It is difficult to choose the worst of Theresa May’s decisions on the path that has led to our predicament this week: her government is now suspended like Boris Johnson on a zip wire, blustering, ludicrous, still waving the union flag, and quite unable to reach the other side without help. Perhaps her most serious blunder was to adopt the slogan “No deal is better than a bad deal”. This was untrue on a very fundamental level: it suggests a choice where in fact there is none. “No deal” is not an alternative to “a bad deal”. Crashing out of the EU without an agreement could only be the precursor to weeks, then months, and finally years of smaller, very bad deals, all much worse than those we could have negotiated as a member of the EU.
The threat of this catastrophe appears to be receding thanks to the intervention of sensible onlookers. Parliament has made clear that it wants to avoid it, even if it remains incapable of deciding how. The EU, motivated by self-interest as well as charity, is also doing its best to lower the end of the zip wire so that Mrs May can descend in good order. But there is no guarantee that these efforts will succeed. The baffled and entitled rage of Conservative ultras reflects their delusive dream of a clean break after which Britannia will be free to sail the oceans in the manner of Admiral Hornblower all through the Napoleonic wars, when he and his country defied the “continental tyrant”.
Mrs May has not done nearly enough to dispel this illusion. She must by now know what an illusion it is. She will have had the briefings from the civil service, some of them probably even worse than the one Sir Mark Sedwill made public last week. But she still frames the problem as if no deal were desirable and she was held back from it only by saboteurs in parliament.
That’s not a lie that the country can afford to believe, and it should be her last service as prime minister to renounce and deny it. Going into the summit next week there will be a lot of people in this country who simply don’t understand why we can’t just leave. And the sight of the UK’s future being settled behind closed doors in a Merkel–Macron argument while Mrs May waits outside is going to be humiliating. That shame will poison politics and make angry Brexiters even angrier.
If there is to be a long extension, the time must be used to reset the whole debate. Plainly, that means rethinking the future relationship, but the process still needs a foundation in wider understanding of why no deal was always an illusion. The only people who can get that argument across to a sceptical public are bona fide leavers: people like Mrs May, Michael Gove and Geoffrey Cox – who absolutely want Brexit but are not vandals enough to want no deal – must level with the public.
There are too many Tories calling for no deal on the basis that the EU will not let us be stupid enough to do it. This is irresponsible gambling. The danger of no deal might have receded, but the threat of “no-dealism” as an ideological frame for looking at the UK’s relations with Europe is alive and well. It needs rebutting, and it needs rebutting by the prime minister. The few remaining grownups in the Tory party need to take on the ambitious colleagues who will say anything to appeal to the fanatical leaver grassroots, who, in the absence of a general election, will choose the next prime minister. Even if her very worst decision was to deploy the language she used about no deal, her second worst may have been to trigger a leadership contest where the winner will be chosen by those who believed her rhetoric.
