THE wailing of the pro-EU brigade has become ever louder in recent months.
In this narrative of relentless gloom, Brexit is presented as a catastrophe which will plunge our country into economic meltdown and global isolation. Such propaganda is eagerly amplified by large parts of the media that have swallowed the fashionable liberal orthodoxy.
Last week the Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, addressing the Royal Television Society conference, asked an audience of more than 250 broadcast executives to raise their hands if they were “optimistic” about Brexit. Not a single participant did so. Fuelled by the usual Remoaner contempt for democracy, Campbell then declared that Brexit “has got to be stopped”.
Sadly the Government has been dismal in challenging the malignant influence of the Remain lobby despite the fact that a decisive majority of the electorate back Brexit. So far, Ministers have been reluctant to set out any inspirational vision for our future as an independent nation. Instead they have focused on the minutiae of the withdrawal process, whether it be the size of our so-called “divorce” bill or the length of the transition period.
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But now one senior Cabinet Minister has sounded a trumpet blast against this timid, defensive approach. In a magnificent 4,000-word article published at the weekend, the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson hailed the unique opportunity for Britain to chart its own destiny, freed from the federalist shackles of Brussels misrule. With a surge of Churchillian rhetoric, he predicted that “this country will succeed in our new national enterprise and will succeed mightily”.
All too predictably, Boris’s sweeping essay has been widely interpreted, not as a clarion call for patriotic endeavour, but as a crude bid for the Tory leadership. That is because the Westminster bubble, obsessed with personality politics, sees everything through the prism of the internal power struggle at the top of the Conservative party. Military metaphors have abounded since Boris made his intervention, which came days before Theresa May is due to make a major speech in Italy on Brexit. “Tories at war to oust PM”, screamed one headline. “Boris has lobbed a hand grenade at Number 10”, said a Conservative MP yesterday.
Yet this analysis is ill-judged and tedious. Far from being disloyal, Boris was supporting Government policy, which is to implement Brexit in full. There was no conflict between what he wrote and what May said in her celebrated Lancaster House speech in January.
It is ridiculous to suggest that the Foreign Secretary, who was one of the most persuasive champions of Brexit in the Referendum campaign, should now take a Trappist vow of silence on the most important issue facing Britain. Indeed, the most committed Brexit Ministers should be regularly on the airwaves or in print, setting out the arguments for our freedom.
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Some have said that Boris’s timing was poor, because of the proximity to May’s Italian speech and because of the London Tube bombing on Friday. But there is almost always some crisis facing the Government. Such logic is a recipe for never-ending prevarication, exactly what we do not need with Brexit.
Boris was right to be bold and brave. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd, an advocate of Remain during the Referendum campaign, told the BBC that she didn’t “want him managing the Brexit process”. Well, given the verdict of the British people, the management of Boris would be infinitely preferable to that of Amber.
As Boris demonstrated in his article, all his instincts on Brexit are correct. Remoaners shriek about his revival of the Brexiteer argument that “we will take back control of £350 million-a-week” from Brussels, but given that our gross annual contribution to the EU is more than £18billion, that claim is fully justified. In any case, the EU’s grasping avarice over the “divorce” bill proves the need to take charge of our own cash.
Boris is equally right in his portrayal of post-Brexit Britain as a beacon of global trade. That outlook might be despised by pontificating professors and moaning media types, but it is shared by business people who operate in the real world.
