What’s left for Brexiteers?

My first encounter with a plan to hold not one but two referendums on Britain’s European Union membership happened more than three years ago. At least two individuals were actively entertaining the idea. Both were Leavers. Dominic Cummings had proposed it in one of his blogs. Boris Johnson had not publicly endorsed such a thing, but (I know) was discussing it with interest privately.

The thinking, as I recall, was similar in both cases. The first referendum would be the one we then faced: asking voters for a yes or no to the idea that in principle we should quit. If the result was Remain, we’d remain. If Leave, there would follow two years negotiating a draft withdrawal agreement. Once agreed, the government would present it to the voters and ask in a confirmatory referendum whether they wished to proceed on that basis.

Two justifications for such an approach were doing the rounds among Leavers. The first carried moral force, and was precisely the reason many Remainers now favour the plan: that ‘Remain or Leave’ was an unreasonable question if voters were ignorant of the terms on which we might leave. We were asking them to endorse a pig in a poke. They should therefore be given the chance to approve (or reject) the proposed deal with open eyes, once its outlines were clear.

But there was also a more cynical reason for a possible two-stage Leave. It would be easier to secure a leave-in-principle result if voters could feel assured that this was not the last time they’d be asked. The idea was being explored at a time when Remain were the favourites to win. Making the 2016 plebiscite only provisional would shorten the leap Leave would be asking the electorate to make, render the jump less dangerous, and bring more waverers over.

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I ridiculed the idea in the Times, pointing out that this could land our country in a limbo between wanting to leave in principle and rejecting any practical plan for doing so (the very limbo, as it was to turn out, that MPs did land later themselves in).