No Way Out

If David Davis does not resign, really by the end of today and certainly by the start of next week, then there will no longer be any point in pretending that the United Kingdom is ever going to leave the European Union, at least this side of a Corbyn Government, although even then it would necessitate Labour deselections on a scale that is most unlikely to have happened.

Davis was John Major's Europe Minister. Theresa May made him Brexit Secretary precisely because she knew that he was neither willing nor able to deliver Brexit. There is no member of the present Cabinet who really believes in Brexit, and no one on the Conservative backbenches who knows why they want to leave the EU.

They think that it only went to the bad sometime in the very late 1980s, around the time of a speech in the dotage of Margaret Thatcher's Premiership, which we now know to have been the beginning of her own dotage. She never opposed the EU while she was in full possession of her faculties, and to this day her flame-keepers cannot tell you what, in particular, is wrong with it.

For that, you need the people who have always been opposed to it. A few of those were on the Right, but most of them are dead. The No voter from 1975 who is now most notable in the right-wing commentariat was a member of the International Socialists at the time. 

But the main opposition to the EU, as such, has always been on the Left. The 2016 referendum was itself won by them and from there, in Labour-voting areas and by writing on the side of a big red bus that there would be an extra £350 million per week for the NHS. That was what swung it, crystallising 40 years of opposition to that which became, remained and succeeded Thatcherism, to which the EU has always been integral. The 2016 referendum result was the 1983 General Election result that should have been.

No wonder, then, that the Conservative Party immediately gave its Leadership to an ardent Remainer without any kind of contest. No wonder that she proceeded to make David Davis, of all people, Brexit Secretary. But if Davis does not resign, really by the end of today and certainly by the start of next week, then there will no longer be any point in pretending that the United Kingdom is ever going to leave the European Union, at least this side of a Corbyn Government, although even then it would necessitate Labour deselections on a scale that is most unlikely to have happened.