Where it all went wrong

Management books often repeat the dictum: ‘If there’s one thing worse than making mistakes, it’s not learning from them.’ So let’s apply that smug little idea to Brexit.

Before I start, a couple of housekeeping points. I voted Remain, but believe we must leave the EU and honour the referendum result. Second, as a former Brexit minister, writing this is a form of therapy for me.

Failure no. 1 — from which many other failures flow — was a lack of honesty. Brexit is the biggest challenge we’ve faced since 1939. It’s complex, existential and will take years. It demands a sense of national endeavour, of ‘let us go forward together’. One example of dishonesty was the much–repeated idea, which I had to trot out as a minister, that the whole thing would be completed by now, and we would enter an ‘implementation period’. This had the whiff of ‘the troops will be home by Christmas’. Not only is it impossible under Article 50 to negotiate the final relationship until the UK has left, but it was delusional to think we could do so in two years.

This brings us to failure no. 2: a lack of clarity. The core Brexit exam question is ‘What matters more: trade with the EU and access to their markets, or parliamentary control?’ Only when you have answered that can you define success and the options available to achieve your goal. Yes, white papers were published, but behind them lay fuzzy thinking. The opaque description for our objective was a ‘bespoke partnership’. Bespoke means tailored for the individual. To Remainers one could say: ‘Yes, Dominic, we will continue to have frictionless trade — suits you sir!’ To Brexiteers: ‘Don’t worry, Iain, we’ve seen the back of those EU judges — suits you sir!’

As 2016 slipped into 2017, and the pressure to trigger Article 50 grew greater, I consoled myself with the idea that the Prime Minister had created a top-secret war room in No. 10