By far the most jaw-dropping revelation so far to have emerged in the extracts from David Cameron’s memoirs was buried in his account of the build-up to the Brexit referendum. Recalling his efforts to persuade Boris Johnson to back Remain, the former prime minister noted that “Boris had become fixated on whether we could pass legislation that said UK law was ultimately supreme over EU law”. He duly dispatched Sir Oliver Letwin on a “nightmare round of shuttle diplomacy” between Mr Johnson and the government’s lawyers to see if a way could be found to address his concerns by domestic legislation.
“But those lawyers were determined to defend the purity of European law and kept watering down the wording.” According to Mr Cameron, this epitomised the problem at the heart of the UK’s relationship with the EU: “Our officials were determined to play by the rules.”
What makes this extract extraordinary is that it confirms that six years after he became prime minister and just weeks before he gambled Britain’s membership of the EU in a referendum, he didn’t understand how it works. Indeed, it appears he still hasn’t grasped that the supremacy of EU law in the areas over which the EU has competence is not a bug but the essential feature without which it couldn’t work.
It is the purity of EU rules and the willingness of member states to play strictly by them that has enabled open borders and frictionless trade across the Continent. Without common rules consistently enforced by a common court, the customs union and single market in whose defence Mr Cameron sacrificed his political career would not exist.
His ignorance of the fundamental principles of how the EU operates is testimony to the enduring hold of one of the most powerful narratives in British politics. This idea that rules are for other people, that the EU’s insistence on the integrity of its legal order is an alien and unnecessary continental obsession, continues to hold an unshakeable grip over a large swathe of Britain’s political class, despite all that has happened over the past three years. Theresa May suffered from the same delusion, proclaiming in her notorious speech at the October 2016 Conservative party conference that she would end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain, apparently oblivious to the fact that she had just committed herself to taking Britain out of the EU single market and customs union until this was pointed out to her by Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s then-ambassador to the EU. She spent the next two and a half years being schooled in legal reality.
Now Boris Johnson is prime minister and the whole cycle has started again. He took office in July, apparently determined to test the narrative to destruction, insisting that by threatening to leave the EU without a deal on October 31 he could convince Brussels to drop its insistence on the purity of EU law and a requirement that everyone play by the rules. Now, with only 43 days to go, we are invited to believe that Mr Johnson is, in fact, keen to reach a deal. Yet from the hazy details that Downing Street has been prepared to reveal so far, there is no sign that the government has been able to identify legally workable “alternative arrangements” that would avoid the need for the Irish backstop in the existing withdrawal agreement. Even if Mr Johnson were to agree that Northern Ireland should remain subject to all EU agricultural rules, or indeed all single market rules for trade in goods, this still wouldn’t be enough to replace the backstop. Without a commitment to a common customs area and alignment on VAT, border checks would still be necessary. Nor is it plausible that the EU would allow the Northern Irish assembly a veto over new EU rules.
What is at issue here is not just the fate of Brexit but the credibility of the British state. Narratives don’t just matter in domestic politics, they matter to markets, too. One of the strongest and most enduring market narratives over many decades is that Britain is a highly stable, well-governed country. Yet Brexit risks putting that narrative in question. When it is clear that three prime ministers in succession have reached the highest office with a flawed understanding of how the basic framework underpinning a G7 country’s most important commercial and security relationships works it is clear something has gone profoundly awry in Britain’s political system.
How can it be that a country with no shortage of expertise in both the public and private sector can find itself led by politicians with so little understanding of how the global trading system works? Perhaps Michael Gove spoke more truth than anyone realised when he said during the referendum campaign that Britain had had enough of experts. As yet another team of British negotiators head to Brussels to try to negotiate a new relationship with the EU based on the same misplaced expectations, it seems that Brexit did not so much cause a crisis in the British state as reveal one.
That bodes ill regardless of how Brexit plays out in the weeks and months ahead. Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s prime minister, was certainly undiplomatic in his outburst after his meeting with Mr Johnson this week, but there is little doubt that his frustration with Britain is widely shared, not just across the EU. A loss of confidence in our political class and institutions risks translating into a loss of confidence in Britain generally. The problem is that once a narrative takes hold, it can be very hard to shift, as we have learnt. After all, there is one thing we can say for sure: even if Britain does end up leaving the EU without a deal and the “reasonable worst case scenario” outlined in the government’s Yellowhammer report turns out to be true, Mr Johnson will never admit that he got it wrong. Like Mr Cameron, he will pin the blame on the lawyers who defended the purity of EU law and insisted on playing by the rules.
Simon Nixon is chief leader writer of The Times
