Another chair short in the Number 10 musical chairs farce.
A Decade of Self-Harm
Even irony has come
to joke at the expense of the United Kingdom. On the eve of the 10th
anniversary of the Brexit vote, the sixth prime minister since that act of
unmitigated self-harm resigned.
Whether you like it or not, Brexit made the UK
ungovernable, and it is the spectre of Brexit that has deftly conducted the
dirge of musical chairs at 10 Downing Street.
Obviously, the
personification of this rotten enterprise is Nigel Farage, along with all the
cloaks of calumnious obfuscation he has donned aboard the various political
vehicles he has ridden to beguile the natives.
Cameron's Fatal
Gamble
In trying to
outmanoeuvre and upstage Farage, David Cameron promised an in-out referendum
without thresholds, believing he could gamble with our future in Europe and
win. He lost. Once the result was announced, he resigned.
The chicanery between
Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, who were the opportunistic ruling party
figureheads of the Brexit proposition, meant that Theresa May, a remainer,
became prime minister.
Everything she tried
to negotiate with Europe was rubbished and undermined by the antics of Boris
Johnson and a cohort of implacables. First, Theresa May gambled away her
majority, and every Brexit negotiation ended in stalemate. She resigned within
three years.
Johnson Gets Brexit
Done
Boris Johnson then
took the helm and purged the Tory Party of the reasonable, level-headed and
moderate One Nation Tories, before calling an election to "Get Brexit
Done".
The least qualified
person ever to negotiate a deal, having had a background in the Scottish whisky
industry, became the point man: Lord David Frost. What he brought back was a
mishmash of imponderables, and we signed ourselves out of prosperity just as the
coronavirus took hold of the world.
Boris made stringent
rules for us, with punitive fines for breaking them, yet he and his staff were
partying in Downing Street. That scandal, along with a few others, engulfed his
premiership and culminated in the resignation of more than half his cabinet. It
soon dawned on him that he had to go. He held office for three years.
Truss and the Lettuce
Enter Liz Truss, who,
after kissing hands at Balmoral, may well have hastened the demise of Queen
Elizabeth II two days later. Her curtsey was so awkward that you couldn't tell
if she was flat-footed, bow-legged, or suffering from some yet unexplained ailment
of her lower ambulatory system. Rather than laugh, you pitied her.
Her uncosted
mini-budget, aiming to introduce us as the new Singapore on Thames, one of the
sunlit uplands of Brexit, much as Canaan was given to the Jews, wreaked havoc
on the financial markets.
The fallout was so
drastic that she sacked her Chancellor of the Exchequer and brought in a Tory
grandee of a sort, Jeremy Hunt. The sand was running out of her hourglass; days
became minutes, and even a patch of lettuce outlasted her. She was gone in 50
days.
Sunak Steadies the
Ship
Rishi Sunak, the
first Asian, the first Hindu, and possibly the richest ever prime minister,
walked into 10 Downing Street. He steadied the ship that had been caught in
various post-Covid, Brexit and immigration eddies. We were in a spiral, and it
was only a matter of time before we lost our heads in a dizzy spell.
He called an election
about twenty months into his premiership and handed the reins over to the
Labour Party in a landslide, after the party had been out of power for 14
years.
Starmer's Short
Tenure
Sir Keir Starmer was
now at the helm, honourable and lawyerly. After a number of missteps, bad calls
and U-turns, his popularity sank so low that by the local elections of May 2026
the Parliamentary Labour Party had decided he could not lead them into the next
general election. A few weeks short of two years as prime minister, he
resigned.
It is likely that
Andy Burnham will become the next prime minister. Meanwhile, in one way or
another, the office has been haunted by the banshee cries of Nigel Farage,
first in UKIP, then in the Brexit Party, and now in Reform.
The Myth of Control
One of the things
Brexit was supposed to give us back control of was our borders. It now
transpires that the problem was never Europe, but policies within our own
domain.
Whereas European
immigrants were near enough that they could, if they wished, return home every
weekend, the immigrants now arrive in larger numbers from further afield. They
cannot return home every weekend; they are full settlers with family ties that must
be accommodated if their services are to be procured for the nation.
Likewise, Brexit was
supposed to ignite a bonfire of rules, mostly from the EU. Yet to trade with
any trading bloc, we need alignment and agreement on standards.
We were once involved
in crafting those rules, but for the purposes of ease of business, the very
rules we thought we could jettison must now be absorbed into our regulatory
system for seamless commercial activity. We are rule takers where we were once
rule makers, in concert with the community to which we belonged.
No Justice in Sight
Then there is the
question of how the UK economy has suffered since Brexit, with the loss of
about 6% in GDP. You may not be able to call Brexit a failure, but if it looks
like one and walks like one, there can be no other conclusion.
The fight for the
soul of the country continues as we struggle to get the facts before the
people, who are bombarded and cajoled into working against their self-interest,
sold easy solutions to complex problems.
We cannot defeat
geography. Europe is our closest trading partner, and a softening of Brexit,
with a bold and courageous defence of the associated policies, is needed.
They say a majority
would now vote against Brexit. The fact is, the perpetrators of this travesty
have never been held accountable, and it is doubtful we'll ever get justice for
the harm they caused. What a wasted decade.
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