Why MPs should back Theresa May’s Brexit deal

Many things about the politics of Brexit are mystifying. Some are minor puzzles: Why don’t people read the documents they say they’re angry about, for instance? And some are major enigmas: Why don’t politicians talk about the economic and social problems that drove the Leave vote instead of fixating on misunderstood abstractions like sovereignty?

Yet here we are, staggering into the ‘endgame’ of the most consequential negotiations in our postwar history and the debate has come down to a pair of Old Etonians talking about vassalage. I wonder how many people of Sunderland thought that’s what they were voting for in June 2016.

To my mind, Jo Johnson was a better journalist than his brother Boris, which is why he can capture his critique of Theresa May’s Brexit policy with economical elegance:

‘To present the nation with a choice between two deeply unattractive outcomes, vassalage and chaos, is a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis,’ he wrote as he bowed out of government.

Jo’s argument is that any deal Mrs May strikes with the EU will leave Britain subject to rules over which it has little or no say. In that — though not in how to respond — he agrees with his brother, who has made the same point rather more floridly and expensively in half a dozen Telegraph columns and elsewhere.

In short, Mrs May’s Brexit policy faces serious criticism from both Leave and Remain-minded MPs over the fact that leaving the EU stands to put Britain in a position where lots of the rules by which our businesses (and others) will have to abide will be set by others.

And here’s the thing: those critics are right, at least in a narrow sense. More broadly though, they’re wrong. Almost hilariously, staggeringly, can’t-see-the-wood-for-the-tree-falling-on-your-head wrong. Wrong to an extent that makes me marvel, again, at the ability of clever people in politics to ignore the blindingly obvious.