Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Remainers are in charge now | 10 July 2018

There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers: their walking away has allowed Theresa May to further surround herself with fellow Remainers, and pretty much expel the Brexit outlook from her cabinet.

The new foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, voted Remain. As did his replacement at the Department of Health, Matt Hancock. Hancock is a former acolyte of George Osborne, arch-Remainer and now chief media ridiculer of Brexit via his newspaper the Evening Standard.

These two join the PM herself, the Chancellor of course, the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary, the Justice Secretary, and the Minister of the Cabinet Office as Remain voters who now find themselves running Brexit Britain. The last one on that list, David Lidington, who oversees all of cabinet’s business, is known for being an especially enthusiastic backer of the EU: he once branded the Brexit vote a ‘massive risk’. These lifelong supporters of the EU are now in charge of getting Britain out of the EU. It doesn’t compute.

Of course, the new Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, is a Leaver. But given that we know, from the sidelining and mistreatment of David Davis, that the civil service has a larger hand in our negotiations with Brussels than the Brexit Secretary does, one wonders whether Raab’s Leave beliefs will make much difference. It is testament to how stiffly bureaucratic Theresa May has become that she turned an unprecedented people’s vote against technocracy into a technocratic exercise, best overseen by nameless men in paper-strewn backrooms rather than by politicians who might have a whiff of ideological conviction about them.

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