Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Leavers don’t actually want to leave

When intelligent, informed and rational people make a choice that onlookers can see confounds their own declared interests, we are wise to look to psychiatry for an explanation. This is where my thoughts turn, now that Tory Brexiteers have conspired to block Theresa May’s road from Chequers to the deal the Commons so spectacularly rejected this week.

Until the last minute, I hesitated to accept the Tories’ European Research Group would join this rebellion. Cautiously I inserted ‘probably’, ‘by all accounts’ and ‘apparently’ into every column I drafted. That hardline Brexiteers would in the end want to kill the Prime Minister’s deal didn’t make sense.

We Remainers have been unable to believe our luck. Even as Leavers have crossed their hearts and hoped to die, even as David Davis, then Boris Johnson, then Dominic Raab, sacrificed their own cabinet seats to try to stop her, I’ve held my breath and thought, ‘If it hasn’t dawned on them yet, it surely will: they’re imperilling their own project.’

‘As the critical hour approaches,’ I’ve thought, ‘they must surely see this.’ If the logic was staring me in the face, surely it would stare them in the face too.

Let me take you briefly through that logic. Remainers have regarded the post-29 March ‘implementation period’ in May’s deal with horror. We’ve assumed the Brexit-eers would mobilise within minutes of Britain’s formal exit, and start agitating to get out of the ‘vassalage’ the interim agreement creates — and would easily bring much of the media and every Leave voter on board. ‘This isn’t real Brexit,’ they’d say, and they’d be right. They’d have won that argument before they started.

True, the dreaded backstop would have to be kicked unilaterally aside if we were to emerge from the implementation period and leave the customs union, but it would have to be kicked aside anyway if we leave without a deal, so Brexiteers must already contemplate that.

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