Danny (Lord) Finkelstein wrote a piece about Brexit for The Times on Tuesday, suggesting neither main party plans to mention Brexit - what he calls “our most consequential postwar decision” - during the election. This was the day before Rishi Sunak fired the starting pistol on that election, as the heavens opened over Downing Street, leaving the prime minister looking like a drowned rat. Nobody bothered to bring out an umbrella for him. It was almost as if his own advisers had sabotaged the launch.
The downpour, coming just as Sunak wanted to appear statesmanlike, was perhaps a portent of things to come. Let's hope so. Yesterday, the PM was in Erewash in Derbyshire at a McVities biscuit warehouse where two local Tory councillors disguised as workers in hi-viz jackets lobbed some easy questions his way. They can’t even stage manage some ‘impromptu’ meetings with Joe Public.
Tory MPs are livid. Many are standing down and know will be out of a job shortly but want more time on the gravy train. The election will be a seismic event for the Tories, and while Brexit is front and centre, it can’t be spoken about except in hushed tones.
I think Finkelstein is probably right, neither party does want to talk about it. But whether they will be allowed to keep the subject quiet over the next six weeks is another matter. I don’t think they will.
It is an odd situation, isn't it? Brexit has not been a success and usually, the opposition would seize the opportunity to criticise the government, but apparently daren't raise the issue for fear of ..... what? Does anyone know?
As Mr Finkelstein points out:
"For the Conservatives, the first difficulty is a fairly simple one to describe and understand. Brexit is no longer very popular. And no campaign manager raises the salience of something that might prove to be a vote loser.
"This means the Tories don’t want to talk about the opportunities that Brexit has or will produce because they don’t want to talk about something voters aren’t keen on. But this links to a second problem. Even if they did wish to talk about it, the party still can’t explain what these opportunities might be."
But the dilemma for Labour is a different and potentially far more difficult one to sustain.
Brexit, the Tory peer says has made Britain "a less attractive place to do business." This is unarguably true and to address it, any government will need to "reduce non-wage labour costs, decrease regulation, conclude trade deals that open our markets to challenge, limit public spending to make tax competitive and allow freer economic migration."
Yet Labour plans to "move this country closer to the European social model" but at the same time, stay out of the EU single market. Over the life of a parliament, he argues, this combination will become more and more difficult to sustain. The cost of doing business in Britain will be rising when Brexit requires it to go down.
In short, Starmer has committed himself to an economic policy that doesn’t work, and that he doesn’t believe in anyway. This is surely an impossible position, he claims.
Finkelstein doesn't say it but Starmer will be leading a largely pro-EU party and a country which has a majority who would like to rejoin Europe just as the Eurosceptic voices in parliament have been reduced to a rump. How long can Labour's policy be sustained? I don't think it will last one term.
Brexiteers certainly worry about it. David Frost for example, has written several articles for The Telegraph warning that Labour will reverse Brexit. His latest is: Voters must now face up to the reality of a Labour government.
Frost, rightly in my opinion, thinks Labour will "blame everything that goes wrong on Brexit."
He can hardly complain, Brexiteers spent 40 years blaming everything on the EU - an idea which has been disproved daily since we left the bloc.
Labour, he fears, will take us back into the customs union, back into the single market, be running to Brussels in every crisis and putting the Brexit referendum in jeopardy. Exactly. This is why Wednesday marks the beginning of the end of the insanity of Brexit.
The rise and fall of Rishi Sunak
Sunak has only been in politics since 2015 and will almost certainly be out again before 2025. I don’t see him sticking around as the MP for Richmond.
His political career has been a meteoric rise and fall. He took over Hague’s safe seat in the 2015 election, supported Brexit, and became a junior minister at the DCLG under Theresa May in January 2018. He helped elect Johnson as leader in 2019 and was rewarded with the chief secretary to The Treasury job in 2019. When Cummings forced Javid out in early 2020, he took over as Chancellor.
Sunak was out himself briefly when he lost the 2022 leadership election to Liz Truss, but came back as prime minister in October that year, after her disastrous 49 days. He is going to lead the party to its worst defeat since the Corn Laws and they’re going to be out of power for a decade at the very least. He will be ditched as leader immediately afterwards.
Anyone who thinks a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager, married to the daughter of a billionaire, with a home in California, will carry on as a constituency MP, representing people in Richmond and dealing with cracked paving slabs, noisy neighbours and planning arguments, should think again. Sunak isn't even popular inside the party. He’ll resign before the year’s out.
Compared to some long-serving Tory MPs like Michael Fabricant or John Baron, who never served as ministers, he’s a carpet bagger who came and went in the blink of a parliamentary eye.
He's done. The Tories are done. Rejoice, the nightmare is coming to an end.
