Brexit is the black hole of British politics, a place of dark matter, strange attractors and bent time. It has now sent Sir Ivan Rogers spinning, screaming into its void. People stop in the street and ask, “What can it all mean?”
Rogers’ deftly-publicised resignation as British Ambassador to the European Union (EU) was hardly shattering. Ostensibly, a disaffected official brings forward his retirement so that someone new can lead his country into the Brexit battle ahead. As he returns to Blighty, he pens advice to his colleagues for the imminent conflict: They should remember the regiment’s glory, speak truth to power, not hide bad news — the usual guff.
But this was no ordinary email. It was more fragmentary evidence in the enveloping gloom that is Brexit. First there was November’s “have-cake-and-eat-it” strategy memo spotted in Downing Street. Then there was the Deloitte leak, that “there is no plan”. Then a palace rumour held that when the Queen asked after Brexit, she was mysteriously told, by May: “It means Brexit, Ma’am.” Now we have Rogers’ dark references to “ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking”. The riddle is wrapped in an enigma.
That the Foreign Office hates Brexit is not news. It is to Europe what the Ministry of Defence is to the army, and the Department for International Development to management consultancy. It is the reason for existing. I once asked the department’s old boss, Michael Palliser, if he had considered resigning over the Falklands. No, he said, he had had to do his duty by the government of the day. The only issue that would cause him to resign, he said ominously, was Britain leaving Europe.
Likewise, Rogers’ heart was clearly not in Brexit. He was no longer “one of us”. For all the fine words about civil service independence, at times like this, senior officials cannot be robots. They have to share in group morale, to believe in what they are doing. If not, they should go. (These are issues that Rogers’ successor, Sir Tim Barrow, will have to grapple with.)
What Rogers confirms is something different. It is that the Brexit war machine set up by May six months ago is not yet fit for the purpose. Appointing three Brexiters as relevant ministers might have seemed politically clever, but between them they had limited experience of Whitehall and European negotiation. Sidelining the Foreign Office and men such as Rogers may avoid friction, but it can only jeopardise the process. Parliament was surely right, before Christmas, to ask the government whether it really had the foggiest idea where it was going.
Britain is to leave the EU and will trigger its two-year period of departure in March. There will be a withdrawal. That much we know. The only real argument is about what form that withdrawal should take: What form would most benefit Britain and its citizens.
That argument is largely technical, not a proxy for rerunning the previous battle over Brexit. The champions of “hard” Brexit want simply to tear up the past and face the world as it comes. Bring on the great disruption, they cry, the ad hoc deals for bankers, students, farmers and temporary workers. See what happens.
Hard Brexit talks the talk, but I cannot see it walking the walk. Scrape its surface and it seems pure machismo, especially in the matter of immigration. Trade in goods may be handled, but Brexit threatens to strip hospitals and care homes of their EU staff, close down entire hotels and food outlets, leave fruit unpicked in orchards and build up gargantuan passport queues. Britain will become, in some respects, a Ruritania of border guards, tariff clerks and temporary work permits.
At the very least, hard Brexit needs to explain, and fast, how exactly its Britain would look. That is why soft Brexit is the only game in town. As Rogers says: “Free trade is not something that just happens.”
There has to be some negotiation with the present EU. Yet, the approach of the continent’s leaders has been to treat Brexit as politically toxic. Many are threatened by separatists on all sides, most of them cheering Brexit on.
To these leaders this is not a commercial issue. They do not care that almost half the British population and the entire British establishment were against Brexit. They do not care if hard Brexit might damage exports of Volkswagen cars or Camembert cheeses. They have no interest in Britain dancing off into the Brexit sunset.
There will always be a handful of wise Europeans who see mutual benefit in doing a deal with Britain. But wisdom is not fashionable in Europe just now. The EU is not the benign confederacy envisaged by its founders. It is a coalition of interests, lobbies and frightened politicians. It negotiates on lines not of greatest economic advantage, but of least political resistance. Any organisation that can treat Greece, Italy and Spain with callous contempt, and Syrian refugees with cruelty, is unlikely to lean over backwards for a Brexit Britain.
I am sure this is why every recent utterance from the Brexit ministers — Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox — hints at compromise. We hear of immigration concessions, transition arrangements, customs unions and “bespoke Norwegian”. These are men feeling their way towards whatever table d’hote menu might work best. Of course there are downsides: An EU law obeyed here, a payment into common funds there, a third-party tariff somewhere else. Brexit was never going to be cost-free.
There is so much that might be salvaged from the Brexit debacle. It is clear to any sensible person that the EU in its present form has run out of steam. Reform should — and one day surely will — realign two, or even three, Europes. One is the existing Eurozone, perhaps divided into two currency zones. The other a northern European free-trade area in some trading partnership with the first. This is the model that was cogently set out last year by the Brussels thinktank, Bruegel.
Either way, there is no point in Britain pretending it has nothing more to do with such a future. It is for ever “part” of Europe. It will always have enemies there and therefore will need friends. That is what diplomats are for.
At present, the Rogers affair merely leaves a bad taste in the mouth. That is the trouble with the new Downing Street regime: Too little sense of purpose, and too much bad breath.
— Guardian News and Media Ltd
Simon Jenkins is a prominent journalist and author. His recent books include England’s Hundred Best Views, and Mission Accomplished? The Crisis of International Intervention
