The Telegraph have a 30 minute video which has the title: The Week That Broke Brexit, and the sub-title: The litany of mistakes that got Britain into this mess - and who we should blame (HERE). It's an interesting video, not for what's in it because I don't see any big revelations, but because it seems to me an attempt to begin shifting the blame onto everybody except the people actually responsible. They all appear washing their hands of any responsibility whatsoever and the video suggests all would be well if only BoJo was prime minister!
First of all, it's hard to overstate the significance of the acknowledgement in the title that we are in a mess. This is The Telegraph remember, the heavyweight broadsheet newspaper that campaigned vigorously for Brexit. It is now admitting that Brexit is a mess. This is a highly important moment make no mistake.
But after the title, from that point on, the video sets out to put the blame on everybody except BoJo and Gove - and the right wing press, which is barely mentioned at all. The week they talk about is the seven days after June 23rd 2016. Brexit was broken the moment Johnson wasn't elected prime minister - or so the video would have you believe. Nothing to do with the 100 plus weeks since then?
Gisela Stuart says Cameron's resignation and the fact that he didn't prepare for the result was careless and reckless and "sowed the seeds" of many of the problems - but she knew the government hadn't made a plan but still urged everyone to vote for it! And bear in mind the leave campaign, of which she was a leading light, openly believed coming up with a plan that all leave campaigners could sign up to was "insuperable" (HERE). And if you needed proof of how insuperable it was, look where we are now. Two years on and there is still no plan.
There is some talk in the video of how Gove, taking a call from Cameron on the morning after the result, wanted to come round to Downing Street actually thinking Cameron was going to stay on but the PM telling him not to bother as he had his own plans. His resignation was actually a shock to them. The Brexiteers have owned the problem from the moment Cameron quit and it is now a "mess", broken by constant infighting over the sheer magnitude and impossibility of the task. The referendum date was formally announced in February 2016. They genuinely thought David Cameron (who thought Brexit would be a disaster) should have prepared a plan in five months that they (who believed totally in Brexit) have been unable to prepare in two years. This is a measure of the lunacy that is gripping them.
Matthew Elliot, CEO of Vote Leave thought the failure of the government to plan for Brexit was damaging but doesn't ask himself how this could have been done given that nobody on the leave side actually KNEW in detail what they wanted. It is ridiculous even to suggest it. We still don't know
Craig Oliver, Cameron's aide at No 10, said Cameron had to resign because he had staked his reputation on the fact that he thought Brexit would be "deeply damaging", something which he turned out to be absolutely right about. We see it happening every day.
Others blame Gove for stabbing BoJo in the back and killing his chances of becoming PM. Gove was set to be BoJo's chancellor apparently.
If anybody thinks BoJo could have become PM and produced a serious plan for Brexit, they really need psychiatric help. He has been a total failure as foreign secretary and even an international running joke. If The Telegraph think we're in a "mess" now we can only imagine what a shambles it would be if Johnson had ever become prime minister. BoJO would have been a disastrous PM at any time in our history, let alone at this chaotic and humiliating moment.
The reason it's a mess, according to Aaron Banks in the video, is that Theresa May doesn't believe in Brexit. If only the Conservatives had picked Boris and Michael, all would be going swimmingly now. This is the pair who couldn't handle a political party leadership bid let alone the most complex negotiation this country has ever faced.
The Telegraph is right, Brexit is a mess but they were told it would be a mess multiple times daily during the campaign, but their journalists almost to a man and woman, dismissed it as scaremongering and project fear. Now it definitely is a mess, as it was always going to be and this is casting around for someone to carry the can - perhaps it's the can Mrs May has been kicking down the road for so long. She should brace herself to be blamed for everything about Brexit.
I note this morning The Independent have a piece about the video, written far better that I could ever manage - see it HERE.
