them have a ‘non-tribal’, EU-centred approach which ultimately makes them honourably ineligible for the struggle of British politics.

The BBC reported on Tuesday that the proposed closure of Honda’s plant at Swindon was largely caused by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. The collapse of ‘just-in-time’ procedures would do for the factory, it said. That’s odd, I thought as I listened: why would you close a whole factory because of something that might very well not happen? Why not wait five more weeks and find out whether or not it will? Sure enough, a few hours later, Honda’s vice-president for Europe said that ‘It’s not a Brexit-related issue for us, it [the decision to close] is being made on … global-related changes.