Where Brexit failed

One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how to enact Brexit, she spent her prime ministerial career failing to follow it.  The words she used in her speech at Lancaster House in 2017 seemed clear enough: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’ It made sense to repeat this in the last Tory manifesto. She was to seek a free trade deal with the EU, but if that proved impossible, then Britain would be leaving anyway. In the event, the EU has not merely failed to offer a good deal, it has refused to offer any trade deal at all — only a withdrawal agreement that might or might not lead to a trade deal in future but which in the meantime threatens to trap Britain in the customs union indefinitely.

So why is the government not taking the logical step of leaving without a deal?  Indeed, why have we not already left the EU, as we were supposed to, on 29 March?  No deal might be seen by many MPs as an unthinkable outcome, but that is not how the people whom they represent see it. A YouGov poll this week found that, in the event of the EU ruling out a further extension, no deal is the most favoured option, with 44 per cent support. A slightly smaller number, 42 per cent, favour revoking Article 50 and abandoning Brexit entirely.

The support for a no-deal Brexit might astonish MPs, just as they were astonished by the referendum result. But the public are not idiots, and neither are they masochists. They can see that the current course — involving a political meltdown that might well put Jeremy Corbyn into No.