History will soon judge this fraught time

Good stories have a dénouement. The Act III moment when all is revealed and the narrative comes in to land is critical to most plays and novels. And so we want it to be with Brexit. Who will turn out to have been right, and who wrong? Whose bluff will have been called, and to whom will go the secret pleasures of ‘I told you so’?

Real life usually disappoints, however. No single event settles matters, and both sides of a dispute tend to find ways of maintaining that they were right all along, and if outcomes confound them then this was somebody else’s fault. Thus, in case it should be needed, Brexiteers are already building their narrative of betrayal: ‘Brussels never believed British threats because traitorous Remainers persuaded Europe that parliament would pull the rug from under the prime minister’s feet.’ And if we do end up with no deal and the sky does not fall in, Remainers, likewise, are readying themselves to explain that it’s apocalypse postponed, not avoided.

Next week I’m off to Pakistan for a short walk in the Hindu Kush, and not back on these pages until late September, when much water will have flowed under the bridge. One is not thanked for being wise after the event, so before events play out (or don’t), I’d like here to examine the possibilities, and ask what the chances are that some key players will be judged to have been right or wrong.

There does exist a chance that leading politicians and commentators will be vulnerable to adjudication. In particular there are two verdicts it may be possible to reach. One bids fair to vindicate or condemn Boris Johnson’s assessments of the possible; and the other could vindicate or condemn leading Remainers’ powers of prophecy.