On brexit, we still prefer democracy to demagogy | thearticle

Last week I wrote here that Theresa May was “out of ideas, out of time and out of place”. Yesterday, the House of Commons took the first step towards seizing control of Brexit from the Prime

Minister. Three more ministers resigned in order to vote against her. She is now at the mercy of Parliament and the EU. Is this the moment to admit defeat? Not if reports about yesterday’s

Cabinet meeting are accurate. There, it seems, the talk was of “wargaming” a snap general election. As this was not a “political” Cabinet, such partisan discussions were not strictly in

order. But desperate times call for desperate measures — and the Prime Minister is desperate. Meanwhile, her rivals were sharpening their pens, if not their swords. In the Daily Telegraph,

Boris Johnson wrote: “It is time for the PM to channel the spirit of Moses in Exodus, and say to Pharaoh in Brussels — LET MY PEOPLE GO.” The capital letters indicate that Boris himself is

channeling the spirit of Donald Trump. By mobilising his half a million followers on Twitter, who surely include most of the dwindling Tory membership, he is threatening to seize control of

the Conservative Party too. Mrs May would then be left with her Downing Street bunker and not much else. Out there in the country, the people are not sure they are ready to be led into the

wilderness. Certainly not by a man whose only memorable achievement during his brief tenure at the Foreign Office was to make the already dire situation of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe,

incarcerated in Iran since 2016, even worse. Unlike the bureaucrats of Brussels, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, really does resemble Pharaoh — in his

pitiless autocracy, if nothing else. Yet Johnson not only failed to obtain the release of this innocent woman, but by implying that she had been working illegally gave the Iranians a excuse

to justify holding her hostage. It was an unforgivable failure of diplomacy. As long as Theresa May is not ready to go, she is quite hard to remove from office. And as long as she believes

that she, and only she, can lead the country between the Scylla of a no-deal Brexit and the Charybdis of no Brexit at all, she is not going to abandon ship. Like Odysseus, she must choose

between the certainty of the loss of a few ministers or the risk of losing the entire crew. For Mrs May, that is no choice at all: to embrace a soft Brexit, and so to break her promise to

honour the result of the referendum, would be to consign her party to political oblivion for a generation. In the Commons, however, most MPs see their predicament rather differently. The

petition to revoke Article 50 and the People’s Vote March last Saturday have put the wind in the sails of those who never wanted to leave anyway. Erstwhile loyalists, such as the three

ministers who resigned yesterday, argue that the greater threat is a no-deal Brexit. Richard Harrington, the business minister, has been a friend of Mrs May since their Oxford days in the

1970s. Joining her other allies of the same provenance, Damian Green and Dominic Grieve, in the rebel camp, Harrington issued a warning in his resignation letter: “I fear that no-deal would

be part of a giant economic experiment that is championed by a small minority of the economics profession, a small minority of the Conservative Party, and a small minority of the country.”

Harrington is mistaken in supposing that these are only small minorities. There are plenty of serious economists, particularly outside Europe, who see the logic of a genuinely free-trading

UK, which requires a clean break with the EU. It’s true that the European Research Group of MPs are in a minority in the Commons, but they probably speak for a majority of the party members

who have the final say in leadership elections. As for the country: it depends which opinion poll you choose to believe. But there’s a substantial and apparently growing body of opinion

that, dismayed by the way negotiations have gone so far, now favours no-deal. That group may be outnumbered by those who favour Remain or a soft Brexit, but it is certainly not a “small

minority”. The truth is that there is still no majority for any of the various Brexits. Nor is there a majority for no Brexit — yet. Significantly, trust in authority is waning among the

electorate. Government, Parliament and many other institutions are losing credibility, but they have not so far been replaced by charismatic leaders. The British still believe in democracy,

not demagogy. For how much longer, though, will we go on trusting a political system that seems to be broken?