Ten days before David Cameron’s disastrous Brexit referendum in 2016, a group of EU diplomats asked me for my prediction. Ignore the narrative that remain would sweep to inevitable victory, I told them: Britain is heading directly for the exit.
Perturbed – this was not what other journalists were telling them – they explained what would happen if so. There would never be a favourable deal for Britain. This was an existential question for the EU: they could not incentivise other nations to leave. Their electorates already resented special treatment for Britain, from the rebate to its exemption from Schengen. They had their own domestic anti-EU and anti-immigration political forces to contend with, none of which they wished to encourage. And if their countries suffered any economic damage because of Brexit, then their voters would be even more resentful towards Britain and even less willing to offer concessions. Strikingly, there were no dissenters from this united position.
These basic political facts should have underpinned all British coverage of over three years of Brexit debacle. Instead, with honourable exceptions, we have been fed a daily diet of delusion and fantasy: that if only Rule Britannia was screamed with sufficient gusto and with enough decibels, 27 united foreign governments would somehow be faced down. Take the reported claims that Angela Merkel had offered a 30-day timetable to renegotiate: in fact, she simply declared, “we said we would probably find it in the next two years to come but we can also maybe find it in the next 30 days to come.” Nothing meaningful is going to be offered or conceded by the EU: it is simply not going to happen, and yet every day several media outlets peddle the deceit that it will.
Both the Tories and much of the media are in the grip of a deluded group with ravenous appetites: the more red meat they’ve been thrown – by David Cameron, then Theresa May, now Boris Johnson – the fatter and hungrier they’ve got. Each day brings another example of their delusions colliding with reality, yet they only become more fanatical. During the referendum, they told us German car manufacturers would force Merkel to offer Britain a favourable deal. It’s now been revealed that German food producers might not bother exporting food to us after a disorderly exit from the EU because of bottlenecks at ports.
The truth is, nothing will ever satisfy these fantasists. Even if the EU scrubbed away the backstop – an impossibility – hardcore Brexiteers are already making it clear that wouldn’t be enough. From the very start of this process there has been a failure to report it properly. There has been no acknowledgement that the EU collectively lacks any incentive to offer meaningful concessions based on the Tories’ red lines. Nor that, even if they did, those who have captured the Conservatives’ commanding heights would refuse them.
For the next few weeks, a pantomime beckons, with Tory papers breathlessly claiming that Johnson’s British Bulldog resolve compared to May’s timidity has the EU on the back foot, or preparing to surrender, or about to offer sweeping new concessions. It’s all noise. European governments simply want to ensure that the British government squarely takes the blame for what is to pass. Although the EU is far more prepared for no deal, when their member states do indeed suffer an economic shock, their aggrieved voters will not countenance offering Britain meaningful concessions when it is forced, enfeebled, back to the negotiating table.
What will the insatiable Brexit fantasists say then?
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
