Is this a Remainer coup?

I don’t normally vote Tory. But I did in December 2019. And for one reason only. Because I wanted Brexit ‘done’, properly. I wanted a Brexit-leaning government after those two long years of the Remainer parliament and its various efforts to frustrate our leaving of the EU. Millions of people, especially in Red Wall areas, took a punt on Boris’s Tories for the same reason. Because they believed it was time Britain had a government that better reflected, or at least tried to better reflect, the views of ordinary people, especially the much-maligned masses in those ‘left-behind’ Brexit-backing areas.

Fast forward nearly three years and I find myself in a country run by Remainers. Everyone agrees that Jeremy Hunt is the de facto PM. This is Hunt the arch Remainer. Hunt who at the very least flirted with the idea of holding a second vote on the EU. There might need to be a ‘democratic endorsement’ of ‘the terms under which we leave the EU’, he said in 2016. He replaced Kwasi Kwarteng, an ardent Brexiteer. Now, in what most people suspect was a Hunt-led reshuffle, another firm Brexit backer, Suella Braverman, has been ousted from the Home Office and replaced by Grant Shapps, Remainer.

Remainers run the country now. It is hard not to feel that we are witnessing a Remainer coup. The political events of the past few days have been among the most extraordinary, and most undemocratic, of my lifetime. Liz Truss, who at least has a democratic mandate from the governing party, has watched, seemingly helpless, as her appointments to two of the great offices of state have been unceremoniously replaced. And both positions have been filled by decidedly technocratic politicians. Kwarteng and Braverman have beliefs. They’re ideological (that’s a dirty word these days, I know). Hunt and Shapps, in contrast, are pre-Brexit style politicians: technically competent, perhaps, but lacking any zeal for sovereignty and common sense.

It feels like we’re back in the Cameron era. Hunt has swiftly surrounded himself in his Treasury fiefdom with advisers who, as the FT says, want to re-establish economic ‘orthodoxy’. These include Rupert Harrison, who was chief economic adviser to former chancellor George Osborne, and Karen Ward, an expert in European economics and once an adviser to former chancellor Philip Hammond. Osborne and Hammond were, of course, hardcore EU supporters. Once again we are ruled over by Osbornites, Hammondites and ‘orthodox’ thought, despite the small matter of millions of people voting to move on from all of that.

A piece by William Hague in the Times this week summed up the creeping shift back to technocracy. ‘Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now’, the headline said. You will sound like a mad person if you argue against the idea of competence in politics. Of course we all want politicians who know what they’re doing. But ‘competence’ is very often a euphemism for technocracy. For ‘the adults in the room’, as the expert class likes to think of itself. The message we seem to be getting from on high is that ‘you had your fun with Brexit and Boris but now it’s time to get back to calm, staid normalcy’. Okay. Only we didn’t vote for that. We voted for Brexit, the ideological belief that national sovereignty is preferable to pooled sovereignty, and we voted for Boris, who may not have been entirely competent but whose ideas we liked. Shifting the nation back to the politics of ‘competence’ without asking the people first strikes me as thoroughly undemocratic.

Liz Truss’s mini-budget was a mistake. People didn’t vote for that kind of thing, for so-called Trussonomics, either. Part of the reason millions of working-class voters took a chance on Boris in 2019 was because of the levelling-up agenda, because they believe government must take seriously its responsibility to invest in community life and community projects. To sweep in halfway through the life of this government with a package of far more free-market policies was bonkers. And yet what is happening now is worse. The sidelining of Truss, the tempering of her agenda, is leading us back to the anti-ideology, anti-politics blancmange of Cameroonism that voters quite firmly rejected. A bloodless coup by bloodless politicians.

I keep thinking: why did we get rid of Boris? He wasn’t doing brilliantly, I know. He was particularly slack on the culture war, which he failed to fight. But were his crimes so great? Eating birthday cake during lockdown and failing to get a handle on the Chris Pincher issue seem like very small fry indeed in comparison with the economic disarray and political skullduggery the country has since been plunged into. Most importantly, people voted for Boris. Fourteen million people. None of us voted for Hunt to run the country or for Osbornomics to be brought back to life. Never in my lifetime has the need for a general election been as urgent as it is right now.