As 2018 limps to a close, senior government ministers are back on parade to remind us how glorious Brexit is going to be – lest, in the gluttonous stupor of Christmas, we had allowed ourselves to forget what marvels lie ahead. In the Sunday Telegraph, Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, declared that Britain, far from retreating into indigent introspection, will become a “true global player” after 29 March 2019, with military bases all over the world. In the Mail on Sunday, meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, invoked the economic success of Singapore since independence in 1965 as a blueprint “for us as we make our post-Brexit future”.
Like Williamson, Hunt suggests that the rest of the world is on tenterhooks, longing for Britain to assume a bullish new role once liberated from the tyranny of Brussels: “We may no longer be a superpower but we are still very much a global power … I have been constantly struck by how much more other countries respect us than we seem to respect ourselves.”
Alongside this new year’s outburst of ministerial bravado, senior government sources are briefing with increased confidence that, behind the scenes, Theresa May is winning the battle to persuade MPs to vote for her 585-page deal in the week of 14 January.
Well, maybe. And then again, maybe not: the numbers certainly aren’t there yet in the whips’ tally. Which is why the assertion that Brexit is going to make Britain great again runs parallel with a very different, counterpart narrative: namely, that we shall crash out of the European Union without a deal, it will indeed be traumatic, but – by God – we can take it. This surfaced in August when the prime minister seized desperately upon a remark by Roberto Azevêdo, the director general of the World Trade Organization, that a no-deal Brexit would not be the “end of the world”.
I leave it to professional eschatologists to judge whether this is doctrinally correct. But it is certainly true, as far as I’m aware, that the words “Brexit – not quite Armageddon!” did not appear in any of Vote Leave’s promotional material in the 2016 referendum campaign (or, for that matter, on the ballot paper). It is a fair old journey from “take back control” and the promise of £350m per week extra for the NHS to the reassurance that, as bad as it might turn out to be, Brexit will not actually resemble the nastier bits of the Book of Revelation.
The technocratic version of this not-quite-the-apocalypse rhetoric is the promise of a “managed no-deal”. Even before his resignation as Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab was sternly insistent that the UK was more than equal to the “challenges”. Penny Mordaunt, at the Department for International Development, has spoken of a “managed glide path” out of the EU, while Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the house, has elevated a no-deal exit from fiasco to the status of “alternative solution”. In August, Hunt said that, while he did not favour exit without an agreement, Britain “would survive and prosper”.
Against this backdrop we have learned more and more in recent weeks of what a no-deal outcome would entail – and none of it is good. The mass purchase of fridges by the NHS to keep medical supplies viable; advice to Britons to “vary their diets” in the event of food shortages; plans to deploy 3,500 troops on the streets: how “managed” does all of this really sound to you?
The puzzle is why the obvious disaster of a no-deal exit holds an allure for certain politicians and, indeed, some voters. And the answer, I think, lies in a strange but powerful yearning for the privations of Britain’s past. As one senior Tory put it to me recently: “It would be a test. But we can do it. Britain always finds a way.”
This is nostalgia in its most toxic form: the longing for an imagined history that has been filtered through folklore, film and popular culture to exercise an entirely bogus appeal. Incredibly, there are still those who fetishise what they call the “blitz spirit” and fragmented memories of the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
You might think that there is something pretty shoddy about a craving for collective hardship, at a time when rough sleepers are already dying on the streets and universal credit claimants living in abject poverty. It is an insult, too, to those who involuntarily lived through the hell of the second world war and the sacrifices of its aftermath.
Yet this psychological strand is definitely present in the Brexiteer subconscious. From time to time, it is even explicit. Witness the tweet posted earlier this month by Ant Middleton, the former special forces soldier and instructor on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins: “A ‘no deal’ for our country would actually be a blessing in disguise. It would force us into hardship and suffering which would unite & bring us together, bringing back British values of loyalty and a sense of community! Extreme change is needed!”
While I am sure that Middleton himself has the ideal skill-set for a no-deal Britain, I think it would do him no harm to read Lord of the Flies before 29 March. More to the point: impatience is the governing emotion of our time. How do the hard Brexiteers imagine that a nation accustomed to Deliveroo, Amazon, Uber and instant gratification would really respond to the sudden sovereignty of delay?
There are fewer than 90 days left till Brexit. We are told, simultaneously and in open contradiction, that it will usher in a new Jerusalem or rekindle the blitz spirit. The one thing of which you can be certain is that it will do neither.