Boris Johnson is not the reason that Britain left the European Union, but Brexit will not be the same without him. Others worked harder and longer for the cause. But no one expresses the spirit of the enterprise more completely than Johnson: the sugar-rush appeal to a diverse electorate; the absence of intellectual coherence; the fragility on contact with hard governing choices.
Much of the mythology of English Euroscepticism was written by Johnson as Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He was conjuring up meddlesome Brussels bureaucrats wielding straight bananas before “Brexit” was even a word.
In the referendum he was the word made flesh. His complacent optimism, in defiance of the seriousness of the question on the ballot paper, was Brexit incarnate. Johnson made kicking away a central pillar of UK economic and foreign policy seem risk-free, an adventure.
The 2019 general election completed a merger of the man and the project. It was a victory for the idea that Brexit had to be done, and also that “Boris” was the only one who could do it. Contained in that fusion was denial of any real-world consequences.
Yet the conditions that made that possible have changed. Johnson’s exit from Downing Street will propel Britain into a new relationship with its neighbours, but also a new relationship with reality. The hard facts of departure that yielded to a charismatic leader in his pomp will prove stubbornly resistant to his successor.
The economic implications of leaving the EU were camouflaged by the fallout from the pandemic. But it is getting ever harder to deny that Brexit aggravates the cost-of-living crisis. Meanwhile, Johnson’s reputation has turned so toxic that little, if anything, of his legacy will escape contamination. As so often with fallen prime ministers, the traits that voters came to despise in him are a sour version of the ingredients that once flavoured his appeal. Irreverent disregard for the rules and cavalier charm curdled into reckless contempt and compulsive dishonesty.
Europe has rarely been the main focus of attacks on Johnson’s record. That taboo bound Tory rebels and the Labour leadership. But Eurosceptic hardliners know that Brexit and “Boris” are extensions of the same brand, and that the demise of the candidate destabilises the cause. When Johnson faced a vote of no confidence among Conservative MPs in June, Jacob Rees-Mogg denounced the ballot as a plot by Remainers. It wasn’t a truthful description of the rebels, but contained a sound intuition. Johnson is the stray thread that, now pulled, could unravel a bigger, shoddy weave.
The turning point in the prime minister’s standing with the public was rule-breaking in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns. The last straw for a majority of Tory MPs and ministers was his (mis)handling of sexual assault allegations against the deputy chief whip. Ostensibly those scandals are nothing to do with Europe. But they had a common genesis in something that has long been familiar to people who have had any professional or personal relationship with Johnson—he lies. He was sacked from his first job in journalism for fabricating a quote and from his first frontbench job in Michael Howard’s Shadow Cabinet for false denials of marital infidelity. As Rory Stewart, the former Tory minister, has put it, Johnson “lies to his wife, he lies to his employers, he lies to his colleagues, he lies to parliament… He knows a hundred different ways to lie.”
Much of Johnson’s praetorian guard at the end consisted of Brexit ultras who did not want to admit that their leader was a fraudster for fear of inviting scrutiny of his biggest ever fraud. The prime minister grasped that a paranoid Tory fear of somehow losing Brexit was his last, best defence. That is why he chose the week after the no-confidence vote to publish legislation reneging on Britain’s commitments under the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.
The declared motive was to placate unionists, who regard the customs border that Johnson’s 2019 deal placed in the Irish Sea as an existential affront. (The prime minister lied about what he had agreed, claiming there would be no checks on goods crossing between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.)
But the bill is about other things, too. It targets remnants of European court jurisdiction, which is tangential to unionist concerns but totemic in the minds of English Tory Eurosceptics. They see the protocol, which effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the European single market, as a dirty trick—a portion of sovereignty pinched from Britannia’s pocket as she fled Brussels.
Unilateral repudiation of an international treaty is action befitting a rogue state. Provoking a trade war with the EU in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis would be monumental economic self-harm. Only in the realm of nationalist fantasy is there any upside to those choices. But this is where a Brexit rooted in denial of strategic reality tends. The alternative would be an honest evaluation of the policy’s successes so far, which are nil.
The OECD recently forecast that UK growth next year will be the second lowest in the G20, ahead only of Russia. The post-Covid recovery is held back by weak exports—a function of new trade friction introduced at the border between Britain and the continental bloc on its doorstep. Business investment has not pulled out of a decline that began with the referendum result. The devaluation of the pound has made imports costlier, feeding inflation, without a compensating dividend in more competitive exports, as might be expected.
The hard facts of departure that yielded to a charismatic leader will prove stubbornly resistant to his successor
According to the Office for National Statistics, in the first quarter of this year the only region of the UK to have bounced back above pre-pandemic levels apart from London was Northern Ireland, which happens to be the one part with one foot still in the EU.
In Eurosceptic theory, free trade deals with non-EU countries should compensate for any loss of access to the single market. Also, there would be no such loss because German manufacturers, desperate to reach UK consumers, would cut a sweetheart deal.
Those assumptions were predicated on spectacular ignorance of how the EU works, the primacy of law, treaties and mutual obligations to its internal coherence and the magnitude of its soft power as a setter of global standards. The Brexit ultras, having defined Brussels for so long as a parasite feasting on national sovereignty, had no conception of the EU as a set of institutions that amplify the influence of its members through collective heft. That is why they failed to anticipate how weak the UK’s hand would be in negotiations to leave. They were shocked that Dublin’s voice carried more weight than London’s. They didn’t know what it would mean to give up a seat at the top table in Brussels and become a “third country.”
In July 2016 David Davis, shortly before being appointed secretary of state for Brexit by Theresa May, made the following confident prediction in an article for the ConservativeHome website: “Within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU.” The raw stupidity of that claim was obvious to anyone who knew anything about trade deals. Davis resigned in 2018, when the outline of the compromises May was prepared to make came into focus. Johnson, reading the Tory mood, followed him out of the Cabinet.
In an interview in June this year, Davis was asked to identify tangible benefits of life outside the EU. He could hardly name one. Asked why the bounty was so slow coming, he said Johnson’s deal was too much like May’s. It constituted “a Remainer’s Brexit.”
Davis was speaking as a utopian revolutionary whose project has been grounded by reality. In such circumstances, the radical is psychologically unable to blame the doctrine itself. The fault must be attributed to sabotage by counter-revolutionary forces. The Brexit hardliners are like extreme leftists who deny that Soviet atrocities constitute a rebuttal of Marxism-Leninism and insist that communism could still work if implemented properly.
Much confusion in British politics derives from the interchangeable use of one word—“Brexit”—to describe two things. Sometimes the word means the technical process of dismantling the apparatus of UK membership of the EU. In other contexts it describes a national renaissance achieved by purging continental influence.
That moral “Brexit” cannot be delivered via negotiations over the technical “Brexit.” There is no deal that can satisfy the Eurosceptic fundamentalists because what they want is a portal into a world where the EU is not powerful and the single market is not valuable. When Johnson was popular, he gave Brexiteers a warm feeling of proximity to that magical realm. Now that he is on the way out, they sense it vanishing into the ether.
Exposing the gap between real and fantasy Brexits is a job for the opposition, but Labour flinches from the task.
The Labour Party is still processing the trauma of its crushing defeat in the December 2019 election, inflicted by an exodus of traditional Labour supporters who had also been Leave voters. It is hard to disentangle their dislike of Jeremy Corbyn from their impatience for Brexit, but either way the opposition concluded that Remainism was a stain to be scoured away if the party was ever to rebuild the crumbled red wall of seats in the Midlands and northern England. Keir Starmer feels especially vulnerable, as a man who served on Corbyn’s frontbench and agitated for a second referendum.
Labour is still a pro-European party but Starmer does not broadcast that fact. There is a sequence: beat Johnson’s successor in an election fought on bread-and-butter issues. Only then restore sanity to EU relations. Promising to build bridges to Brussels too early makes the goal harder to achieve by giving the Tories the attack line they most crave—Labour as a Remain revanche.
But tactical discretion is hard to distinguish from outright denial of the problem, and opposition squeamishness was becoming awkward. Starmer has filled the void with a “five-point-plan” to “make Brexit work,” but without countenancing re-entry into the single market. That neutralises the political accusation that Labour is seeking vassalage to Brussels and a return to open-door immigration.
There is a tactical rationale to “make Brexit work” as a slogan, albeit a defensive one. Starmer’s ambition for the European question is to shut it down as a campaign weakness, not open it as a new front. But the risk is that a commitment to modest tweaks within the framework of Johnson’s original settlement amounts to complicity with Tory pretence that the single market doesn’t matter. It will be hard to give British voters a full account of the causes of their financial pain—and Tory responsibility for it—without putting Brexit at the centre of the argument.
Swerving the subject also deprives Starmer of a fruitful line of attack on Johnson’s integrity. Labour should be including perfidy about Europe in the narrative of Johnson’s habitual dishonesty, recklessness and disregard for law. The charge is that all who served the outgoing prime minister belong to his corrupt gang marked by the same arrogant irresponsibility, governing for their own gratification and in contempt of the public. That is the ethos that defines Brexit just as it explains how Johnson let Downing Street become a party venue during the pandemic.
Conservative Eurosceptics dread voters making that connection. Their nightmare is a scenario where Johnson’s reputation for propagating falsehoods contaminates the policy most associated with his name. It is not a huge leap from thinking of the discredited and discarded Tory leader as a dodgy dealer to resenting how Brexit was missold.
A full national U-turn on European policy is unlikely. When Michael Heseltine said recently that “if Boris goes, Brexit goes,” it was more a statement of moral vindication than a political forecast. None of the main English parties is agitating for a reversal, so Britain is stuck with Brexit for the foreseeable future. But without its most formidable champion, the project will quickly come to feel like a burden even to those cheerleaders who explain that milk and honey are not yet flowing because unbelievers have been blocking the pipes.
The next prime minister will be chosen by a ballot of Tory members, so there is no incentive for candidates to tilt back towards European reality, even if they could see it. None has yet queried the substance of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, nor made a prominent commitment to repair relations with Brussels.
The contest will be an ideological bidding war for the affections of people who see “getting Brexit done” as the heroic achievement that mitigates Johnson’s failings in other departments. Diehard fans of the outgoing leader are already propagating the myth that his undoing was an act of treason by the kind of establishment lackeys whose judgment was repudiated in the referendum and whose commitment to completing the anti-Brussels revolution is suspect.
The new Tory leader will enter No 10 having committed to honour Johnson’s Brexit legacy, only to discover all the European chores he neglected—the hard choices shoved to the back of cupboards; the economic facts swept under Downing Street rugs. The licence to pretend those choices do not exist was issued under the very particular circumstances of the 2019 election and to a specific candidate. Stripped of the “Boris effect,” Tory denial will look even more like wanton national self-harm.
Economic and strategic expediency will demand a rapprochement with the continent; ideology will pull the other way. The result will be a reopening of faultlines on the right over which Johnson was, for a time, the decorative plaster. For most of the past decade, the Tories have been harried and goaded towards nationalism and xenophobic demagogy by Nigel Farage. He suspended hostilities in 2019, withdrawing Brexit Party candidates from seats where Conservatives were incumbent. That was a one-off truce.
When Johnson was popular, he gave Brexiteers a warm feeling of proximity to a magical realm
It didn’t take long for Farage to start making populist mischief around the issue of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats, and for Johnson to stumble into the trap. The government’s plan to deport asylum seekers for processing in Rwanda is a cruel and expensive gimmick of a policy with little prospect of success, designed to signal draconian intent and rile liberal opinion. The first flight was grounded by legal action in the European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR is not an institution of the EU, but that does not stop its critics conflating them. When “European judges” are seen telling ministers what they can and can’t do with regard to immigration policy, it can be made to sound a lot like unfinished Brexit business. What will happen next is grimly predictable. The Tories will make undeliverable promises, ramping up anti-immigrant grievance without the means to satisfy the target audience. Farage will then punch the bruise. Every precedent in British politics indicates that pro-Europeans vacating the field cedes the terms of debate to the fanatics who pursue immaculate separation from the continent.
While former Remainers fret over how, or even whether, to steer the conversation towards a more constructive partnership with Britain’s neighbours, the Conservative Party is heading towards a campaign framed by demands to “complete” Brexit—to finish the job, make it purer.
The dividing line is not between different arrangements for Britain’s relations with the EU. It is between different meanings of the B-word—Brexit as a set of political and economic problems to be solved and Brexit as utopian delusion.
In making Johnson prime minister, Britain rejected the former of those definitions. No successor can embody the latter one in quite the same way. It was a lie to claim that Brexit would be done by Boris, and the lie is perpetuated when his successors pledge to keep it done in the same spirit. They can defer the moment when European reality reasserts itself over British politics, but not for long. The peak of the illusion has faded, because the great illusionist has been unmasked.
