Six is the magic number. Over breakfast, Keir Starmer had laid out Labour’s six Brexit red lines that Theresa May was guaranteed to ignore; just a few hours later, the Ukip high command was gathered at the Marriott hotel on the south side of Westminster Bridge to deliver their six Brexit demands that were also almost certain to be largely ignored.
Ukip had intended to get their Idées Six in first, but the event was postponed from last Thursday because of the attack on Westminster. In the intervening days, much had changed for Ukip with their only MP, the indecisive Douglas Carswell, having appeared on Stars in Their Eyes to declare, “Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be Independent.”
Some parties might consider it a cause for concern that they had lost their one MP, even if it was only Carswell (it can surely only be a matter of time before he resigns over irreconcilable difference with himself). But Ukip are a hardy breed and they are determined to take his departure as a sign of strength. The fewer elected representatives and supporters they have, the better they believe they are doing. The message not getting through is a sign of the message getting through.
“Our voice has to be heard,” shouted the Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, trying to make himself heard over the noise of the photographers busy snapping Nigel Farage, who was sat in the second row. For someone who has supposedly had enough of frontline politics, Farage seldom misses an opportunity to undermine or upstage his successors. Narcissism is hard to shrug off.
Nuttall waved his arms in the air to get the spotlight back to him. Satisfied that he had the attention of at least a third of the people in the room, he carried on. “We want Theresa May to succeed,” he insisted, while keeping his fingers crossed. If the prime minister were to be daft enough to accede to Ukip’s demands, the party would have talked itself out of a job.
Just to make sure there was no danger of this happening, Nuttall was quick to outline the framework against which his six demands should be viewed.
The key to negotiating with the EU was not to negotiate. Negotiating would only slow things down for decades, so what the UK needed to do was just tell the EU what was happening and get them to sign along the dotted line. Only that morning, Nuttall had bought a five-bedroom house for £2,000 by telling the owners that’s the price he was paying, and the prime minister should take a leaf out of his book.
Nuttall’s subsequent demands were no less extreme. The British parliament should be supreme except when it could not be trusted to come to the right decisions and British territorial waters should be extended to 200 miles from our coastline. Ideally the whole of northern France would be flooded rather than allow the French to have half of the English – it was called English for a reason – channel. The only good cod was a Brit cod.
As for the single market and customs union, the EU could shove them where the sun doesn’t shine. Far better to crash and burn on World Trade Organization terms than make an effort to come up with something mutually advantageous. You just couldn’t trust Johnny Foreigner to keep his word, so there was no point going through the charade of trying.
“Above all,” he said, “we shouldn’t pay the EU a penny for leaving.” There were a few murmurs of “hear, hear” for this. Sensing he now had seven of the audience of 12 with him, Nuttall went on to say that the EU should be handing us back £9bn, partly in gratitude for all we had done in winning two world wars but mainly as payback for an abusive relationship. They were the guilty party in the marriage, so they should pay for the divorce.
The final demand was that any Brexit deal should be concluded by 2019. Any later and it was touch and go if Ukip would still exist. Especially if Nuttall was in charge. Farage beamed as the cameras swarmed around him once more. These were the moments he lived for. Brexit was all well and good, but nothing could quite beat watching your successors slide into irrelevance.