The Cabinet meets today on an away-day to iron out the last few wrinkles in the UK’s Brexit programme. All that needs to be resolved is that they decide what sort of Brexit we want and what might be remotely achievable. What could go wrong?
By the end of today we will either be seeing the next stage in the fracturing of the Conservative Party or we will have moved on to the latest fudge which has kicked the can down the road for a few more days. Or maybe both.
Obviously, the country is split on Brexit – I don’t want Brexit to happen (and I can’t see anything over the last couple of years that would change my mind on that) – and so are the two major Westminster political parties. I can’t quite imagine that Labour would have made quite as big a mess of the last couple of years as have the Tories but I’m not very confident that they would have done much better, if any better.
The government’s mishandling of Brexit will have done more long-term harm to British politics than the expenses scandal ever did. I don’t expect politicians to be paragons of virtue when it comes to their expenses, taking speeding points, taking drugs. who they sleep with, what illegal substances they take and various other matters where they, and you, are all too weakly human. But I do expect our politicians to act as public servants, for the common good, in matters of great national importance. And Brexit is clearly one of those issues. It is, in fact, the biggest issue that this bunch of politicians will ever face and the government is failing the country dreadfully.
I’ve been on a few away-days in my time. Changing scene is a remarkably effective way of making the meeting special and to some extent encouraging all present to shed some of their ingrained approaches and loosen up a little. And I’ve chaired such days and been one of the gang on others. None, clearly, had the import of today’s Cabinet meeting, but some were dealing with crunchy issues for those of us around the table at the time.
Some of them went well, some of them went badly and most have disappeared into a haze of lack of memories. However I never really doubted that for the vast majority of the time the good of nature conservation was utmost in people’s minds. Yes, sometimes the best thing for the RSPB was an issue too, but never instead of what was best for nature conservation. And sometimes the interests of a particular part of the RSPB above another part was an issue – we were human too. But I never went away from those meetings feeling ashamed of my colleagues or of the organisation that we managed and led. Will the British Cabinet leave with the same feeling today?
I’d love to be a fly on the wall and to read the body language as well as hear the actual language. If you could look around the room there are few politicians around that table who have demonstrated much of a moral compass in the previous years. They are a shabby crew. Boris? Liam? Michael? I’m not sure any of them could even get to the ‘m’ of moral compass. This may be a defining moment for Theresa May but I doubt it. Even if she shows more leadership and guts than we have seen so far and knocks a few heads together, the path to Brexit will still be the road to shambles.
Lincoln’s ‘House divided’ speech.
BBC Radio 4 The Briefing Room’s programme on Brexit – I listened to this yesterday evening driving home from an event in Cambridge
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Shambles is the word. The tragedy is that there is a majority of MPs who know this will be a disaster for the UK but seemingly there’s no way to stop it. Cameron and May are to blame along with the leading Brexiteers who are beyond the pale; and Jeremy Corbyn hates the EU. You couldn’t make it up, but of course they did.