Once again Boris has set out to undermine May, offering conditions for the progress of Brexit. He does so with impunity because the government’s position is itself so vague that it is hard to nail the Foreign Secretary for being disloyal. Meanwhile as the Tories gather in Manchester, some have shut their eyes and are hoping for the best, some, including senior figures, are calling for hard Brexit and yet others are calling for a softer Brexit which amounts to staying in everything but the political institutions which run the EU.
Both these latter strands of passionate opinion have a certain integrity. What does not is the government’s official negotiating position. This is full aspirational rhetoric but light on specific detail on each of the contentious issues, leaving the country and the EU baffled by the ambiguity of it all. Moreover it is full of contradictions which are impossible to square in reality, for example free access to markets without adhering to the rules or the membership fees. If there are options that will never be one of them. And remember this is not a party enjoying the luxury of arguing in opposition; this is the government tasked with the biggest peacetime restructuring since the Romans up sticks and left.
So this is a very worrying time for the ordinary person in the street. What would help would be for the soft Brexiteers to come clean on the ongoing political and financial cost of staying in the customs union and the single market. Even more important is for Boris and his gang of pipe-dreamers to quantify even a single advantage of leaving the EU, while setting out in cold hard figures the short and medium term economic damage of hard Brexit which will scupper the hopes of a generation. Boris’s hero Churchill, he see himself as a modern incarnation of the national Icon, in exchange for blood toil tears and sweat, offered the people one simple goal. Victory. What exactly is Boris offering? My suspicion is he is only offering Boris.