As candidates started announcing their entry into the Conservative Party leadership contest, a new orthodoxy swiftly emerged.
Outspoken Tory MPs and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press were quite clear. The man or women who succeeds Boris Johnson and becomes our next prime minister simply must be a Brexiteer.
It may be six years since Eurosceptics won the referendum on EU membership – Brexit has been done – but the matter remains an obsession for the Tory rank and file. This being so, the election of a Remainer to the most powerful position in the UK Government would be a betrayal.
Amusingly, candidate Jeremy Hunt sought to overcome his shameful Remainer past by teaming up with one of the sharpest-fanged Brexiteers in the House of Commons – former breakfast telly presenter, Esther McVey – only to be knocked out in the first round of voting.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss did make it through that initial vote, despite having backed Remain in 2016, but let us place her in the category marked “exception that proves the rule”. Truss is a born-again Brexiteer, a covert whose zealotry saw her win the support of proper wingnuts Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries.
How depressing that, years after the UK public made the decision to depart the EU, the issue continues to dominate our politics. I fear this situation will remain unchanged for some time.
Downsides of Brexit are fault of Remainers
Under Boris Johnson’s leadership, the Conservative right was emboldened. He cleared the parliamentary party of troublesome One Nation Tories and pandered to the basest instincts of those who remained loyal to his vision.
Boris Johnson leaves a Tory party in complete denial about the damage departure from the EU has caused
Johnson’s successor will inherit a party strangely devoid of empathy or common sense, a party of monomaniacs who blame the EU for every ill that befalls the country, and who yearn for a simple, misty-morninged past that never actually existed,
And nothing the next PM does will every satisfy these people. For Brexiteers, we know from experience, are never satisfied.
Any attempt to find common ground with the EU – even on issues of such importance as the impact of the Northern Ireland protocol on the Good Friday Agreement – will be characterised as an act of surrender.
Getting Brexit done means never taking the slightest bit of responsibility for the downsides of leaving the EU. Downsides, after all, are entirely the fault of Remainers for failing to believe firmly enough in the upsides.
Having led the successful Brexit campaign in 2016, not because he believed in the worth of the project but because he saw it as the swiftest route to Downing Street, Boris Johnson leaves a Tory party in complete denial about the damage departure from the EU has caused.
What a miserable state of affairs.
Euan McColm is a regular columnist for various Scottish newspapers
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