Photo: Boris Johnson: a comfort zone leader. Photo: Shutterstock
The selection of a new prime minister, even when the exercise is conducted without the endorsing legitimacy of a general election, is supposed to be accompanied by something approaching a frisson of anticipation, even hope. A new beginning; a resetting of politics; a fresh sense of possibility. Not so on this occasion. The race to replace Theresa May is instead filled with foreboding, the grim sense that matters will have to get worse before they can get better. Britain today is not a land that still believes in a place called hope.
Incentives remain cruelly misaligned. The country requires some kind of compromise, some attempt at rapprochement that will, at long last, ease the state of anguished crisis in which the UK finds itself. But we cannot move on from Brexit without accomplishing Brexit, and yet Brexit cannot be accomplished without enhancing the dangers of the crisis in which we find ourselves. There are no pain-free options here.
No serious contender for the Tory leadership can advance his—or her—cause except in profoundly unserious ways. Hence a plethora of Brexit “plans,” which rest on the proposition that a new prime minister will be able to achieve a better Brexit deal in three months than May achieved in three years. If this is not impossible, it remains vanishingly improbable.
Meanwhile, Labour MPs see no reward in rescuing the government from its predicament. Jeremy Corbyn, against much internal grumbling, is running Labour as a functionally pro-Brexit party, but he does not extend this to voting for a Brexit made, and owned, by the Conservative Party. Labour asks that the country “move on” from Brexit to focus on more important matters. But it will not provide the votes needed to do the deal, and start the “moving on.”
Judged dispassionately, that is hardly an unreasonable position. Governments propose and oppositions oppose. Nevertheless there is a palpable yearning for this whole saga to come to an end, one way or another sooner rather than later. We have been consumed by Brexit chaos for far too long.
So be it, perhaps. The people voted for Brexit and they must suffer it. Nevertheless, the damage done to the Conservative and Labour parties will not be repaired soon. Change UK may have proved a squib that is now damp to the point of doomed. But the reasoning behind its formation has not disappeared: not this Labour Party, and not this Conservative Party either.
I doubt this Tory leadership contest will resolve the crisis of confidence and leadership from which both the party and the country are suffering, either. Boris Johnson, who at least started the race as heir presumptive, is many things. But one of those things is a Tory version of Corbyn. He’s a candidate to tickle the membership while leaving the general public cold; a retreat into the Tory Party’s comfort zone, not an attempt to reach out and build something new.
Johnson’s backers will not see it like that, of course, but it is telling how far the Tory tribe is now focused on winning back support lost to the Brexit Party, not voters who have defected to the Liberal Democrats or are simply inclined to give up on voting. That is a comfort zone strategy too and one that Labour supporters who despair—with reason—of Corbyn will recognise as well.
But then there are no truly national parties across Britain at present. The SNP can plausibly claim to be one in Scotland, but that only underlines how—in political terms—it is now another country. Schisms of class and geography, to say nothing of age and educational attainment, have fractured the shared political culture. It does not have to be like this in perpetuity but fixing, or overcoming, these divides will take real leadership with inspirational qualities that are currently wholly absent. None of the Tory contenders looks ideally equipped to deliver this, any more than Corbyn or his most likely Labour successors.
And so we limp on, chuntering and grousing, unhealthily but avoidably. There is a thirst for real leadership and a new era—but few expectations it is coming.
Brexit cannot be blamed for all this, even if the process has exacerbated it. A wearying decade of stuttering growth and stagnant wages has translated into grinding politics. The fallout from 2008 is still felt in 2019. The crash created the political conditions for the Brexit gamble, but many of the problems Britain faces—not all of which are unique to Britain—would still be there and still be unanswered even without the Brexit shock.
Blaming Brexit, then, is too easy. So is the comforting assumption that there will be a fresh start once, or when, some kind of Brexit resolution is reached. In truth, there will be no picnic then either. Britain’s trauma has distracted attention from a wider malaise afflicting much of the developed world. France, Italy, Spain and even Germany are experiencing significant difficulties, and significant political convulsions, too. Across Europe, there is a sense of one era ending but without there being any clarity, far less any agreement, on what should follow it.
All things must pass, including Brexit. By then the map of British politics will have been so thoroughly changed as to seem all but unrecognisable. The hope must be that something better emerges from the chaos.
