Month: September 2018

European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Salzburg Summit Winners and Losers

Who were the principal winners and losers from Theresa May’s Salzburg EU summit débacle?

Note: this is the longer version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Monday 24th September 2018

In the city famous for its associations with The Sound of Music, the notes played at Thursday 20th September’s European Union Summit were discordant: not only because the would-be soloist Theresa May was unbelievably poor, but also because the Brussels Orchestra wanted her either to play a different composition altogether, or preferably not play at all.May Salzburg Summit 2

Over its four-and-a-half decades of European Union membership, Britain has often suffered frustrations and rebuffs at its tedious summits: the then PM Cameron’s total failure to return from the crucial one in February 2016 without even a minor concession he could implausibly present to UK voters as ‘significant reform’ was merely the most recent.

But in the entire history of its involvement, the malevolent ambush and abject humiliation calculatedly inflicted on Theresa May by the EU Summit in Salzburg, in rejecting out of hand her Chequers Plan for Britain’s EU exit, was surely unprecedented, however much we rightly condemn both the origins and details of the Plan itself for their duplicity and excessive appeasement of, and concessions to, Brussels. 

But such situations always produce winners as well as losers. Who were the principal winners and losers from Theresa May’s Salzburg débacle?

The first big loser is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab. Formerly a staunch Brexiteer, he agreed to take on the job at the Department for Exiting the European Union just after the resignations of David Davis and Steve Baker in the aftermath of May’s infamous Chequers Summit.

But he did so knowing the department had been cynically used by May’s No 10 Downing Street as camouflage for their covert backstairs operation to put together the Chequers Plan, presented to the Cabinet as a take-it-or-leave-it fait-accompli.

He also accepted the post in full knowledge that he would be required to progress and promote Chequers, which was already being comprehensively eviscerated for its lack of ambition and abandonment of the red lines which May herself had laid down in her Lancaster House and Mansion House speeches.

Three months later, May’s Chequers Plan, already (and justifiably so) politically toxic in Britain, and now comprehensively rejected by the EU, lies in ruins, to all intents and purposes dead. Whether Raab was motivated mainly by the prospect of promotion is almost immaterial. As bad judgement calls go, his was a humdinger, and it deserves to blight the rest of his political career.

Theresa's Puppet-Master Olly RobbinsA bigger loser than Raab is May’s No 10 Brexit negotiations adviser, former FCO mandarin Oliver Robbins.

As supposedly her ‘expert’ on the EU and thereby uniquely equipped to advise May on what the EU would or would not find acceptable, Robbins has long been suspected, not entirely without reason, of being opposed to Brexit notwithstanding the Referendum result, and therefore determined to influence an all-too-gullible and vulnerable to such influence Theresa May towards as soft-Remain, substantially-in-name-only a Brexit as possible.

It was Robbins who allegedly helped to devise, in secret, behind the backs of the public, MPs and even the Cabinet, and deceitfully using the Brexit Department as camouflage while disregarding its recommendations, May’s ignominious Chequers Plan: which was bounced on to the Cabinet, remember, with the peremptory instruction that it could not be changed, because it had already been agreed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

With the EU’s emphatic dismissal of Chequers, Robbins’ credibility is zero, his reputation for EU expertise deservedly joining in the gutter his reputation for a total abrogation of Civil Service impartiality and neutrality. The EU whose anti-democracy and technocratic authoritarianism he so obviously reveres has rewarded his misplaced loyalty and self-abasement in its cause by making a monumental fool of him. Clearly, he can play no further part whatsoever in any Brexit negotiations. Whether he can remain in Government service at all is dubious.

The main loser, of course, is May herself. For all the frantic spin of the 36 hours after the Salzburg Summit, attempting, with the connivance of the media, to present her simultaneously as both the grievously-wronged honest-broker and the re-incarnation of Boadicea, a Margaret Thatcher Mk II standing up for Britain against EU chicanery and intransigence . . . .Sun Front Page Sat 22 Sep 2018. . . . the inescapable fact is that she has been completely and utterly humiliated – exposed at best as a naïve, gullible ingenuée, and at worst as a devious, cynical schemer hoist on the petard of her own duplicity.

Let’s not forget just how and why we arrived at this embarrassment. It’s because Theresa May herself – whether out of ideological conviction or political expediency hardly matters – set out deliberately to deceive her Cabinet, MPs, party and country that she was pursuing in good faith the Brexit which 17.4 million voted for and which she largely pledged to achieve for them: while at the same time launching a secret backstairs operation to devise and advance her own much weaker Soft-Remain, Brexit-In-Name-Only Chequers Plan which not only reflected her own Remainer inclinations but preferred to appease an EU determined to ensure Britain must not be seen to benefit, either economically or politically, from Brexit.

It was, and is, gross constitutional treachery and political ineptitude, and that it has blown up in her face is poetic justice. Yet bear in mind, amid the spin, that she’s still a Remainer, she hasn’t junked either Chequers or the people who designed it, and she’d still revert to it if the EU accepted it. Her credibility too is at rock-bottom, and her position is even weaker than before. Hence the desperate, choreographed attempts to shore it up, to try and insulate her from irresistible demands for her resignation.

Johnson, Davis resign from Cabinet post ChequersAnd the main winners? Well, foremost, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Steve Baker. Leaving personalities aside, their resignations in protest at Chequers now look prescient, principled and justified. Paradoxically, the EU itself has proved they were right all along. Their positions, and credibility, have been strengthened.

ERG Davis, Paterson, Villiers, Rees-MoggNext come Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group of backbench Brexiteer Tory MPs. Their technical and constitutional objections to Chequers, and their warnings that the EU would not accept it, have also been proved right. Salzburg has vindicated them, and they too won’t be so easy for the closet-Remainer May-ites to dismiss in future.

After that come Tory members and activists in the country. Consistently opposed to Chequers in Conservative Home surveys, the latest of which shows a mere 10 per cent believing May should stick with Chequers, they have also been proved correct.  And this matters, because with a majority of Tory MPs being overt or closet Remainers, it’s grassroots dissatisfaction which provides the best chance of forcing May out.

History is replete with apparent defeats that subsequently turned out have been the springboard for ultimate victory. For both Brexiteers and Britain, Salzburg could well be another.

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European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Soft-Remainer Wets vs Canada-Plus Drys

The real issue behind the Tories’ Boris vs Doris imbroglio earlier this month, ostensibly about wives and words, is actually a bitter internecine dispute about the shape of Brexit.

Note: this article was originally published at The Conservative Woman on Monday 10th September 2018

Neither Co-Editor of The Conservative Woman, Kathy Gyngell, I suspect, nor I, imagined it when we co-wrote our article “Boris’ Resignation Speech – Did He Flunk It?” published there on 20th July 2018.

Boris resignation speech 18 July 2018

That, a mere seven weeks later, the subject of it would be embroiled in quite the degree of controversy which enveloped him over the weekend of 8th and 9th September, firstly in the fall-out from his divorce announcement earlier that week, and secondly from some provocative language in his Mail On Sunday article attacking Theresa May’s justifiably much-criticised and thoroughly-debunked Chequers Plan for a Soft-Remain Brexit-In-Name-Only.

And yet this alleged scandal has always had a very artificial, almost manufactured, feel about it. It isn’t really about Boris’ chaotic private life, or his undoubted character flaws, much less about some ill-judged phraseology in a newspaper article.

It’s merely the latest escalation of the Johnson vs May war, Boris vs Doris, and of the ‘Conservative’ Party’s internal struggle between the advocates of a Clean-Break Brexit and the more numerous  – in some cases Brexit-ambivalent but nakedly-careerist – supporters of an ultra-soft departure that’s more spin than substance.

Firstly, Boris’ serial philandering, and he and his wife having for some months lived in effect separate lives, is hardly a State secret. In some ways it’s arguably among the least of the various faults, like a lack of attention to detail, vaulting personal ambition, and a sometimes cavalier regard for accuracy, which make him such a dubious leadership proposition.

Yet the whiff of hypocrisy in some of the pearls-clutching reaction to it borders on the nauseating, coming from a party which has spent much of the past two decades enthusiastically supporting, if not imitating, much of the cultural-Left’s attack on the institution of the family.

May's leopard-print kitten-heels 2002

And all in a desperate, ultimately futile attempt to counter the Tories’ self-inflicted ‘Nasty Party’ image. Remind me once again, precisely who it was who coined that particular damaging phrase which has hung round its neck ever since?

Secondly, much of the confected outrage about Boris’ Mail on Sunday article has to rely for its impact on a blatant misquote. He did not, as was widely, but inaccurately, reported, liken Theresa May to a suicide-bomber. What he did say was, that, in proposing exit from the European Union on the basis of May’s Chequers Plan, “we have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution – and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier.’

Now, given the extent to which, under Chequers, EU rules and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice would continue to hold sway over large areas of economic activity, despite the UK no longer being a member of the EU, this is a fair point. But it’s also one which May’s No 10 team would definitely prefer was not widely understood.

Despite the EU’s effective rejection of the Chequers Plan, May’s increasingly bunker-like No 10 are still heavily invested in it. Remember, it was they who put it together in a secret backstairs operation in which May’s own Cabinet was kept in the dark, and the Department for Exiting the European Union was cynically used as camouflage for it. Hence the faux-indignation by May’s outriders in the Brexit-In-Name-Only wing of the ‘Conservative’ Party at Boris’ laying bare its manifest constitutional concessions. 

Next, it was revealed – or at least claimed – in 9th September’s The Sunday Times that a dossier of Johnson’s peccadillos had already been prepared in Downing Street for deployment against him in the event of him launching a leadership bid. May’s No 10, I’d suggest, is in paranoid-panic mode, and especially since the news broke that Boris is to address a 1,000-strong rally on the Fringe at the ‘Conservative’ Party conference on Tuesday 2nd October. It isn’t exactly difficult to guess what his main subject will be.

Boris 'We Never Even Tried' Brexit headline D-Tel Mon 03Sep18

That’s also the day before May’s speech to Conference as Leader. Given the utter disaster that was May’s Conference Speech last year, on top of her normal charisma-free, robotic delivery in contrast to Boris’ oratory – at which, for all his faults, he excels – it will be the talking-point of the Conference and set such a high bar for May’s own speech the next day that she is bound to fail.

So it’s not difficult to see why an unspectacular divorce announcement and a luridly-worded section in an otherwise unremarkable newspaper article would have been seen in the No 10 bunker as an opportunity to push the nascent Stop-Boris-and-Discredit-Brexit operation into higher gear.

Incidentally, as an operation to discredit an opponent and potential leadership challenger, and of which May is the beneficiary, the similarities with how Andrea Leadsom came to be removed as a challenger to May’s unelected and unopposed coronation in mid-2016 are intriguing.

None of this is to absolve Johnson of the faults which make him unsuitable and risky leadership material: I’m on record at The Conservative Woman calling him ‘a dilettante, a gadfly, and prone to indiscretions’, after all. But it does weaken the likelihood of an alternative to May’s disastrous BRINO Chequers Plan gaining traction, even though Boris himself appears uncertain of which one he favours.

In the past week or so, it’s emerged that the three leading Tory Brexiteers, namely David Davis, Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg, have all favoured exiting the EU on what’s known as the “Canada Plus” option. This isn’t ideal, for all sorts of reasons, not least its implications for Northern Ireland’s economy and its cross-border trade with the Republic of Ireland: but compared with Chequers, it delivers more on the instruction handed to the Government by the electorate.

May, of course, is dead set against it. The real story of the Boris imbroglio of the past week is that it risks strengthening her hand, against his and those of his less compulsively mercurial colleagues, in the battle over which vision of Brexit is to prevail. Against that, the brouhaha surrounding Boris, his libido, and his leadership ambitions are merely a noisy, but ultimately peripheral, sideshow.

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Civil-Liberties, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

After Brexit, Reform Our UK Democracy

Neither our current democracy, nor our present Parliament, are institutions fit to be entrusted once again with the powers of self-government we will have succeeded in retrieving from Brussels

Note: this is the longer (and updated) version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 28th August 2018 

Over two years after Britain voted, narrowly but still decisively, to leave the European Union, that it remains necessary to say “if Brexit happens”, is not only a shameful indictment of the ruling class’ contempt for mass democracy, but also a warning of what must follow if it does happen.

52 per cent of those who voted in the EU Referendum, no fewer than 17.4 million people, voted Leave – the largest vote for a single policy in British political history. On the best academic psephologists’ estimates, approximately 63 per cent of Parliamentary constituencies voted Leave. Approximately 85 per cent of votes cast in the 2017 General Election went to the two main parties whose manifestos and candidates both pledged to respect and implement the Referendum result.

Yet about 70 per cent of the 650 MPs who purport to represent us were opposed to Brexit, and still are. Even before the Referendum, a significant number voted against one being held at all.

Many of those 2017 election pledges were self-evidently made dishonestly. Over the past two years, we have seen repeated Parliamentary obstruction – from both the elected Commons and, even worse, the unelected and unaccountable Lords, and often going down to knife-edge votes – to almost every Brexit-progressing measure introduced by a government that is clearly reluctant to implement the electorate’s decision.

This experience has surely, therefore, made one thing abundantly clear: that, if Brexit does happen, we cannot retrieve from Brussels our powers of governing and legislating ourselves, only to vest them once more in the very same Westminster Parliament which not only spent the last 45 years eagerly giving them away in the first place, but which still vehemently opposes their repatriation and our recovery of democratic self-government.

So Brexit must, in my view, be followed very quickly by significant Parliamentary and electoral reform, to strengthen democracy & the power of the electorate over the legislature, and to curb its ability to ignore or negate the expressed majority-view of the voters – to make legislature, government and executive work, not in the interests of the New-Class Establishment-Elite’s cartel, but in the interests of the people.

We must start with abolition of the unelected, unaccountable, House of Lords, which has become largely a refuge for superannuated politicians after their rejection by the electorate, a bauble with which to reward donors, or a safe harbour for otherwise unelectable placemen. It has been teetering on the edge of democratic legitimacy for years, but its conduct during the passage of Brexit-related legislation has surely signed its death warrant.

Many of the intemperate, anti-democratic speeches made by unelected Peers during the Lords’ passage of the EU Withdrawal Bill, outraged that the great unwashed masses of the British electorate had been allowed to determine their own constitutional future, and that their decision dared to diverge from that of their betters, will rightly be forgotten and consigned to the dustbin of history.

Two, however, should be preserved for posterity, to remind us at some future date of what we needed to rid ourselves of. In the first, Lord (Chris) Patten, pillar of the Europhile ‘Liberal’-Elitist Establishment, on the, to him, intolerable folly of removing such decisions from him and his ilk exclusively:


In the second, Lord Hailsham, better known to politics watchers as former Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, who acquired during the 2009 Parliamentary expenses scandal a justly permanent notoriety, for charging to the long-suffering taxpayer such items essential to the performance of his Parliamentary duties as the costs of cleaning his moat, tuning his piano, and fixing the stable lights at his Lincolnshire manor-house. 

That Britain needs a bi-cameral legislature is undeniable: but that the House of Lords as presently constituted should under no circumstances comprise its upper, revising, Chamber, is surely equally so. Whatever format we eventually settle on is debatable: but that it must be on the basis of selection by universal franchise, not favours and cronyism, is a sine qua non.

Reform of candidate selection should be high on the list. The Tories’ notorious A-List of Metro-Cameroon Cuties to be imposed on unwilling constituencies has thankfully gone, and Labour’s dominance by hard-left Momentum seem to have done for All-Wimmin shortlists: but neither main party, with the occasional exception, appears at all keen to open up their candidacy processes to a wider selection and thus make them, not only more transparent, but more representative of their local members’ views and concerns.

So the case for constituency Open Primaries, by which all the members or even the registered supporters of a party in it can choose their candidate, is strong. There have been too many instances, in all parties, of either centrally-favoured rising stars, or ministers dumped out of a marginal and desperately in need of a safe seat, being foisted on to constituencies against their will, to the detriment of a sound local candidate who knows the constituency and its concerns far better.        

A proper Recall Mechanism, by which a minimum percentage of constituents can “recall” a MP to face re-election, is a priority. Momentum for one, unsurprisingly, accelerated after the 2009 expenses scandal, and intensified when several MPs were caught out having voted in debates on legislation, in the outcome of which they had a direct financial interest.

One of whom, co-incidentally, was one Richard Drax, who made several protesting interventions when a Recall Bill was finally debated, to the effect that MPs were all honourable men whose reputations might suffer were their constituents to read in the Press that they were the subject of a Recall Petition. Which, you might think, was precisely the point.   

But it’s not only to deal with misconduct that a Recall Mechanism is required. Since the 2016 EU Referendum was held, one of the main talking points of its aftermath has been the huge disparity, in so many Parliamentary constituencies, between MPs and their voters on the issue of Britain’s EU membership.

That has exacerbated the need for proper Recall. In both main parties, how many Remainer MPs allegedly “representing” solidly Leave-voting constituencies would persist in obstructing Brexit in defiance of their electorates, if a mere 5 or 10 per cent of their voters could trigger a Recall and force them to re-stand for election and possibly lose their seat?

MPs, of course, are dead against it. Tory Zac Goldsmith’s Bill presented in the 2010-2015 Parliament, to allow constituents to recall an errant MP to face re-election, was watered-down almost to the point of ineffectiveness. MPs decreed instead that only a committee made up of themselves was fit to decide whether one of their fellow-MPs had misbehaved sufficiently to have to account to his electorate. So far, astonishingly, none has been so judged. That must now change.

More Direct Democracy is needed, both to counter the tendency of the elected to ignore the views of their electorates once elected, and to sustain and/or enhance voter engagement in politics.

For national-level democratic participation we must rely on a once-in-5-years cross-marking exercise, based on manifesto commitments and campaign promises which relatively few expect their parties to honour. But in an age when we can book a holiday, arrange life-insurance, or apply for a university course with a few mouse-clicks or screen-touches, why should this be?

The Swiss manage to hold between 7 and 9 referendums each year, and on issues other than major constitutional questions like the voting system or EU membership, and are hardly the divided society that the anti-referendum campaigners claim. In fact, that the Swiss are also regularly the people expressing the highest confidence in their system of government is no coincidence.

confidence-in-govt-switz-top

The potential abuse of postal voting through over-generous qualification, and the related issue of voter ID-fraud, urgently need addressing. The requirement for voter-ID at the polling station in a democratic election ought to be axiomatic and a subject beyond debate, while postal voting needs once again to be restricted to those verified as genuinely too ill or infirm, of overseas on military service.

Objections to some of the above will no doubt be raised on the grounds that they contravene the Burkean principle that the elected MP is his electors’ representative, not their delegate. My contention however, and which I intend to explore further in future articles, is that so many elected MPs themselves, by so manifestly disregarding the majority wishes of their individual electorates and the country as a whole, have now stretched this principle to breaking point.

Without significant Parliamentary reform to make the legislature more responsive to the electorate, extra-Parliamentary action starts to acquire a legitimacy of its own. That prospect should be welcomed by nobody: but a Parliament constituted on its present basis is not a fitting repository of powers hard-won back from Brussels.

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