Survival Instinct: Conservatives may engage in fratricide, even regicide, on Brexit, but not suicide

On 26 April 2003, Aron Ralston went hiking in Blue John Canyon, east Wayne County, Utah. While climbing down a boulder, the rock moved and completely trapped his right arm. He spent five days slowly consuming the contents of a small bottle of water and two burritos, attempting to escape and awaiting his rescue. After that, he was driven to drinking his own urine and contemplating more dramatic action. He decided that his only hope involved breaking the bones in his own arm and then amputating it with a small pocket pen-knife. Amazingly enough he managed to do this and thus free himself. He then rappelled down a 65-foot sheer wall (minus an arm) and marched out of the canyon. He finally ran into some Dutch tourists who were able to assist him. By the time that he reached hospital he had lost 40 pounds in weight (in less than a week) and a quarter of his blood. He had been hours from death but not only survived but is alive still and makes his living as a speaker.
The parliamentary Conservative Party is, courtesy of the 2017 election result and Brexit, currently living through its own version of Mr Ralston’s experience. Predictions of its collapse abound. It has danced with danger and even its political demise on a number of occasions. Yet as was seen in the course of numerous potentially close votes in the House of Commons Tuesday and yesterday, when push has come to shove, it has more or less stuck together and carried the day in the lobbies. While it is certainly capable of fratricide, and if it felt the urge could yet engage in regicide if it thought that a new leader were in its collective interest, it would seem that outright suicide is not on its agenda.
This does not mean that Theresa May will not endure considerable heartburn. She has known for some time that these few weeks would be extremely challenging. She has had to calculate in what order to do the following: produce an agreed “backstop” position on the Irish border issue that she could sell to a sufficiently high percentage of her Cabinet and parliamentary colleagues; reverse a series of hostile amendments to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill inserted by the House of Lords and agree a text of and publish a White Paper on the UK’s ultimate relationship with the European Union. If any of these cards are not played at exactly the right time and in the right way then she fears that her chance of reaching the relative safe harbour of the summer recess without either a high profile resignation from the Cabinet or a serious defeat on the floor of the House of Commons or, in the most extreme circumstances, a no confidence vote from Conservative MPs, would recede sharply. She has wagered, though, that the parliamentary Conservative Party does not have a death wish.
It might develop one by accident rather than design, but there are three factors Mrs May banks on.
Relatively few Conservative MPs are interested in the finer points of detail on Brexit
Despite appearances, the majority of Conservative MPs (and indeed Conservative Peers) are not obsessives about Brexit. They are clearly not united on the issue. At the time of the 2016 ballot on EU membership about 60% of Conservative MPs backed the official “Remain” line but a sizeable 40% of them did not. The numbers for whom this was the most important issue on Earth are not vast. A respectable estimate is that, once the result was known, about 25 Conservative MPs are in favour of the softest Brexit that can be delivered and around 75 Conservative MPs favour the hardest version. The majority of them, however, are looking for a Brexit that respects the referendum outcome, and is seen to do so by those who voted to leave, but beyond certain clear core fundamentals such as formally leaving the political institutions of the EU, formally departing from the single market and formally bidding farewell to the Customs Union, the exact details of how this might be achieved are ones that they are content to delegate to their leadership. They will cut the Prime Minister slack. Not many Conservative MPs will rush to read every word of the White Paper when it is released in July.
Following the fundamentals is, nonetheless, essential. On the “backstop”, therefore, it is important that the UK definitely leaves the Customs Union by the end of the transition period (31 December 2020) and has the authority to negotiate new trade agreements, even if were then to choose to “shadow” the Customs Union by independently adopting exacting the same tariff levels as the EU-27 for a 12-month period thereafter while new trading arrangements are established. The practical distinction might be microscopic but the political principle involved is much more substantial. Mrs May is well aware of this and that will shape both the “backstop” and the forthcoming White Paper.
A clear majority of Conservative MPs want to secure Brexit without a serious split in their ranks
The Conservative Party has been in power for such a large proportion of the past two centuries because it has been more willing to sacrifice ideological purity for party unity than its rivals. It has endured only one truly epic division – that over the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s – and has never forgotten that the consequence of this episode was exclusion from office for most of the next 25 years. It came close to a similar fissure over Tariff Reform in the 1900s but lost few MPs over that controversy (Winston Churchill was a notable exception) and tried to defuse the controversy. It lost some elections because of that policy (1906 and 1923 in particular) but it did not split in anything like the fashion that the Liberal Party did over the conduct of the Great War or the Labour Party would do over the formation of the National Government in 1931. It lived to fight another day.
The overwhelming majority of Conservative MPs including those who do hold strong views on the mechanics of leaving the EU do not want Brexit to become the successor to the Corn Laws. Their instinct for survival is compounded in this case by the Corbyn factor, the fear that any implosion of this Government could create the conditions in which a hard-left administration came to power in the UK and enacted a series of radical measures that could be close to irreversible. To that degree, Jeremy Corbyn is Mrs May’s not especially secret weapon in the entire Brexit saga. While she is viewed as the person best placed to arbitrate between rival party factions on Brexit and has better personal popularity ratings than the Leader of the Opposition then she remains in Downing Street.
It is entirely possible to put off the “soft Brexit” versus “hard Brexit” question until 2021 or later
The terms “soft Brexit” and “hard Brexit” have evolved over the past two years. They are mutating again to mean a divide between those who agree that the UK should have the theoretical autonomy to diverge sharply from the EU on regulation and trade deals but exercise that right only modestly to maintain the maximum market access to the EU (the new notion of a soft Brexit within Conservative circles) versus those who think that not only should the right to diverge vigorously from the EU exist but that it should be actively embraced as soon as the UK is fully out (the new hard Brexit position).
A choice does indeed have to be made between these stances. The arguments on either side are already being rehearsed in anticipation of that choice. But it does not need to be made now, or in late March 2019 or even at any moment up until 31 December 2020. The Conservative Party will hold together in the short-term as long as it is possible that either a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit could be followed once the transition period or any further backstop timetable has ended. All sides (but notably the hard Brexit camp which is confident that it has the instinctive endorsement of most Conservative Party members) can afford to wait until 2021 or possibly longer when the contest to be the next Conservative Party leader after Mrs May will probably become a proxy vote on whether autonomy or alignment is the more important objective for the UK in dealing with the EU. Hence, like Mr Ralston, the Conservative Party might lose a lot of blood, weight and possibly a limb over Brexit, yet the balance of probability is that it might flirt with but not in the end lose its senses.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA