One should have thought that in the production of Richard III at Islington’s Almeida theatre on the night the referendum results were declared, the cast would have relished the following exchange:
Richard: What news abroad?
Hastings: No news so bad abroad as this at home.
As we were reeling from the referendum result, this exchange would surely have brought the house down. But it didn’t. They left out the second line, and the opportunity was missed.
Or perhaps it was deliberate. What a shame. The subsequent outbreak of knifing among the Goves and Johnsons of this world makes the gory plot of Richard III look like a vicarage tea party. As the comedian Terry-Thomas would have said, these so called senior Tories are “an absolute shower”. They deserve every unguarded remark Kenneth Clarke makes about them.
What a tragedy it all is! Buffoons at the top of the Conservative party and the man who ought to have been leader years ago, namely Clarke, ostracised because, unlike the egregious Johnson and Gove, he is true to his European principles. As the Roman poet Juvenal opined at a certain farcical juncture in the affairs of his city state: Difficile est non saturam scribere (It is difficult not to write satire).
Indeed, the mood among my fellow Remainers seems to be evolving from depression to black humour. It was none other than Rupert Harrison, former economic adviser to George Osborne, who recently remarked that the people may have spoken but – did they know what they have said?
For sheer chutzpah I can think of few things more farcical than the statement by Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun, that even he was suffering from “buyer’s remorse” and regretted having voted Leave. Can this be the same man who spent his time as editor poisoning the minds of his readers with constant attacks on the EU and Brussels? Surely there must have been some mistake.
Again, during David Cameron’s last supper with European leaders in Brussels the other week, our prime minister complained that if the others had offered him an “emergency brake” on the inflow of migrants, the result might have been different. To which Jean-Claude Juncker made the eminently reasonable point: “If you, over years or decades, tell citizens that something is wrong with the EU – that the EU is too technocratic, too bureaucratic – you cannot be taken by surprise if voters believe you.”
As for Nigel Farage, a man whose nasty campaign can hardly be unconnected with a sharp increase in hate crime since the vote – can this be the same populist hoodlum who maintained that, if it went 52% to 48% against Brexit, then there should be another referendum, because such a momentous decision could surely not be taken on such a narrow majority?
Which brings us to a brilliant article in the current issue of Prospect, by the economist Anatole Kaletsky. Kaletsky takes issue with the way so many of the establishment seem to have caved in without a fight in the face of a referendum whose result even the former editor of the Sun objects to.
He makes many points that I cannot cover here, one of the key ones being that it is absurd to maintain that it is undemocratic to question the result. As he explains, from the very moment of a general election result, it is the duty of the opposition to carry on the attack.
Kaletsky argues that the implications of Brexit are so calamitous that it makes sense for a genuine effort on the part of the UK and the rest the EU to come to an accommodation on immigration and the single market, and then put it to parliament.
An obvious factor behind the hope that there will be a change of heart among the electorate is that the damage of Brexit is already becoming apparent. Contracts are being put on hold all over the place and the panic in the City is so great that investors are not being allowed to withdraw their money from prestigious funds.
I have seldom known such an atmosphere of fear and apprehension in postwar Britain. The Chilcot report concludes that the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq was faulty and there was no plan for the aftermath. In this case there was certainly no plan; but there was also no intelligence. In the film The Dark Knight, the Michael Caine character says: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
The collapse of the pound has only begun, and is in danger of going well beyond what our trading competitiveness might require. And if Brexit goes ahead, any competitive gains are likely to be dwarfed by the impact on investment from multinationals that, until now, have seen the UK as a base for operations within the single market.
The governor of the Bank of England – who is, as it were, doing a sterling job trying to keep the show on the road – recently quoted A Streetcar Named Desire about dependence on “the kindness of strangers”. He was referring to the financing of our vast current balance of payments deficit. When the longer-term implications of losing the single market sink in, those strangers may not be so kind.
We urgently need to recognise that a huge mistake has been made. Meanwhile, let us remember that David Cameron came into politics to “make a difference”. He succeeded.
