Loyalty, it used to be said, was the Tories’ secret weapon. No longer. Self-discipline has been discarded — along with commitments to lowering taxes, being strong on defence and keeping the streets safe. The Conservatives appear to have abandoned all of their beliefs and transformed into the party of Brexit. But, it seems, they can’t even get that right.
Brexit is one of the most important projects any government has undertaken in our postwar history — a task that has been entrusted to Conservative MPs, most of whom voted against Brexit. The Prime Minister and her Chancellor, her Foreign Secretary and her Home Secretary all argued during the referendum campaign that leaving the EU would be a disaster. Now in charge of things, they are dangerously close to vindication, mainly because the party is indulging in a bout of in-fighting when attention ought to be focused on the task in hand.
Boris Johnson has been the subject of much of this week’s back-biting. Anyone who walks out of government in protest at one of its main policies can expect to find themselves in the wilderness, but is there anything to justify the very public vow by Alan Duncan, a Foreign Office minister, to ‘end’ the former foreign secretary’s political career? For a minister to attack a backbencher in this way is a sign of a party that is going quite mad. Indeed, Mr Duncan embodies everything that is wrong about Theresa May’s approach to the job. When she made Mr Johnson foreign secretary, she appointed Mr Duncan as his deputy in a quite deliberate act of sabotage: everyone at Westminster knew the latter loathed the former.
Johnny Mercer, a backbencher and former Remain voter, observed this week that you don’t have to be a dedicated Brexiteer to come to the conclusion that the Chequers deal would give Britain the worst of all worlds: we’d be tied to EU rules on goods and many other things, but without any say in those rules.
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