The seriousness of Britain’s predicament after voting to leave the European Union probably calls for a classical allusion or grand historical parallel, but I keep thinking of Paddington Bear and the Disappearing Trick. This is the episode in Michael Bond’s first collection of stories where Paddington puts on a conjuring show in which the finale involves borrowing a watch from the cantankerous neighbour, Mr Curry, placing it under a handkerchief, and smashing it with a hammer. Only once the timepiece is in smithereens does the hapless bear realise he has skipped a vital page in the instructions. The trick requires a duplicate watch.
Here stands Britain on the world stage, the sound of cracked glass in the air, economic springs unwinding, political cogs rolling across the floor, riffling through a manual that ought to have been mastered before the act of destruction.
The flaw in this analogy is its flattery of politicians who incited the hammer blow. Boris Johnson’s career is founded on a Paddington myth – the creature of kindly intent whose bumbling charm excuses chaotic misadventure. But there is nothing cuddly about voracity for power, allergy to responsibility and infidelity to any cause besides personal advancement. Yet that is the constellation of traits that forms the former London mayor’s character, exerting such narcissistic gravity that no passing truth escapes unbent.
Johnson is the incarnation of a campaign that within hours of victory sought to absolve itself of accountability for the outcome. Brexiter Tory MPs ask with straight faces why they should be expected to describe Britain’s future relationship with the EU. For that they look instead in cowardly dudgeon to a lame duck prime minister who spent months arguing that the best model for a relationship with the EU is membership of it. But we should not be surprised that the Vote Leave crew have no new response to questions they refused to answer during the campaign, nor that they take no blame for turmoil they dismissed as scaremongering fiction when the remain side accurately foretold it. Arsonists do not fetch water.
The irresponsibility of the Johnsonites reflects also that peculiar cultural aspect of Conservative politics that treats even the gravest decision as a parlour game, a ritualised sport for rich and articulate dilettantes who are quick-witted and rhetorically adept enough to reconfigure their most selfish manoeuvres as acts of principle, and who face no material risk in the event that their gambles fail. Thus we have the paradox of a popular revolt against complacent elites, animated by resentment of mass migration, harnessed to the service of an Old Etonian who would gladly jettison stringent border controls on day one of Brexit negotiations.
And, though it pains me to say it of my own trade, the British media have been stupidly or wilfully complicit in this blinkered parochialisation of the European debate for decades, but most pronouncedly during the campaign. Routinely, the question of whether the country’s interests would be served by leaving the EU was treated as a minor technical detail of the more absorbing choreography in a hypothetical Tory leadership race.
When Angela Merkel said she wanted the UK to remain in the EU but warned that post-Brexit deals superior to the one already negotiated would be impossible, she flickered across the headlines for barely an afternoon and was then forgotten. By contrast, Steve Hilton made multiple front pages and haunted TV studios for days with weightless musings on the subject. The most powerful politician in Europe imparting essential data that voters needed to process in their decision-making was treated as a lesser figure than some California-based author who once spent a couple of years padding around Downing Street in his socks urging the prime minister to replace whole Whitehall departments with websites.
David Cameron himself spent most of his years as prime minister cultivating ignorance of the way European politics works, indulging the myth that “Brussels” is an imperial power to which the UK pays surly tribute in exchange for reluctant concession.
Only as the referendum loomed did he appreciate that diplomacy exercised within EU institutions makes Britain more powerful than it could be – than it will be – as a sullen petitioner on the outside. By then it was far too late to get the point across. It is a point bluntly made by Cameron’s exclusion from today’s European Council summit, and which will be rammed home to his successor very quickly.
One of the many fictions of the leave proposition was that Britain might design a bespoke deal with the EU, preserving the benefits of membership and removing the costs, then present this package to a chastened Brussels for ratification. The Brexiters will soon learn that it is not easy to win the support of 27 separate governments, each with their own domestic political problems, many of them fighting xenophobic, nationalist wrecker movements that have taken great succour from what they discern as a kindred insurgency in Britain.
There is now a tension between economic and political motives within Europe. There is eagerness to retain fluid trade ties with the UK, a point on which the leave campaign (uncharacteristically) was not lying. But, for the sake of political cohesion among remaining members, there is also an appetite to see the unilateralist Brexit experiment fail.
The UK urgently needs friends. It needs to be mending relations, applying soothing diplomatic balm to wounded allies. Instead, Nigel Farage turns up in swaggering pomp, crassly insulting members of the European parliament, reinforcing for a continental audience the impression that English politics, once an exemplar of democratic moderation, has degenerated into the pursuit of football hooliganism by other means.
Meanwhile, the Tory men who campaigned for this scenario are cavorting out of sight in their natural habitat – whispering in Westminster corridors, tapping up supporters in the tearooms, playing leadership games, performing tricks. Behold, they say, how we take the precious and delicate mechanism that fuses financial stability, diplomatic credibility and a civic culture of openness and tolerance! See how we place it under the banner that says “Take control!” Gasp as the hammer comes crashing down! Now then, where are those instructions?
And these are the men who would lead Britain through a decade or more of perilous turbulence? We’d be in safer hands with Paddington.