When Cnut sat on
the beach and told the tide to stop, he didn’t actually think for one moment
that it would obey him; he was just trying to prove that he didn’t have quite
as much power as his courtiers seemed to believe. In similar vein, when Theresa May says
that no new Brexit referendum will be held “in
any circumstances”, could she just be trying to demonstrate (not that she
really needs to) the extent to which she is not in control of events either? Because, as sure as eggs is eggs (or perhaps
as sure as “Brexit means Brexit” to
use her own terminology), there are a whole host of potential circumstances in
which the decision becomes no longer hers to make. Although assigning probabilities to
events is a fraught exercise, the probability that she won’t be the one taking
the decision seems to be growing almost daily.
On the whole, I’d
prefer to believe that she is trying, Cnut-style, to demonstrate her own lack
of power or control, largely because I’d prefer to live in a state where I
believed that the head of the government retained at least a tenuous grip on
reality. But all the evidence, based on
previous behaviour, suggests that she genuinely believes that she is currently,
and will remain, in a position to simply rule out a second referendum. Worse, the same evidence suggests that she
believes that, having ruled it out, the issue will simply go away. The problem with that, as the Chequers
debacle demonstrated, is that she can’t even keep her own cabinet in line, let
alone the rest of the country.
The phrase “in any circumstances” is a dangerous
one for a politician to use in an uncaveated form. It’s probably safer for us to assume that it
should have been followed by “that I can
currently foresee”. So, not this
week then.
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