No Way Out — Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris (£26) is published on Thursday and the final book, Out: How Brexit Got Done and Four Prime Ministers Were Undone is published on June 20. The earlier ones were All Out War and Fall Out.
His own impeccable pro-Brexit leanings are clear despite his attempt to appear even-handed. He has worked at The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and The Sunday Telegraph before becoming political editor at the Sunday Times. If he's not a Brexiteer I'll eat my hat.
However, he seems to prefer to give the impression that he's above it all. On Mrs May's difficulties in 2018-19 he says: "Closure remained as tantalisingly out of reach for me as it often seemed to be for Brexiteers and Remainers." In other words, he's neither. Just an impartial observer.
Don't believe it. We know he voted because he says so:
"When I was pondering my own vote in those distant prelapsarian days of 2016, I felt Britain was not a natural member of the political institutions in Brussels: too independent minded, too rooted in parliamentary democracy and the ability to change those who rule us. My doubts centred on the economy, cutting ourselves off from our largest market, and a suspicion that the British state was not really set up to handle the process of Brexit or take advantage of the opportunities it presented.
"I believed, frankly, that we would botch it. Everyone will have a different view about how prescient this was. I’ll just say that, since January 31, 2020, when we left the EU, we have been free to make our own mistakes, and boy have we made them."
First of all, the idea that Britain wasn’t a “natural member of the political institutions in Brussels” is the view of a minority. Britain was happy enough in 1975 to endorse the decision to join the EEC and eight years later to emphatically reject Labour’s manifesto commitment to pull us out. No party afterwards put such a policy forward in any general election.
Polls in the years leading up to the referendum showed most people (90%+) didn’t rate Europe as a problem at all. Eurosceptics realised they could never get elected with a policy of Brexit so they opted for a referendum and a campaign of disinformation, deception and lies to make it appear that Britain didn't fit inside the EU.
Shipman circulates around a lot of Tories and he mistakes them as being representative of Britain as a whole. This is where he gets his ideas. This isn't to say his stuff isn't interesting because it often is.
But he specialises in the gossip, the trivia and the tittle-tattle rather than the substance. In his article, the first of the "Key revelations" is this:
• Michel Barnier, EU chief negotiator, bypassed by European Commission, who were privately helpful to UK. Breakthroughs secured in secret meetings on hotel roofs between Oliver Robbins and Martin Selmayr, EU official dubbed “Monster of Brussels”
Another one was that one of David Davis’s aides sawed off part of the legs of a chair to make it shorter so Barnier was at a disadvantage in a news conference. That worked out well, didn't it?
Now he talks airily of the “opportunities” Brexit presented. hark at this as my old man used to say:
“Only Remainers tend to point out the problems with the Brexit settlement and only Brexiteers look for the potential benefits. On the other hand, everything has changed. Whether Brexit is good or bad, it is both here to stay and a never-ending negotiation.”
This is simply not true or only partly true. Brexiteers like Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and even Jacob Rees Mogg do talk about ‘potential benefits’ but that’s all they do, talk. In power, they show no inclination to find any actual benefits. The whole deregulation agenda has run into the sand. Where we have changed things like the CAP and the CFP, farmers and fishermen are increasingly unhappy, and some are as mad as hell with the government’s offerings.
The sorry truth is the Brexiteers can't find any upsides while Remainers are up to their necks in downsides.
Shipman himself doesn't list any benefits (surprise, surprise) and the fact the government has been unable to show the British people any ‘benefits’ after eight years of a policy which has seen a border between parts of the United Kingdom and political chaos which continues to this day, particularly over immigration, is precisely why voters have turned away from the Tory party.
His comment that Brexit is “both here to stay and a never-ending negotiation” shows that he has only a shaky grasp of democracy. A substantial and growing majority of the electorate, especially young people without the xenophobic view of foreigners that my generation often has, want to rejoin and there will come a time when no party will be able to ignore it.
I don’t know what Starmer will do about Europe and I suspect he doesn’t yet.
However, what will change after the electoral drubbing the Tories are headed for is the whole narrative around Brexit. Business and industries have been critical of Brexit but few have called for rejoining the EU or the single market. I suspect they know it’s a waste of time and could even be used to punish them.
When Labour are in government there will be a cabinet far more sympathetic to the whole philosophy of the EU. Ministers will be supported by a parliamentary party overwhelmingly in favour of closer ties with Brussels and a civil service that has always seen Brexit as little more than damage limitation. Most Labour grassroots members in my opinion would like to see the UK rejoin and they usually aren’t backwards at coming forward. The 2025 party conference should be quite interesting.
I am stating the obvious when I say that Starmer will come under huge pressure to adopt policies that he is already known to be favourable towards and to reject Brexit which he campaigned vigorously against.
He unwisely quotes Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”
But Brexit - or its success at any rate - was never possible or attainable, that is the problem. It was sold as a panacea but has turned out to be snake oil and close to two-thirds of voters know it. And what was the point of removing ourselves from the EU's political institutions only to enter a "never-ending negotiation"?
In politics, very little can be done without money. To get it you need to have a successful economy. In today's world to do that and to create taxable wealth, you need trade. Sovereignty isn't a substitute for tax revenue. It's a tradable commodity that helps wealth creation as both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher recognised.
Cutting ourselves out of the SM and the CU was a colossal act of self-harm and no matter how long you spend investigating alternatives, nothing will make up for it.
Shipman is simply wrong. Brexit is not here to stay however much he thinks it is.
