Dominic Cummings was described by David Cameron as a career psychopath. This was when he worked for Michael Gove at Education. He graduated to become the campaign director for Vote Leave and is often credited with being the mastermind behind the stunning result. His use of social media was particularly clever and ruthless. Now he's working as senior policy advisor to Johnson, a post which many think is due to Johnson's strategy of going for an election sooner rather than later.
However, governing is not campaigning as I think he is about to discover.
A year before the referendum, Cummings was writing on his blog:
"Creating an exit plan that makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task. Eurosceptic groups have been divided for years about many of the basic policy and political questions".
This is common knowledge but he went on to add:
Even if one succeeded, the sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered in such a plan even were it to be 20,000 pages long, and the longer it is the more errors are likely. On top of the extremely complex policy issues is a feedback loop – constructing such a plan depends partly on inherently uncertain assumptions about what is politically sellable in a referendum, making it even harder to rally support behind a plan. Further, in market research I have done it is clear that 15 years after the euro debate the general public know nothing more about the EU institutions than they did then. Less than 1% have heard of the EEA. Few MPs know the difference between the EEA and EFTA or the intricacies of the WTO rules. The idea that the public could be effectively educated about such things in the time we have seems unlikely.
Here we are four years on and we still have no plan which all 'reasonable people could unite around' and the task still seems 'insuperable' - the dictionary definition of which is, Insuperable:(of a difficulty or obstacle) impossible to overcome. Cummings even admits the general public, far from knowing what they were voting for (or against) in 2016 knew little or nothing about the EU institutions - and neither did he or Johnson.
The 'sheer complexity' is now apparent and the questions just as 'endless'. MPs and the public are no more 'educated' now about the intricacies of WTO rules and EEA/EFTA than they were in 2016. In fact, if possible they are less educated and even more confused.
His fatal mistake was to assume a plan would emerge that a majority could coalesce around but this hasn't happened and in my opinion. it's doubtful one ever will. Last week Mark Francois, the bovver boy of the ERG, told Boris Johnson that his group, "will continue to vote down [the] withdrawal agreement". This isn't to say the WA couldn't get through with the help of Labour MPs but the Tory party would never survive intact.
Francois' thinking is that the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) is too long and complicated, although MPs haven't even seen it yet, and would be subject to much parliamentary argument:
“Even if you took the backstop element out of the bill you are still talking about a very substantial bill. You’d have to spend weeks in Parliament…and you’d have weeks and weeks of people tabling wrecking amendments.
“You’d have a running Parliamentary war probably for at least a month and I don’t think that any sensible government would want that in the run up to October 31, so in practical terms I don’t think it’s a good idea”.
The ERG want the Withdrawal Agreement scrapped altogether and either a new, shorter agreement without the backstop negotiated or we should leave without a deal. They are at one end of a very wide spectrum while the LibDems and the SNP are at the other, and would prefer to see us remain in the EU after a second referendum. In between are fifty shades of grey - if you'll excuse the expression.
There is no time left for any substantial negotiations and a crash out no deal would, for the ERG, actually be a desirable outcome. For the rest of us it would be an unmitigated disaster.
There is no time left for any substantial negotiations and a crash out no deal would, for the ERG, actually be a desirable outcome. For the rest of us it would be an unmitigated disaster.
So Cummings was right in 2015 and unfortunately, there is still no consensus and none remotely in sight. I predicted in 2016 that at the end of Brexit, if indeed we ever get to one, nobody in this country will be happy about the settlement, which really means it will just go on and on and on.
Iain Duncan Smith, writing in The Telegraph compared Brexit to the Reformation and was roundly attacked for his ignorance of British history with plenty of people, including Simon Schama, the historian, tweeting:
why do these dunces abuse history in the name of their simple- minded prejudices. 1) the Reformation was a pan European phenomenon, 2) it created a religious civil war in Britain that lasted 2 centuries https://t.co/vr7AMsnUas— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) August 3, 2019
So we may have another two hundred years of it.
