If Boris goes, does Brexit go?
As the saga of the many parties allegedly held in No 10 during lockdown continued, and began to raise questions about whether Boris Johnson could survive as Prime Minister, Lord Andrew Adonis — Chair of the European Movement and indefatigable opponent of Brexit — tweeted that if Boris goes, Brexit goes too. It’s a line that has been taken up by those engaged in shoring up Johnson’s teetering Premiership.
On the face of it, it’s difficult to see how that could be true. The Conservative Party is a Brexit party; all of the likely contenders to succeed Johnson are Brexiters and even if an anti-Brexit candidate were to emerge, it is impossible to see how they could win.
Moreover, there is no will to reverse Brexit on the opposition benches. Keir Starmer is, on Brexit, the continuity Corbyn leader who whipped his Parliamentary Party to support Johnson’s deal and has ruled out any significant renegotiation. Indeed, opposition to freedom of movement — a precondition of re-entering the EU’s single market — remains the one principle that unites the post-Corbynists and the poundship Petainists of Blue Labour. Labour’s mantra has become “make Brexit work” — admittedly without giving any indication of how they plan to do that.
On the face of it, then, Brexit — which is certainly not “done” and is a process that is on course to occupy whoever is in power in Westminster for a long to come — is likely to survive Johnson’s departure, if that happens.
But there is another way of looking at this, and it involves doing what the Brexiters refused to do throughout the process of leaving the EU: attempting a definition of what Brexit is. It’s problematic because, despite the prevalance of that most meaningless of slogans “Brexit means Brexit”, its a notoriously slippery concept; the ultimate ideological shape-shifter. Obviously at the most prosaic level it’s the process of leaving the European Union. But it became so much more than that: the debate about Brexit was, first and foremost, a culture war about an ideological project, one that was driven by an authoritarian populist nationalism that brooked no compromise; and ended up being driven by claims about what was the “true” Brexit that bore little or no relation to the actual realities of disentangling Britain completely from the institutions of the European Union after nearly half a century of deeply embedded membership, let alone what people really believed they were voting for in that deeply-flawed referendum.
In other words: Brexit was a construct in the minds of Brexiters, which bore little relation to the real world. And this is one reason why it was never defined, because it was always a subjective, not an objective, phenomenon; even if it did possess certain obvious characteristics — xenophobia, English exceptionalism, a narrow view of sovereignty that owed little to concepts of the real world. It was a construct that relied on victimhood, a sense of lack of agency and of a decline from a better past — which suddenly and unexpectedly won and couldn’t get over it.
And — ironically enough given the circumstances that threaten to end Johnson’s political career — one of its defining characteristics was cakeism: the belief that Britain could leave the EU while continuing to enjoy the benefits of membership. Hence the belief among Brexiters, throughout the Brexit process, that it was somehow the EU’s job to solve the problems — in Northern Ireland, at the UK borders — that the UK’s decision to leave, on the most radical terms, had inevitably led to.
And it is precisely in the minds of Brexiters that Johnson’s departure may have the greatest effect. Johnson has been defined by Brexit, even though it is clear that he had no real ideological commitment to it. His election victory — the biggest Conservative win for thirty years, capturing seats in parts of England that had been Labour for generations — was, at least in the official Tory version, the victory of “getting Brexit done” (even though there is ample evidence that fear of letting Jeremy Corbyn into No 10 was just as powerful a factor).
Johnson’s potential successors are all Brexiters. But, if Johnson goes (and nobody should take that for granted), the mood will change. The focus will be entirely on the problems caused by Brexit — the problems in Northern Ireland, the shortages, the cost-of-living crisis that is the inevitable consequence of the profound supply shock caused by leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, and Britain’s hugely diminished. Keir Starmer will find that the concept of “making Brexit work” becomes even more ludicrous by the day.
Johnson’s departure will not lead to a swift reversal of Brexit, or even the end of the Brexit rhetoric. But it will, for the Brexiters in all political parties — for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves as much as Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — mean that the world has changed. To misquote Schiller, the fine days of Brexit will have come to an end.
And, if Brexit is first and foremost a state of mind, Andrew Adonis could well be right.
