This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“Brexit didn’t work” is now close to being a consensus. It suits the people who failed to do it and Brexit’s unreconciled critics equally. The former have their excuses for squandering their chance: Covid, the courts, Remainers, even their colleagues “who never believed in it”. But never them.
The fumblers claimed they wanted Brexit done. Yet it is what these failures — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and their successors, did — which is why the Conservative party is in the state it finds itself. Brexit was the chance to leave the EU. Nothing more, nothing less.
As D.H. Robinson notes in this issue, and as so many others miss, far from the Referendum being some irresistible happening politicians couldn’t avoid, it was an elective dodge that went wrong.
What did David Cameron hope that dodge would do? It was to entrench British membership of the EU by putting the subject to bed for another generation and allow the rest of politics to flow round that settled fact. A shoddy gambler staked the house and lost. But does this now, in retrospect only, stand as the fatal moment the Tory party chose to destroy itself?
For at the time, in the fights from 2016 to 2019 — not least in Nick Timothy’s 2017 manifesto which we can only conclude from her subsequent behaviour Lady May didn’t understand, if she read it at all — their glorious opportunity was clearly visible.
It was for the party and its leading politicians to serve a new desire for what conservatism could offer, and look forward to another century in office. Or at least Brexit was a chance for Tories to recognise that what they had been shovelling wasn’t what their voters wanted any more.
After the temptation to support May’s disastrous deal was removed by the European Research Group’s Spartans at the third “meaningful vote” (MV3), getting Brexit done — as the 2019 general election suggested — provided the Conservative Party with the opportunity to escape its sins and start again. But the Party preferred to carry on sinning.
Consider, however, that sentence in the preceding paragraph, the one about the ERG’s Spartans at MV3. What are the voters to make of that? Nothing, it’s borderline inexplicable to students of politics and historians now, never mind to the public.
If rising above the level of social media burps, words are speaking to other politicians
It certainly describes a real and essential factor: had the Tory party proceeded to an election in 2019 on the basis of May’s deal, it would have split, which could have ensured Jeremy Corbyn entered Downing Street.
Those few Spartan politicians who acted as they did were both brave and right, resisting the pressure of the Conservative party mainstream and the current of conventional wisdom. But actions need symbols. And politicians need rhetoric.
Michael Bentley’s reflections on Maurice Cowling, a Cambridge don 30 years dead, deals with what words do for politicians. Always, in every mediated moment, rhetoric is positional. That’s the point of the words. If they’re rising anywhere above the level of social media burps, words speak to other politicians. The speech of politicians together becomes what the public hears.
Never pretend politicians are speaking to the public: they are speaking to one another, then straining to imagine what their peers think the public have heard. The man who most plausibly claims, “the public think X” wins politics, regardless of how or even whether he proceeds to say that the voters think X, by his telling of this story, “because Y”.
And he wins because he has come up with a line other politicians subscribe to: passing round such shibboleths is how business is done. Politicians, not the public, decide politics.
Is such a Cowlingite view of the world — high politics is all and “the people” are simply an immaterial noise off — a mere token in a game played by scarcely more than several dozen people — mean popular discontent doesn’t matter? Of course not, reality is real. And it’s worse than you think.
Politicians deploy their words in a grim environment that few people have diagnosed better than Chris Bayliss. His work for The Critic provides harsh lessons in realism.
We are not the country we used to be, by dint of the conscious, deliberate Millennial ideology that D.H. Robinson explains. Instead, we are the country Chris Bayliss describes.
That a bad situation got worse during the 14 years of Tory misrule is still a fact that its remaining leading operatives can’t grasp. For mishandling, or even — if that’s your view — doing Brexit, is not what sunk them. It’s everything else they did.
The ERG, as a Tory faction, pulled off a tremendous parliamentary coup. At no point in the Parliaments from 2015 were there even a hundred MPs who wanted anything which could be meaningfully called Brexit done because it achieved Brexit.
Many, a majority even, finally wanted it done to get the torturous drama over with, but precious few wanted it for the opportunity it could have presented, let alone as leaving the EU as an end in itself.
What mostly resulted were the priorities the majority of Tory MPs genuinely wanted to see come to pass. Equality here, diversity there, green guff everywhere. All of this, with the arsenic of secular tyranny and economic insanity stirred in as a pandemic interlude — however popular that momentarily was.
Why did they do it? Why did these Conservatives coo over Greta Thunberg, or advocate child mutilation on behalf of onanist paedophiles? Why did the Tories commission “the Lammy review into the treatment of, and outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system”? Lammy duly delivered the assumptions and results we all — Prime Minister and Justice Secretary alike — knew he would.
Why did the Tories do all that? Inescapably it is because David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove, facilitated by Dean Godson and Douglas Smith, let them. That is the key in a parliamentary system: it matters who the MPs are. We have had the wrong ones.
This is the fault, and ruin, of the Tories. It is particularly these five men who groomed someone like Liz Truss for the top and smirked about doing so.
With Danny Kruger’s defection to Reform the chance that the Tories can be saved from this quintet’s latest offering, Kemi Badenoch, are remote. Some lightweight such as James Cleverly will replace her, and the party shall deserve him.
What British politics needs is for authority to be restored to Parliament, and away from presumptuous judges and the priorities of Europeans and Americans (no greater emancipation of thought and allegiance is needed than that). But there is no point in giving power back to Westminster if the people going there are of the same calibre as Cameron’s Conservatives.
Will Nigel Farage, who by definition can be prime minister only care of the blankest sheet in British history, do better at picking them, with the still greater opportunity he has to do so? This would not be The Critic if we were optimistic.
Brexit was bungled by people who didn’t want it, or expect it, but also by those for whom it — see Cowling — was inescapably just one political device amongst many others when it unexpectedly became a real thing after the Referendum.
Thus “leaving the EU” rhetorically stood in for whatever it was you had always wanted, or suddenly thought might be politically useful. Any idle fantasy could be pursued by talkers in the guise of this generational opportunity.
Yet what we should always have wanted wasn’t just the right ideas but the right people. If you see them, tell Nigel.
