Him again

So now we know – he will not be supporting Sunak, or his deal, which really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Loyalty has never been a strongpoint. He has already stuffed two prime ministers from his own party – why not go for the hat trick?

He continued: “And in the meantime I will continue to campaign for what I thought of and what I think of as Brexit and the logic of Brexit.” This clearly means that he intends to put up a fight against Sunak, who stuffed him, and that he wants others to join in.  

“Because this is nothing if it is not a Brexit government,” he continued, reaching for a statesmanlike tone, “and Brexit is nothing if we in this country don’t do things differently.” 

“And we need to take advantage of it. And we need to be seen to take advantage of it.”

When he asked for a show of hands of who thought Brexit was a good idea, no one put their hand up – except him. But then the audience was not the intended recipient of his message. He was really talking to the Democratic Unionist Party, along with the europhobes of the European Research Group. They are all he has left. The DUP are particularly important – if they reject Sunak’s deal, and it fails to solve the issue of trade across the Irish border, then the PM will find himself in a very weakened position. The collapse of his big EU deal could make Sunak vulnerable to a challenge from a certain former tousle-haired PM who is still indecently keen to stage his political comeback. And if local elections in May lead to a Tory wipe-out, so much the better.

The Windsor deal is no good, he said. Sunak’s framework “isn’t about the UK taking back control… This is the EU graciously unbending to allow us to do what we want to do in our own country, not by our laws, but by theirs.”

But why bother with any of this? It seems fairly clear that a return to No.10 is now the longest of long-shots. His own people have already chucked him out of power once. But perhaps more significantly, Sunak’s success in forging an agreement with the EU has delivered a sharp slap to the Tory party’s face. Stunned awake, it now sees that the current PM’s sensible, well-intentioned negotiation with the EU has yielded a far better outcome than his predecessor’s brand of belligerent, sleazy cakeism. And who in their right mind would want to go back to any of that?

The great Cakeist himself, it seems. “When I stepped down,” he modestly told the crowd, “we were only a handful of points behind the Labour Party.” It was an interesting remark, its only weak point being that it happens to be a colossal lie. Three polls taken on or around the day of his resignation showed the Conservatives 11%, 12% and 12% behind Labour.

Later, taking questions, he went even further, stating that, because Britain was outside the EU’s vaccine programme, it was able to act quicker. “I would say Brexit saved lives,” he said, happily ignoring the fact that Britain had a higher Covid death rate per 100,000 than Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands – did Brexit also cause that? 

All of which makes clear that he is still the same instinctive fabulist, that he still meets the truth at his own oblique angle and that he still thinks he has a role to play in British public life. As Martin Fletcher recently made clear in these pages, the voters of Uxbridge and South Ruislip don’t necessarily agree. But even if he does get chucked at the next election, there’s still plenty of political damage that he can do, plans he can undermine, careers he can ruin. 

That now is the role towards which he is sliding. Thwarted and embittered he has become the negative man of British politics. No more stirring Churchillian rhetoric, or “Britain can make it” verve. All that’s left to him now is to scurry about, rat-like, through the engine rooms of government, nibbling at the cables in the hope of cutting off the power.