Boris Johnson should be straight with us about our prospects after Brexit
The PM could help himself and the nation by explaining calmly which expectations can be met and which cannot
Matthew Parris
Saturday February 01 2020, 12.00am GMT, The Times
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The Big Ben bongs we didn’t hear last night …
BONG. Welcome to the new vassalage.
BONG. Will it be to the EU or the USA?
BONG. Fisheries or financial services?
BONG. Straight bananas or chlorinated chicken?
BONG. US trade commissioners or the ECJ?
BONG. British taxes on Google or US tariffs on Jaguar Land Rover?
BONG. More Romanians or fewer cabbage fields?
BONG. Fewer nurses or more Commonwealth immigration?
BONG. No European health insurance cards or more health tourists?
BONG. Or something in between?
BONG. Nothing has changed.
We do not wake up to a new world tomorrow. We wake to the same world. Welcome back to the old, hard choices, the same choices we’ve faced since 64 years ago at Suez when the Americans smacked us in the mouth: a post-imperial power with dreams of exceptionalism and a tired economy, troubled by low productivity and a culture of health and welfare entitlement that we struggle to afford.
Enough arguing the toss over Brexit. It’s done now; it was surely a mistake; we who believed that and still do, did our utmost to persuade politicians and fellow citizens to think again and we failed. But some of us also argued that leaving the EU wouldn’t be the end of the world. That, too, I still believe; and the job of politics now is to re-set expectations. A bit of a pinch is coming.
Leading the mission should be our new prime minister. I’ve railed mightily against Boris Johnson but believe now that he could prove well suited for the job. He would be good at letting us down pleasantly, though has qualities that could trip him.
A fellow Fleet Street columnist, Rafael Behr, wrote this week that during the last election Johnson’s winning formula was “to downgrade the promise of Brexit from reward to relief”. That was my impression on the doorstep. Relief was within Johnson’s power to deliver and he had in his hand a piece of paper — his draft withdrawal agreement — to prove it. “Get Brexit Done” was a killer phrase. He could stop the pain. And in a way he has. Even I can feel it.
This was like going to the dentist with a raging toothache: first, please, the novocaine and afterwards we can discuss the extraction, the filling and the cost. So too with Brexit. The pain has gone, but what next?
There’s a school of thought among many former Remainers that we’re in for a big shock this year. Expectations (they warn) will be dramatically dashed as Brussels shows its hand, or Trump gives us the finger, or both. “Alone in the world! What a blunder we’ve made,” the nation will wail.
I doubt this. More likely is a slow-growing realisation that the big new trade deals it’s hoped a “global’ Britain could strike beyond Europe are for the middle term at best; and meanwhile we must reach accommodations with the EU (“interim” accommodations, we’ll be told) that keep us fairly closely aligned with the single market and customs union. We’ll pay a bit for this and there will be no rewards at all, but we’ll survive: nobody wants to bankrupt us. For former Remainers, then, not yet the apocalypse. For Brexiteers, not yet the sunlit uplands.
If I’m right, then expectations here at home will have to be managed down; and they surely can be.
To the extent that Johnson thinks about such questions I would expect he anticipates this, for my guess is that beneath the outward exuberance lurks a deeply pessimistic soul. But his instinct will be to pump up the promises and leave reality to talk us back down. One by one and softly, expectations will be lowered by boring reports about sectoral progress (or lack of it) in trade negotiations with the EU and, as to those new global trade deals, the absence of news. In the meantime Boris will keep burbling sunnily about how great it’s all going to be, and taking care to keep himself and his cabinet off BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
But the instinct to duck is dangerous. Silence when things are steady can look strong; silence when they go wrong looks panicky. It reckons without events (a car manufacturer closes; Britain enters recession; unemployment rises … whatever). It reckons, too, without the animal spirits of parliamentary Brexiteers, keeping their counsel at present but who really do expect, after the relief, the reward. And it reckons without the populace, who feel they’ve been promised something big. General jollity, at which Johnson is very good, can flip suddenly from being lovable to being infuriating.
I don’t think Boris is at heart a joker but his instinct to avoid crunch encounters may be about to let him down: for if the political weather turns then he will appear to have been discredited and there may be no coming back from that. Right against his instincts, I believe, he needs to get his excuses in first. He has to level with us: explain in calm and serious terms that there will be no quick dividend from Brexit, and that hard choices, and often compromise choices, will have to be made.
For this he’ll need a new tone and some very good speeches, carefully prepared. Though he has made his way by talking, Johnson isn’t actually very eloquent. He has a real genius for verbal exuberance and his talent to amuse equips him wonderfully to gain our sympathetic attention. But once he has it, one senses he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He’s not a natural explainer and does not easily distil a rational argument into clear language.
What’s needed, soon, is a grave fireside chat. It would go deep with us, I think, and be remembered with respect in more difficult times to come. The prime minister might start with John Keats’s ditty about a boy who thought that if he only went somewhere different, the eternal verities might change. But …
“… he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red,
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England.
So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder’d,
He wonder’d,
He stood in his
Shoes and he wonder’d.”
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