“Back of the net,” shouted an unidentified Tory MP as the majority of 124 for the second reading of the Brexit withdrawal agreement was declared. That got a few cheers, but not many. After all, it had been the most open of open goals. It had all been too easy. A bit like watching Liverpool take on a team of under-11s. And even then, some of the under-11s had started playing for the other side, as 30 Labour MPs either voted with the government or abstained. If anything, there was a slight feeling of anticlimax in the chamber as MPs departed for their Christmas break. Not to mention a sense of deja vu.
Boris Johnson had opened the debate by saying that now was the time to end the dither and delay. Rather forgetting, yet again, that few politicians had done more to prevent Brexit happening over the past three and a half years than him. He had twice voted against Theresa May’s own Brexit deal, which had been – on his own previous admissions – substantially better than his own, in order to further his own career.
But that was part of a prehistory now consigned to oblivion. 12 December had marked a new Year Zero in British politics. One in which the world must be rewritten in the image of its new Supreme Leader. The Once and Future World King. Anyone who dared to mention either that Johnson had described his Brexit deal as one to which no UK prime minister could possibly agree, or that it had actually already passed its second reading once before, was at risk of being disappeared. The truth was sinking fast and before long there would not even be a ripple on the surface to show it had even existed.
“It is time to come together and get Brexit done,” he said. It was time for the nation to be reinvigorated and to forget the old divisions of leave and remain. The downside to all this was that they were to be replaced with the new divisions of losers and winners. And it was about time the losers just sucked it up. Boris may talk the talk on healing, but every smirk, every casual aside, betrays his baser, primal instincts. His first reaction is always to gloat. He is a man entirely without humility. Anyone who challenges his sense of entitlement is to be crushed.
Yes, there were one or two changes to his previous withdrawal agreement bill that definitely hadn’t been passed in October, he conceded. The bit about safe passage for children of refugees had needed to be canned. Not because he had anything against children, mind. Rather because it was always useful to keep them as bargaining chips. It’s what the kiddies would have wanted.
Same with workers’, food and environmental rights. Far too important to be left aligned with the EU when there was a chance of watering them down for a US trade deal. And as for the guaranteed end to transition that made a no-deal Brexit a real possibility at the end of next year, everyone deserved the chance to be poorer. We were in a new space-time continuum. Up was down and down was up. And there wasn’t a damn thing anyone in the Commons could say to change that. Not that many were minded to do so. They were too busy drinking the Kool Aid.
It was a debate characterised mostly by absence. An absence of thought and an absence of personnel. All the true one nation Tory MPs who used to expose the flaws in Boris’s Brexit have been erased from the Commons. As Johnson now goes unchallenged, so he appears at best only half interested in his own arguments, having long since taken for granted that he would win. He looked like a man who was phoning it in and could scarcely be bothered to even acknowledge the concerns of the Scottish National party and Northern Irish MPs. It now feels like almost an inevitability that the union will break up at some point in the next 10 years.
Jeremy Corbyn was also operating on low power mode. He has been ever since the election, but this time he had an excuse. Because there was literally nothing he could say to make a difference. There were faintly despairing speeches from Labour’s Hilary Benn, Matthew Pennycook and Keir Starmer but the Tory benches were almost a total IQ-free zone. As Owen Paterson, Mark Francois and Liam Fox were only too happy to prove, since they are too stupid to remember that this was a Brexit deal to which they too had been vehemently opposed for more than three years.
But to the victors, the spoils. And the amnesia. Boris stood triumphant, surrounded by sycophants and crowned in laurels. He was Caesar. The autocrat, disguised as a man of the people, whose prescription for blue-collar Conservatism was old-fashioned, establishment paternalism.
Brexit was done. Even if it wasn’t. And anyone who dared whisper the word Brexit again after 31 January would be arrested for thought crimes. Boris had hoped he would feel more elated than this, but instead he could only feel disappointment closing in. He had gained the world, but had long since lost both his family and his soul. His narcissism would inevitably destroy him. In the beginning is my end. Now the light falls.
John Crace’s new book, Decline and Fail: Read in Case of Political Apocalypse, is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
