Brexit was built on two irreconcilable visions

Good morning. It’s Thursday, aka my favourite day of the week, when I can riff off Robert Shrimsley’s column without having to come up with a good idea for the newsletter myself. Some more thoughts on Robert’s column below.

Promised lands

Robert Shrimsley’s column in today’s paper on how Thatcherites won the Brexit referendum but lost control of both their party and of Brexit ends with an absolutely brilliant final line (which I’ll leave you to discover yourself). The piece starts with a great riff on Oscar Wilde:

To borrow Oscar Wilde’s quip about the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to hear the wails of free-market Brexiters without laughing. Recent weeks have seen a flurry of laments, fury and blame-shifting by leading Leavers, from Nigel Farage to Lord Frost.

When I contemplate the fate of the Conservative party’s Thatcherites, I am reminded of another Wilde aphorism: “Every woman becomes their mother. That’s their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That’s his tragedy.”

The big problem facing liberal Brexiters is that for them, the vote to leave the EU was in order to become less European — lower regulation, a smaller state, lower taxes — while for most Leave voters, it was the reverse.

The Conservative party’s internal divides since 2016 have been in large part about a series of doomed attempts to reconcile those two things. The Brexit project has, in practice, become its mother: the desire of Leave voters for a bigger state, a thicker regulatory environment, and so on has been met. But the Thatcherites are further away from their mother than ever before. The UK is out of the single market, one of Margaret Thatcher’s great policy achievements. And across the length and breadth of government policy, the Conservative government is very far indeed from anything resembling Thatcherism.

As Robert sets out, the reason why the Conservative party has ended up here is obvious: supporting a bigger state and higher spending was a precondition to getting Brexit. But there is no obvious path from the UK’s Leave vote to the idealised vision of many of its architects.

Although the biggest reason the Conservatives are in so much trouble, electorally speaking, is that a series of external crises have blown the government off course, one part of the problem is that many MPs don’t really like the electoral deal they struck to carry off Brexit. While this won’t be the explicit theme of the next Conservative leadership election, it remains the essential subtext.

Now try this

When I’m writing, I like to listen to the same piece of music, or the same record, over on a loop. This week, I wrote my column on the UK’s tuition fees model to Run-DMC’s Kings of Rock. It is one of the great hip-hop albums of all time and it is hard to pick out a standout track, but anyone who has had to work with or alongside me will surely appreciate that one of its many delights is the song “You Talk Too Much”. Give it a whirl wherever you get your music.

Top stories today

• Better together | A future British government should adopt a “general policy” of aligning with EU regulations to improve post-Brexit trade, an independent cross-party business group said yesterday.

• CBI remaking | The CBI will recruit a new president as part of a governance overhaul unveiled by the scandal-hit UK business lobby group as it battles for survival ahead of a crunch members’ meeting next week.

• PM seeks unity on irregular migration | Rishi Sunak will urge European leaders today to work together to defend their frontiers against irregular migration, as he joins about 50 counterparts at a summit just 21km from the Ukraine border.

• Johnson hands over diaries and WhatsApp messages | Boris Johnson has handed all his unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks to the cabinet office, urging it to “urgently” disclose the material to the Covid-19 public inquiry.
  – What does this episode say about the use of WhatsApp in government, and who is held accountable for ministers’ data? Chris Cook, standing in for Peter Foster, takes on these questions in today’s Britain after Brexit newsletter. Sign up here to make sure you receive it when it lands at 5pm (for premium subscribers).

• Totting up the bill | Labour’s policy pledges so far would cost the equivalent of a 3p rise in income tax, the i newspaper reports, based on its analysis which suggests that Labour’s policies will require an additional £20bn of funding every year.