Tunnels, ditches, pathways … how I tried to quit my Brexit addiction

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/13/how-i-tried-to-quit-my-brexit-addiction-tim-adams

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I had begun last week with a determination to avoid Brexit. Or at least to stick to some kind of personal Brexit diet: either a spartan, fact-based Brexit-Atkins plan, or maybe a four-days-on, three-days-off regime. It was not the first time in the past couple of years that I’d made that resolution. Like many of us, on all sides, I felt jaded by the same questions and the same answers, sated with vitriol, numbed by non-negotiation. I had heard of people who had gone whole weeks without discussing with their kids or their colleagues the removal of the backstop and its implications for the Good Friday agreement, but, in honesty, I didn’t believe they existed.

In this spirit I set out on Monday morning to make a point of listening to music rather than news. I used my lunch hour to read a novel rather than Brexit commentary. I deleted the Twitter app from my phone. I wouldn’t, I resolved, give the noise and nonsense any more attention, perhaps until the EU summit – perhaps, with any luck, until Halloween.

On Tuesday morning, inevitably, I was suckered back in by an overheard mention of Dominic Cummings’s unguarded strategy briefing to the Spectator. I could not resist Googling. And then, of course, there was the thuggish racism of the Leave.EU poster about world wars and krauts, and I was back composing outraged tweet-lines in my head, admonishing myself for taking the bait, a lost cause.

By Friday, like the abstemious Lenten nobleman in the film Chocolat, who ends up gorging on prohibited Easter eggs in the chocolate shop window, I found myself back again at something like peak Brexit. I happened to be down near Parliament Square, mooching among bedraggled tourists and aimless pockets of Extinction rebels and drenched Ode to Joy pipers and St George flag wavers. I stepped into a cafe out of the rain and disappeared down another Brexit rabbit hole for an hour or two. It began with a clip of Question Time: an exchange between Theo Paphitis off Dragons’ Den and an audience member voicing the angry beliefs that she both “knew what she had voted for” and that “nobody knows what’s going to happen”.

Then I was watching, one after another, the 11 Brexit “explainer” videos tweeted out by Andrea Leadsom, each one a mesmerising catalogue of the freedoms we are collectively dying in a ditch to discard. As I was watching, a text happened to come through on my phone, announcing that “passport validity rules will change after Brexit” and I needed to look up the new restrictions. From there, it was only a few Google steps into the back catalogue of Cummings’s blog archive – not the recent, pithy, government one-liners but the impacted, self-mythologising screeds about how the referendum was won and how “the systemic and consistent dysfunction of establishment decision-making systems over a long period, with very poor mechanisms for good, accurate feedback from reality, created the space for a guerrilla operation to exploit”. Or: how I used technology and behavioural science to create division by manipulating fears about immigration.

A small part of most of us perhaps wonders how we might replace Brexit's spectacle of uncertainty and extremism when it is over

The trigger for that latest restless effort to make some sense of things, to get a grip, was Thursday’s news that, after three-and-a-half years, the government had identified “a pathway” that might yet lead to “a deal”. Forget about the fact that the unknown concessions would, by any account, make the nation significantly worse off and likely dissolve the union, this shift in “mood music” was apparently a cause for hope. The pound surged, though it was hard not to latch on to the twin qualifiers in the announcement: “They agreed that they could see a pathway to a possible deal.” The politicians hadn’t set off on the grail quest. But they had identified the place it might start from if they did.

Talking earlier this week about his brief Brexit fable, The Cockroach, in which the prime minister’s body is taken over by a giant insect, Ian McEwan noted that, as a nation, “we have moved into a mystical realm” when it comes to Brexit, somewhere murky and surreal. That land was divided along many lines, he suggested, but one of the primary ones was between those “who are junkies for this stuff and those who just want to get it done”.

It was a nice distinction but I wasn’t quite convinced. It seemed to me, a haggard veteran of vox pops and call-ins, that all sides – even the “get-it-dones” – were now equally in thrall to Brexit’s spectacle of uncertainty and extremism, to the bruisers’ politics it has engendered. A small part of most of us perhaps wonders how we might replace it when it is over; a much larger part fears it never will be.

As any student of addiction knows, hits must get stronger for the craving to be satisfied. In Brexit terms, that means ever more layers of manufactured complexity and false hope in pursuit of a deal that will satisfy nobody. One thing that Boris Johnson understands is that the old tropes are not enough to engage attention. “Brexit means Brexit” will no longer cut it. He needs to keep spouting oddness – “pitchforking the incubus off our backs” and so on – because his premiership is based entirely on his ability to offer new kinds of slapstick distraction.

In this endeavour he saves most of the best lines for himself. In his novella, McEwan was able to quote a speech of Johnson’s verbatim, an unhinged fantasy about an unfettered Britain that was home to the electric aeroplane; satire was already priced in. Meanwhile the foot soldiers of the cabinet are tasked with remembering their few sanctioned phrases. Seasoned Brexit watchers – by which I mean all of us – could predict the majority of them before they are uttered.

“It doesn’t benefit anyone to have a running commentary on live negotiations,” was one of the lines put out by the hapless education minister Gavin Williamson on Friday morning, before being echoed by others. Meanwhile it was noted that the pause in conversation between the British and Irish leaders allowed “a period of reflection” as to next steps. The nation, as ever, was left to ponder what either of those phrases might mean. That Johnson had developed a plan so subtle in its tracery that it would not bear the light of day? That a meditative safe space was essential to creating a plan for beyond the end of the month?

As ever there were one or two new coinages designed to frame the drama. “Super Saturday” was rolled out as the phrase to describe the emergency session of parliament on October 19 at which a deal or an absence of a deal will be addressed. The Tory MP Nigel Evans repeated this phrase with the dedication of a promoter drawing attention to the latest pay-per-view cage fight.

Leaving the EU was always going to be an interminable process, not a singular event, but that has never stopped its cheerleaders persisting with fake promises of a brisk final act. Once again, then, we are about to enter a “now or never” week, and we will be invited to go through the motions of believing in the possibility of climax – until we are not. There have been many other crisis weeks. Each promised to be the beginning of the end. None proved to be close to the end of the beginning.

In his lazy bestseller The Churchill Factor, Johnson dwelt on the few dramatic moments in which his hero changed the course of history, attempting to associate his own flaky character with Churchill’s indomitable will. In thinking about the coming week, the prime minister is deluded enough to have in mind the image of Churchill facing down a rebellious party minded to negotiate with Hitler, and his “darkest hour” speech, which concluded: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

The country is so energised by the prospect of liberation from the EU that productivity is falling at the fastest pace for five years

The intent of Johnson’s “surrender act” and “do or die” is a shaming echo of that rhetoric. His emergency Saturday parliament is another effort to shackle the crisis of his own making to previous notable occasions when parliament had weekend sittings: at the outbreak of the war in 1939, for the Suez Crisis in 1956 and on the invasion of the Falklands in 1982. None of those previous threats to the nation was a homegrown invention. Unlike Churchill (or Eden or Thatcher), Johnson, would – in continuing to countenance a no-deal Brexit – have his country suffer an economic and social blitz simply to demonstrate that he has a semblance of spirit.

If this is his personal plan it feels more than ever like a by-product of a wider philosophy. In his blogs, Cummings dwells on some of his own heroes, those cross-disciplinary “synthesisers”, with their “cool Thucydidean courage to face reality”. His most recent long missive argues that “what is happening now is a once in a 50- or 100-year crisis and such crises also are the waves that can be ridden to change things normally unchangeable”. His aim appears to be to surf the current “creative chaos” in the belief it might beach government in a technocratic future in which policy and strategy are dictated by an elite “Red Team” in his own image. “It’s very hard to create a wave and it’s much easier to ride one,” he notes.

In this realm of deliberate turbulence, in the name of future efficiencies, billions of pounds continue to be squandered to prepare for a no-deal exit that the courts and parliament have agreed cannot happen. Meanwhile, the government reneges on its promise to settled EU nationals by threatening deportations, and pledges to reward expatriate citizens with six months of healthcare when a lifetime of provision was once guaranteed. And the country is so energised by the prospect of liberation from the European Union that the productivity of its workforce is falling at the fastest pace for five years, and remains drastically below the EU average.

Surveys of the nation’s psychological health catch the effects of those figures. The latest revealed that around four in 10 people – 22 million – reported feeling powerless (43%), angry (39%) or anxious (38%) because of Brexit in the last year. An LSE study which examined data from 35,000 people found significant increased levels of “mental distress” post-referendum that showed “no significant difference” between Remainers and Leavers.

Where will it end? The news, as I write this, offers the promise that the EU27 have given “the green light for Brexit talks to move to the ‘tunnel’ phase”. There is debate about whether that means negotiations are actually “entering the tunnel”, or whether intensified discussions are to prepare for “possibly entering the tunnel”. And so we approach another week, employing more millions of collective hours and days of attention and emotion discovering if we are yet in the dark, and being fed our daily bread of catchphrase and half-truth, waiting for what comes next.

17 January 2017

In her first substantial speech on Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May sets out her “red lines” and a 12-point “plan for Britain”, ruling out membership of the customs union. The Daily Mail greets the news with a front page that announces “Steel of the new Iron Lady … We’ll walk away from a bad deal and make the EU pay.”

29 March 2017

May triggers article 50, starting the two-year countdown to Britain leaving the EU. The Sun beams the message “Dover and out” onto the White Cliffs, for the benefit of our EU neighbours.

8 December 2017

After a series of late-night crisis meetings in Brussels, the idea of the Irish backstop surfaces for the first time. The Times reports that Theresa May “is to confront Boris Johnson over his vision for Brexit”. The Daily Telegraph calls it “The price of freedom”.

9 July 2018

After convening an emergency meeting at Chequers to sign off a collective position on the European withdrawal bill, May ends up “fighting for her political life” after the subsequent resignations of David Davis and Boris Johnson, the latter later describing the deal as a “suicide vest”.

10 December 2018

May scraps plans to have a Commons vote on her withdrawal agreement at the last minute, in the knowledge that 100 Tory MPs will vote against it. “Desperate May reveals her plan B” the Guardian reports, which is “to buy more time”.

15 January 2019

May suffers the biggest defeat in parliamentary history for her withdrawal bill. The Sun declares her “Brextinct”, and suggests the deal is as “dead as a dodo”.

12 March 2019

Despite a belief that May had assurances from MPs, the withdrawal bill is defeated again, this time by 149 votes, making the possibility of leaving the EU on 29 March impossible. “How much more of this can Britain take?” the Express asked. Plenty, it seems.

All eight indicative votes to discover where parliament’s will over Brexit lies are defeated, along with a third attempt by May to pass her withdrawal bill. “Parliament finally has its say”, the Guardian reports: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.” The prime minister offers to resign if MPs will back her deal.

24 May 2019

Having moved to find a cross-party consensus over Brexit with Labour, Theresa May is forced into an emotional resignation as prime minister by her own party. “It all ends in tears” the Times reports.

28 August 2019

In one of the first acts of his leadership, Boris Johnson announces that he will prorogue parliament for five weeks in an apparent effort to keep the possibility of a no-deal Brexit alive. The decision is subsequently overturned as unconstitutional in the courts.