He makes a plausible argument that Hannan was one of several long-standing Brexit supporters who wanted some form of soft Brexit but were somehow swept along by others who favoured a much harder version, up to and including leaving with no deal.
The Leave movement had, Smith claims, "radicalised itself throughout the campaign." By accident, I suppose.
Hannan, Johnson, Gove, were all essentially ‘Liberal Leavers’ but had "unleashed something they could no longer control." David Campbell Bannerman started the shift towards a much harder ‘WTO-Plus Option’, and others began to follow him. DCB ended up as the leading light in ‘Let’s Go WTO.’ Even a David (Lord) Frost, who had campaigned for Remain, wrote in the Telegraph at the end of June 2016 that we needed to take the Norway Option, Smith says.
Frost did argue for the EEA, but only as a ‘transitional arrangement’ as we negotiated a more long-term FTA, exactly as Flexcit planned. This assumed the EU would agree to a former member having five years to disrupt the single market while simultaneously strong-arming their way to an unprecedentedly good deal. That was never on.
Hannan certainly argued for a Swiss-like option, but the EU had grown to hate the 100+ bilateral deals they have with Switzerland and ruled that option out from the start.
Smith talks as though what happened between 2014 and the referendum was that originally, there were two distinct groups of Brexiteers. Those who wanted a total break with Europe and what you might call the wets. You need to be a real student of the inside of Brexit politics to see this distinction.
These eventually morphed into one movement as men like Michael Gove began to argue towards the end of the campaign that Britain could actually leave everything but would still mysteriously be part of the EU single market, and people believed him. I remember him on TV telling the British woman who lived in France that nothing would change, implying that we would retain FoM while everyone else in all the other member states wouldn’t be able to enjoy the same rights in Britain. It was nonsense of course.
Like all good theories, Smith's claims contain a kernel of truth. But the larger and more embarrassing truth, is that all those who started out campaigning for a soft Brexit didn’t understand the EU or how the single market worked.
Complaints of over-regulation and MPs spending inordinate amounts of time not properly scrutinising new EU laws were never going to stop in the EEA option, since virtually all of it was connected to the drive to finally and fully harmonise the single market. The only difference would have been the total loss of influence over these EU laws.
Moreover, Flexcit was simply a means to the end result, which was always a complete break. In other words, the distinction Smith is talking about is merely a matter of timing. A few deluded souls like Owen Patterson and Hannan went on TV and said Britain shouldn't leave the single market at all, but they were very much in the minority.
They simply failed to think it through. Mrs May's obsession with controlling immigration (I wonder what she thinks now?) only revealed the truth, that the only logical position was for the UK to leave the EU, the single market, and the customs union. The soft option would leave this country as a permanent rule-taker, no place for the world's fifth or sixth biggest economy.
This is why I think talk now of rejoining the EEA is bound to fail. We have no choice but to rejoin the EU, and I am confident that by 2035, we will have done so.
Smith also tries to argue that the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) didn't have a party line on Brexit by quoting a few associates who published articles arguing against leaving the EU, but they never seemed to appear prominently on TV or in the campaign, and were a small minority.
This is the start of a re-writing of history. That Brexit was a mistake, but nobody is to blame because they just got a little bit carried away with it all. We must never allow them to forget.
