Caroline Flint: why I’m backing this Brexit deal

Nothing in Caroline Flint’s CV would have marked her out as someone who would end up marshalling 19 of her fellow Labour MPs through the ‘aye’ lobby to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal. One of the original ‘Blair babes’, she went on to become Gordon Brown’s minister for Europe. She campaigned for Remain in the referendum but this week she ended up telling MPs that ‘the EU is not God’ while fending off accusations that she is the devil. One commentator called her ‘a heroine for those seeking to turbo-charge Thatcherism’. He didn’t mean it kindly.

When we meet in her office, on another one of the supposed Brexit make-or-break days, she is preparing for further battle. ‘I just think: hang on a minute, I’m the moderate here,’ she says. ‘I’m trying to stop no-deal by getting a deal. Accepting that we’ve had a vote to leave the European Union.’ Labour, she says, owes Brussels nothing. ‘The EU didn’t protect us from Thatcher. It didn’t protect us from privatisation. It didn’t protect us from the sale of council houses. And it didn’t protect us from our mining communities being devastated. Labour governments stopped Tory policies, not the EU.’ The surest means of getting another Labour government, she says, is for it to back Brexit now.

Her obstinacy can be traced to a fateful decision she made while campaigning for Remain in June 2016: that, if her side lost, she resolved she would respect the result. ‘I had conversations with MPs, with my family and others asking: if I campaign for Remain, what if it goes the other way?’ The ‘over–confident arrogance of the Remain campaign,’ she says, led it to make some terrible decisions. She describes sitting in Remain campaign meetings where every time she suggested that a certain tactic wouldn’t work in Doncaster, ‘it was like tumbleweed going around the room’.