She says "Brexit has become the madwoman in the country’s attic. Demonised, its spirit crushed, it looms over the UK like Mr. Rochester’s wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre. Of course, Bertha – who sets fire to her husband’s bed and rips up Jane’s wedding veil."
This sentence caught my eye because four years ago, almost to the day, at the foot of a post on this blog, I wrote these words:
"I sometimes think the nation has been reduced to Thornfield Hall and the world has finally caught up with the fact we have had 17 million mentally disturbed people, like Edward Rochester's wife, living in the loft that we have tried to keep secret for years and years. Now it is all out in the open. And the world is standing watching - and sniggering behind our backs."
OK, She's a better writer than I am and expresses it with more colour, but you get the general picture.
So, we are agreed on something, which is progress I suppose.
The difference between us at the moment is that she still thinks Brexit was a good thing if only the Tory party had implemented it properly. Me? Well, you know what I think.
She admits that almost nothing has been achieved and it's time for the Leave camp to start saying the unsayable: the Tories have made such a hash of Brexit that "the project is probably now unsalvageable."
Her logic is just as tortured as it was three years ago when she wrote "the panicked EU goes into Brexit meltdown, Britain finally has the upper hand." This was just after Boris Johnson had signed the Withdrawal Agreement. At the time Jacobs said:
"Brussels knows that its chance to flog Britain the worst trade deal in history is slipping away. It can no longer fall back on the backstop to keep us locked in Hotel California. Boris Johnson’s thumping majority also means Britain’s "no deal" bargaining chip is back in play: a WTO Brexit would pass through Parliament reasonably comfortably.
"Revelations this week that, in the event of no deal, Japanese car giant Nissan would consider doubling down on the UK to boost its domestic market share, and protect its Sunderland plant, underline the inconvenient truth: Project Fear premonitions are overblown, and Britain could cope perfectly well without a trade deal."
A no-deal Brexit was never going to pass through parliament, comfortably or not. As for Brussels flogging us the worst trade deal in history, they didn't need to bother because this is what Lord Frost wanted, nay demanded.
Her current thinking is that the Brexit debate "fixated too much on questions of trade – with Remainers endlessly outraged at new barriers between the UK and the EU" after earlier being outraged herself and talking about "tensions in Northern Ireland and strangling small firms with red tape." Where do you even start with that?
She says no attention has been paid to "opportunities around innovation – the chance to reinvent the country as a science superpower, for example, and to create a world-leading regulatory environment for tech firms" – what was that all about if it wasn't about trade?
The government, she complains, has increased taxes to a peacetime high and the big business lobby has obstructed deregulation efforts in case it increases competition. Brexit’s only major achievement to date, according to Jacobs, is that it has scathingly "exposed the ineptitude of this country’s political class."
The only people who could actually make Brexit a reality are the political class but they have suddenly - after June 2016 - been substituted by a bunch of inept men and women too incompetent to do the work. Odd that, I wonder how it happened?
She does not ask herself why it is that people who might have been able to make something of Brexit thought it was a thoroughly bad idea and wouldn't have done it anyway. Only those who didn't understand it were prepared to give it a go. This I must say, is often how disasters happen.
Anyway, her conclusion is the same as mine:
"What of the Tories – the party that little over three years ago received a historic mandate to “get Brexit done”? If the first elephant in the room is that Brexit’s days are numbered, then the second is that the Conservative brand cannot possibly survive such an ignominious outcome. Could we finally see the emergence of a new centre-Right party that genuinely has a chance of taking power? As the revolution goes up in flames, this may be the only thing that can save it."
Yes, there must be a split. Those who think Brexit is still a good idea should go and campaign for it. They will never get elected. Conservatives who have kept quiet for the last seven years need to stand up and be counted and rebuild for the 2030s or 2040s. Admitting Brexit was a huge mistake would be a good start.
Brexit was only ever a distraction. It was a clamour by politicians who had simply no idea what Britain's problems were down to and it was at best a last desperate roll of the dice. It has failed, let's stop looking for answers isolated from our friends in Europe and knuckle down with some real solutions.
