Like Tennyson’s Eagle in his poem of that name, Mrs May ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands’, clinging to power desperately at the cost of the national good. Her ruthless whipping team bombarded her payroll MPs and a few others keen to gain a knighthood or other goodies and gained her a vote of ‘confidence’. She dashed yet again to the EU and got a rebuke and no help with the Irish backstop, but plenty of theatrics for the BBC and assembled press. Now she is back and speaking as if that were not the case, as she has done since Chequers, that she has undertakings from the EU and that she will get her deal through.
This ‘vote of confidence’, along with the weirdly juvenile public school ‘jolly good round of applause’ from the confident MPs given as Sir Graham Brady joyfully announced the result (later revealed to have been orchestrated) received a forensically accurate response in Janet Daley’s Telegraph column. She coined the term ‘super-liar’ to describe those MPs responsible for giving this vote of confidence, and who could question her description? I quote her introductory sentences:
‘It may be a truism to say that politicians are dishonest but we are now into the age of the tactical, calculated super-liar. Hardly anybody (with a few honourable exceptions) is saying what they believe to be true. Almost all of the people who professed fidelity and devotion to Theresa May yesterday (especially those in the Cabinet) really think that she is hopeless as a leader, a negotiator and a Prime Minister. Trust me on this. They may have a degree of human sympathy for her but they really believe that she is utterly out of her depth. But they hate the candidates who would be most likely to replace her even more. So out of what they would call a principled determination to block a coup, and you might call pure spite, yesterday they cleaved to an absurdly inadequate leader.’
Rather than acting on what they know to be true, they lied to themselves and the public and kept this reckless gamble with the national fate going. They could have stopped it, reset the dealings with the EU, and pulled out of the immense giveaways written into her Withdrawal Agreement – desires not for gaining Brexit but for deepening UK ties to the EU. The MPs who ‘supported Theresa’ and her inversion of the Brexit referendum result were imposing the will of the controlling elite, not the will of the people.
Here the motivation for the super-liars gets murky. Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph identified six core fundamentalist Remainers who control the PM and deliberately steered her into the wall of a Parliamentary crash: Philip Hammond, David Lidington, Gavin Barwell, Sir Mark Seddon and Olly Robbins, and Robbie Gibb their spin doctor.
Hammond, as we now know all too clearly, has been responsible for blocking spending on trading arrangements in the case of no deal with the EU, using dereliction of duty as a policy weapon against the public, voters and taxpayers in order to thwart Brexit. The super-lie is that May’s ‘deal’ is ‘delivering Brexit’ in any genuine sense. It reverses Brexit into a Remain outcome but handing over control of much of our sovereign control to the EU Joint Committee, along with the control of our fisheries, agriculture, and Northern Ireland. These men are the core bunker Remainers, the heart of darkness with their penumbra of shadows being the Cabinet who have failed to resign and enact the truth, plus the plethora of junior ministers and bag carriers on the payroll. All are participating in the super-lie.
This elite, forsaking normal morality, has almost succeeded in defeating the Brexit majority and turning it into a losing minority. They hope to get Parliament, after it bins May’s absurdly bad plan, to cancel the triggering of Article 50, or to hold another referendum and gain a result that they would agree to implement and not sabotage, that is, to remain in the EU as we are now.
The contempt for the winning vote for a clear Brexit is beyond measure. This is a coup against a democratic mandate by a tiny group of Conservative MPs deploying the ‘Blairite’ Remainer civil service. Hammond, the chief destroyer of Brexit, now even calls the honest and decent Leave MPs ‘extremists’.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office document FCO 30 / 1048 expresses utter contempt for the ordinary people of the UK who are patriotic and endorse their national historic identity. They are xenophobic and have a distrust of foreigners, said the civil servant who penned the document in 1971. Has this in fact been the Conservative Party’s real attitude to ordinary people all the time, but veiled because of the need to gain their votes at election time?
Most Remainer Tory MPs sit in constituencies which voted Leave: the likes of Anna Soubry are in effect suppressing the will of their constituents. To disagree with Remainers is, by definition, to be ignorant and bigoted. To cap this hypocrisy and tangle of lies, they call for a ‘people’s vote’, misappropriating the name properly belonging to the Leave voters and giving it to the Waitrose wealthy middle classes. Another lie. The financing behind this ‘people’s vote’ campaign must be vast: Soros, Branson, Roland Rudd, Blair, the Gina Miller campaign group of lawyers and financiers, CBI funding, EU funding, no doubt, and the Financial Times. This is the plutocratic elite of Remainers who have been given by the PM all the powers needed to stop Brexit being delivered at all, who have disenfranchised real people – 17.4million of them.
The sheer nerve of what is being done exceeds anything in our constitutional history for centuries: a coup from within by an elite against a clear democratic mandate. Logically it could destroy our whole democratic Parliamentary system, and take us to an Orwellian Big Brother regime, a secular form of the divine right of those entitled to rule over the rabble, or an East German elite dominating the plebs. Remainer Tory columnist Matthew Parris wrote in the Spectator a few months ago that he never wants to ‘trust the people’. Tragically he articulates what most MPs stand for in the Conservative Party, confirming Janet Daley’s analysis.
The 117 MPs who stood apart, and attempted to stop this coup, deserve our praise and gratitude for resisting this frightening juggernaut towards an unaccountable, elite executive and government by a non-elective dictatorship.
