In order to appeal to the kind of people who choose to join the Conservative Party the candidates know that they have to pitch their campaign in a very particular way. There isn’t much point in standing if you wish to Remain in the EU. Instead it is necessary, if you wish to win, to present yourself as the toughest re-negotiator in town. Indeed it is essential, if you want to win, to tell the members what they want to hear and to promise them that you’ll renegotiate and get a better deal.
Which is a bit of a problem when there is not the remotest realistic prospect of renegotiating a deal that the UK previous Prime Minister has spent two years agreeing with the EU. Only three options are actually open to the next British Prime Minister. One is to leave the EU without a deal. The second is to find some magical way to get the UK Parliament to sign the deal Theresa May set up. The third is to call the whole thing off via a second referendum or by simply revoking article 50.
The leadership race is expected to take as long as eight more weeks. That means there will be three months left for a new Prime Minister to sort out a mess that the last one couldn’t find a route through in two years. The new PM is going to have to come at the problem having made a set of promises to the Conservative Party members about re-opening negotiations and being tough which are simply impossible to deliver.
The aggressive stance needed to win the race to be PM is virtually guaranteed to result in relationships with the EU breaking down. As things stand the sequence of future events runs as follows. Boris Johnson or someone equally daft becomes Prime Minister. They head off to Brussels for negotiations having made 8 weeks of promises to a small club of political hobbyists about how fierce their stance will be. The 27 remaining members of the EU tell the PM what they have all consistently said for months. They won’t change the deal. They might add some words to it. They might clarify some parts of it. They might even move forward and agree extra things as it is actually so vague that it needs a lot of further detail to be worked out. But they will not renegotiate the deal.
The Prime Minister has to come home and stand up before Parliament and explain the failure. The only way they can do that without losing the support that got them their job is to lash out at the EU and blame their intransigence. An aggressive posturing Prime Minister will claim that he, or just possibly she, has stood up strongly to Brussels and been granted no concessions so has decided to bravely walk away from the table.
So the process of choosing a new Prime Minister by pandering to the opinions of a small political club is leading us in a very dangerous direction. We are heading for a No Deal Brexit. If the next PM does nothing the country crashes out. It doesn’t matter how many resolutions Parliament passes saying that it doesn’t want no deal. Unless they vote for May’s deal, a General Election or a Referendum the EU has made it clear that it won’t extend the deadline again.
It won’t surprise anyone that my view is that the best way of avoiding a no deal is for Parliament to insist on a Second Referendum and for the EU to further extend the membership of the UK to allow that to happen. That would mean a significant number of Conservative MPs rebelling against the leader of their own party weeks after the members of that party had just given them a mandate. I simply don’t see that taking place.
It would be obvious to any Conservative MP that their new PM couldn’t survive a vote for a second referendum weeks after promising their own party they would never agree to one. It is therefore most unlikely that when push comes to shove enough Conservative MPs would rebel because they would be voting to create a situation which would generate a General Election and that would cost them their job.
So we face a bleak future. The UK Prime Minister returns from Brussels to inform us gravely that negotiations have broken down, or to be more accurate never even begun. The country is asked to draw together in its hour of need and put up with the disruption caused by the unreasonable behaviour of Johnny Foreigner. The wall of hate propaganda against everything European reaches a new pitch of excitement. And the country descends further into chaos and confusion.
The fantasies of the far right have led us a very long way down a dark path. Instead of dropping those fantasies I fear that we are about to witness them reaching new levels of intensity as self-serving politicians compete to tell a small club of Conservatives what they think they want to hear and then fail to deliver it.
Has the country ever been more in need of different leadership? And has the opposition ever been less effective at offering it?
With every passing day it becomes clearer to reasonable and balanced people that the country has is in a very dangerous place and has been badly weakened politically, economically and socially by the fantasy of an easy Brexit.
In a logical world that would cause our public representatives to take brave and principled actions and call a referendum which could cancel the whole thing. In the squalid self-serving world of the competition to be leader of the Conservative Party what we are getting instead are sound bites illustrating how well our next Prime Minister can promise the impossible.