James Kirkup

Most people at Westminster are betting against the Tiggers. Most people, if forced to guess, would predict that the Independent Group won’t become a new political party that wins scores of seats in the Commons. We can all recite the reasons: no membership, no machine, no leader, no policy platform, the electoral system… But maybe that doesn’t matter. Because there are more ways to change things than winning seats. Just ask Ukip – if you can find it these days. Ukip only ever won one seat in the Commons, and in truth it was Douglas Carswell not the party who delivered it. But Ukip still changed history: without it, David Cameron would very likely have got out of calling the EU referendum.

I am a little late in coming to the recent report on community cohesion by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hate Crime. It was published earlier this month but drew little attention at Westminster: yet another example of Brexit smothering the domestic policy agenda, I suppose. The report has lots to say about lots of different types of nasty behaviour.  Among the topics it covers is the gender debate, the discussion of trans rights and their potential impact on the rights of others. One one level, this is a good thing.  It is the job of MPs to debate and discuss matters of contention and controversy.

'Retweets are not endorsements.' It’s possibly the most futile disclaimer of our times. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the hate-pit that is Twitter knows that sharing something renders you wholly responsible, not just for its contents, but for all the actions and opinions of its author, and the responses that people have to it. If you were, for instance, to retweet a link to a column this week by The Spectator’s Rod Liddle because you thought he made an interesting observation about, say, the BBC, you are of course endorsing something tasteless that he might have written in the Sunday Times last month or something horrible he did in real life a year ago. And you share responsibility for the upset those things have caused.

On Saturday, a car bomb went off in the UK. In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to be exact. It was the latest in a long, long list of terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland, many of them carried out by men who wish to unite the island of Ireland in one state. Today, the European Commission stated, more bluntly than it ever has before, that Britain leaving the EU without a deal will mean a hard border between the EU (Ireland) and the UK (Northern Ireland). That means checkpoints and men in uniform policing the physical division of the island of Ireland. Let us, if such a thing is possible, set aside questions of whether that hard border is truly inevitable in a no-deal exit. Let us also set aside any questions of blame for the prospect of that hard border.

Are some Brexiteers addicted to disappointment and frustration? Do they so crave the righteous indignation that flows from being thwarted that they are actively trying to sabotage their own project? How else to explain the extraordinary strategic incompetence of Tory MPs who say they want Britain to leave the EU yet behave in a way that makes it increasingly likely that Britain will not do so? Brexit-backing readers may well dismiss my thoughts on Brexiteer strategy because I am, of course, a dreadful Remainer. More accurately, I voted to remain and I believe that leaving the EU will give the UK a range of possible futures that are less economically beneficial than those we’d have if we remained a member.

Why did Britain vote for Brexit? As Parliament gazes into the abyss, the question seems worth asking, even if I don’t pretend to be able to offer a simple answer. And that’s the point, really. Britain is teetering on the brink of a grand failure of policy and politics because, insofar as anyone involved has even wondered why a majority of voters rejected Britain’s political-economic settlement in June 2016, they have generally come up with simple, shallow answers. Among No Deal Leavers, most explanations for the referendum result these days refer to “control” (especially over immigration policy) or “sovereignty” or some nebulous idea of the economic opportunities that lie in different trading arrangements.

Westminster conversation about Brexit often suffers a time lag. MPs frequently speak with surprise about things that actually happened months ago and which are regarded as old, established facts in Brussels and policy wonk-world. The backstop is the best example: outlined in the December 2017 Joint Report of the UK and EU negotiators, its meaning and necessity still came as a novelty to some MPs – resigning cabinet ministers included – in June; and to others in November. (The 2017 election result is another instance: it took many Tory MPs at least a year to realise it meant there could be no Commons majority for the hardest form of Brexit; some still haven’t worked that out.

When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked. So says Warren Buffett, the folksy billionaire investor, explaining that tough times expose which firms have poor management. The same is true of politics, and especially Brexit. 2018 was the year the tide went out on Brexit, and we saw too many of our politicians' failings exposed in all their shrivelled glory. The tide was, like all tides, predictable. As we neared the end of the two year Article 50 period, the outline of a potential exit deal had to emerge, and that deal would show that, contrary to fantasy, the EU holds the better hand of cards in this game. Any agreement to leave the EU was always going to involve compromises, decisions to accept something less than what you hoped for.

Tory MPs should vote for Theresa May in tonight’s confidence vote. Keeping her in place will be painful, difficult and lead to any number of awful problems. But it is far, far better than the horrors that will follow if they remove her. Even if you can, like Owen Paterson, blithely gloss over the fact that Britain would not have a permanent head of government for a month at a time of national crisis, you can’t deny the fact that changing the leader won’t change the parliamentary numbers. Nor — despite the fantasies of the Tory unicorn-herders — will it change the EU position.

I started my first job at Westminster in 1994, more than half a lifetime ago. Almost all of my career has been spent watching politicians, talking to politicians, writing about politicians. I covered the case for war in Iraq and the war’s dismal descent into failure. I was part of the Telegraph team writing about MPs expenses. I’ve written about more ministerial resignations, scandals, failures of public policy and abdications of leadership than I can remember. None of those failures has ever left me quite as bewildered and despairing as I am today, pondering the latest act in the national farce that is Brexit. Bewildered, despairing and surprisingly angry.  Surprisingly because I don’t often get angry with politicians.

Anyone observing or participating in the continuing collective trauma of Britain’s Brexit debate should pay more attention to Jeremy Corbyn and some of the most important — and to some people, surprising — things he has done as Labour leader. Here’s a short list: 1. Promised big handouts for the middle class. Mr Corbyn ran his 2017 general election campaign offering huge middle class subsidies from the state. Scrapping tuition fees and offering “free” universal higher education would be a gift to the better-off, whose kids still dominate university entry. (Just look at Scotland.) And the gift would be funded by non-graduate workers’ taxes. 2.

Brexit is an accident born of misunderstanding. One of the biggest miscalculations is about the EU and how it works. Troublingly, that misjudgement, embraced by both unwise Leavers and imprudent Remainers, could just lead Britain off a cliff, for the second time in three years. I attended my first EU summit in 2001 and stopped counting the number of Council meetings, ECOFINs and other EU gatherings when the figure passed 50 some time early in the financial crisis. I’ve seen a lot of British politicians go to Brussels (and elsewhere, in those innocent days before the Belgians captured all council meetings for their capital) and pursue the British national interest, with varying degrees of success.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult life writing and talking about politics and politicians, there are still things about politics that I just cannot, on a fundamental level, understand. Top of the list is tribalism, the “my party right or wrong” stuff that reduces public policy to the level of football chants. (Yes, football is another thing I don’t get. Surprising, I know.) Apart from anything else, taking the view that the people and ideas of the other side are automatically bad is surely utterly self-defeating? Politics is about persuading the greatest number of people to agree and support you, whether at elections or during day-to-day governing.