The Telegraph is either commissioning ever more hysterical pieces or Brexiteers are becoming increasingly panicky. Last week, on one day we had three pro-Brexit, anti-May's deal articles by prominent Brexiteers in a co-ordinated broadside.
The first was one from Owen Paterson (HERE) who attacks the deal simply because he thinks it's a good one for the EU which goes a long way to explaining his Kamikaze approach. Brexit for Paterson is less about improving the lot of citizens in the UK and more about inflicting maximum damage on Brussels. He writes:
"It is not often that Donald Trump and the EU Commission’s Secretary General, Martin Selmayr, agree. But on the Withdrawal Agreement, they are as one. It looked “like a great deal for the EU” to Trump, and Selmayr confirmed to the Passauer Neue Presse in December that the EU had “negotiated hard and achieved their aims.”
"As my colleague Greg Hands has pointed out, Selmayr went even further. “This exit from the EU,” he said, “doesn’t work” for the UK. These statements mirror Selmayr’s and his colleagues’ previous boasts that “losing Northern Ireland was the price the UK would pay” and that the UK “would have to swallow a link between access to products and fisheries in future agreements.”
Next Allister Heath has a go (HERE), claiming that it is all the Tory remainers fault because "they don't trust themselves to govern". I must say they're not alone. I don't trust the bungling gang of useless incompetents either. For Heath though the Vote Leave campaign was not a lot of underhand manipulation, simplistic sloganising and plain lies, it was a beacon pointing to the way the negotiations should have been conducted.
"Cummings, Matthew Elliott and a few others were the genuises behind the official Brexit campaign: principled, thoughtful, well-read, brilliant men and women who took on the establishment and won. Their plan, honed through previous campaigns to halt the euro, regional assemblies, wasteful spending and the alternative vote, was to tap into latent discontent with the way politics was siphoning power away from voters, “hack the system”, and deliver the greatest upset since the fall of the Berlin Wall"
And so enamoured with the unprincipled, thoughtless, amoral and perhaps illegal Vote Leave campaign team, he thinks it should have become the template for the Cabinet Office:
"Was the great Brexit adventure always doomed? Of course not. It was never “obvious” that pitting the people against MPs would fail, that Brexit was “undeliverable”. I suspect that had the Vote Leave team taken over No 10 after the referendum, pushing through massive reforms and waiting until they were ready before triggering Article 50, we would be in a dramatically different place, with the country united behind a vision of an independent, open, self-governing Britain".
Heath seems remarkably uninformed if he doesn't know it was the 'genius' Cummings (HERE) who rejected the whole idea of having a plan even before the vote, saying that one which, 'makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task'. The idea that name Dominic Cummings and the word plan could ever appear together in the same document is risible. In truth Cummings saw what Heath cannot see even now. The idea of the 'country united behind a vision' is even more 'insuperable' now than it was when Cummings first said it in June 2015.
And Sir Richard Dearlove (HERE) proclaims that the Withdrawal Agreement would 'present a grave threat to our national security'. The silly old buffer writes:
"Her deal – which the Government still maintains amounts to “taking back control” – would in reality erode our ability to take charge of our own affairs while putting at risk our place at the heart of Nato and the functioning of the vital Five Eyes information sharing alliance (made up of the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)"
All of these men, for various reasons, think leaving without a deal is the only option. We shall see.
Even Richard North thinks so. This morning (HERE) he writes: "unless parliament votes for the withdrawal agreement, the default outcome is a no-deal Brexit. The government doesn't have to do anything – it does not have to declare it as a policy objective. It will happen automatically".
I stand by my long held view that this will never happen.
