Here’s a pre-Christmas party game. Each player comes up with a word to fill the blank in ‘If Brexit was a …, which one would it be?’, and everyone else has to come up with witty answers. If the word is ‘film’, for example, obvious answers are Independence Day or Death Wish, according to taste, though a much funnier one was offered to me by former Tory MP Jerry Hayes: The Italian Job — in which Michael Caine, in the David Cameron role, famously complains ‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’ after a bullion van is accidentally obliterated, and the whole caper ends up hanging over a cliff edge.
At the CBI meeting, Mrs May promised to avoid such cliffhanging, while the corporate lobby group’s chairman Paul Drechsler observed that for many of his members, ‘It’s not about a hard or soft Brexit but a smooth Brexit.’ Likewise, eager Leavers such as Norman Lamont have been arguing for a ‘clean’ Brexit, with certainty of timetable and outcome, as opposed to a ‘dirty’ one that drags on unresolved. But a Whitehall mandarin whispered to me recently that ‘soft just isn’t an option, the truth is it’s a choice between hard and harder’ — the latter meaning not only zero concessions on single-market access for favoured sectors, but also huge demands for compensation from the UK as the price of leaving and no substantive agreement on anything at all by the time the Article 50 two-year notice period expires.
Negotiating positions apart, all these adjectives bring me back to my party game. So here goes: if Brexit was a brand of toilet paper, which one would it be? Clearly we’re not talking Velvet Comfort, ‘the perfect balance of softness and strength’. Older readers will know what I mean if I say this is beginning to feel like the Bronco Brexit.
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