The current accusations bedevilling Boris Johnson are being exploited by Remainers to exact revenge for Brexit
Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/01/21
Just when everything is going Keir Starmer’s way, up pops a ghost from the past to threaten to wreck the Labour leader’s chances of ever seeing the inside of No 10.
Michael (now Lord) Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister and arch proponent of Britain’s membership of the European Union, has declared that Boris Johnson’s removal would give Britain a chance to “reconsider Brexit”. This insight carries with it two extraordinary assumptions.
The first is that the general public, rather than just a few hundred Remainers in the London media bubble, actually want to be plunged back into the torrid, deeply unpleasant and appallingly divisive atmosphere that prevailed between 2016 and 2019. There is a type of activist whose personal political obsession with the EU and refusal to concede defeat wants nothing more than to return to the past in order to re-fight battles they believe passionately might have been won if only they had shouted louder or thrown their punches harder. Heseltine is one such Euro-warrior.
But the vast majority of the public – even those who believe Brexit was a mistake – would surely not countenance a return to those troubled times. Heseltine and those who nod vociferously at his words (we can all name them) are like Scottish nationalists to whom the only issue that matters is independence, and even a democratic vote against their ambition counts for naught. Social division and democracy be damned – we must get our way!
The second worrying assumption is that the country sees the prime minister’s guilt primarily through the prism of Brexit. Yes, he may have broken Covid rules, but that’s unimportant compared with the far worse “crime” of having persuaded a majority of the electorate to back Leave six years ago.
And to the likes of Heseltine, I have no doubt, holding parties at Downing Street is indeed a lesser offence than securing Brexit. There has been, for some weeks, a sneaking suspicion among supporters of the prime minister that the current accusations bedevilling him are, to certain of his critics, no more than proxy issues that are being exploited by irreconcilable Remainers (I guess we must now start calling them “Rejoiners”) to exact revenge for his past, far more serious, sins.
This is unfortunate, not to say dishonest. The crimes of which Johnson is accused, and which he may well be ultimately found guilty, are serious. Many people in the country feel angry that they were forced to sacrifice personal contact with loved ones at a time when the prime minister and his staff – the people laying down the rules – blithely ignored them and continued partying like a bunch of frat brats. To manipulate that legitimate and sincere anger merely to accomplish a petty, narrow political goal unrelated to Covid is the height of cynical opportunism.
But Heseltine’s – and before him, Lord (Andrew) Adonis’s – public admission that Partygate is being weaponised by Rejoiners spells extremely bad news for the Labour leader.
The decision by Starmer, when shadow Brexit secretary, to perform a U-turn on his party’s previous pledge to support whichever decision the electorate made in the EU referendum, and instead to promise a rerun referendum giving voters the chance to cancel Brexit, was the single biggest political blunder Labour has made in recent history (aside from electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Twice).
It was the party’s fear of angering its own membership, and those Remain voters who refused to be reconciled to losing in 2016, that prevented Labour following through on their original promise to honour the referendum result. As a consequence, the party missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to destroy the Conservative Party by supporting Theresa May’s soft Brexit package (which was also, incidentally, their last chance to keep Britain in the EU single market and the customs union). So in thrall was Labour to the Remain minority that it played the role of midwife to the snap 2019 general election, Boris Johnson’s landslide victory, and Brexit on far tougher terms than those it rejected just a few months earlier.
And it paid the electoral price for its obstinacy and its, frankly, incompetent political strategy. Brexit may have been the ambition of Boris Johnson, but it was the millstone around the neck of every Labour candidate at the general election, then and since.
What Starmer desperately needs is for Brexit no longer to be a live issue when the next election comes around. He needs the freedom to talk about other issues – any other issue – on which he need not feel defensive and which does not remind former Labour voters of his catastrophic personal political misjudgments.
And now, just when the polls suggest he may get the chance to lead the country after all, a veteran old soldier who never surrendered, who was unaware that the war was even over, has emerged from the undergrowth to encourage everyone to take up arms once again.
Will he be heeded? Are there enough people around who want to begin the process of renegotiating Britain’s re-entry to the EU? Will either Labour or the Conservative Party wish to place such an undertaking in their next manifestos? Heseltine undoubtedly hopes so. I suspect the Conservatives, with or without Johnson as their leader, would relish the opposition making such a foolish promise. It would remind voters of Labour’s betrayal all over again, just when they are showing every sign of being willing to forgive. And it would give the Tories a perfectly legitimate excuse to accuse Labour of wanting to abolish the pound in favour of the euro.
A return to the Brexit wars is the very last thing Labour needs right now. But for the Conservatives, it might be the very thing they need to re-establish their own popularity. Lord Heseltine should be very, very careful what he wishes for.
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