The Romans substituted theater for politics, but we moderns prefer politics as theater. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scripts and rituals of the party conference. The surprises are negotiated in committee. The policy announcements are leaked to the media before the speeches. The ovations are about as spontaneous as those at the get-togethers of the Chinese Communist party.
A conference is a carefully staged advertisement, a drama with little plot and no suspense. In a good year, that is. In a great year, it goes off script. In such a year, as the Democratic leadership discovered at Chicago in 1968, there is real drama on and off the stage, and the audience has the pleasure of seeing the party planners, the scriptwriters, and the media spinners landing on their collective posterior. On those rare occasions, a party conference is not a partisan advertisement but an inadvertent confession of the truth about the party and the times. That’s what happened to Britain’s Conservatives last week at their annual conference in Birmingham.
To enter the secure zone at Birmingham’s convention center, I ran a gauntlet of single-issue lobbyists: an all-female group of anti-fracking activists from northern England dressed in white Victorian gowns like a team of radicalized Miss Havishams; two anti-circumcision campaigners with pained expressions, waving photographs of mutilated penii and shouting about child abuse; a dog-collared preacher reading uncut from the Book of Revelation into a boombox; four men in suits of armor from the Wars of the Roses protesting the redevelopment of a nearby battlefield; a raging horde of pro-European Union protesters dressed in the E.U.’s colors of blue and gold; and a woman dressed as a badger.
This gallimaufry summarized the issues that Theresa May’s government does not want to address and would not be considering in the conference hall: public concern about fracking in areas with high population densities; encroachments onto public land and green spaces; the mass culling of badgers on scientifically dubious grounds; and the End Times.
Verily, signs of the end are upon us in Britain. As it was written in Article 50 of the European Constitution, the day of apocalypse will occur 180 days after the Sunday address from Conservative chairman Brandon Lewis opening the conference. On March 29, 2019, two years to the day after Theresa May invoked Article 50, Britain will leave the European Union. When the economic veil of Euro-regulation is lifted, 52 percent of the people shall rejoice at their newly restored independence. But the 48 percent who voted Remain shall stock up on candles, tinned food, and water. Brother shall decry brother as a Little Englander, and the Little Englander shall put up two fingers.
The lion is rumored to be in preliminary talks about lying down with the lamb. Anti-Brexit Conservative and Labour MPs are believed to be considering setting up a centrist party, to restore common sense and unity by calling a second referendum in order to undo the democratic result of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Brexiteers are wailing that Theresa May’s idea of Brexit is Remain by another name. Remainers are gnashing their teeth because May, who voted Remain, is threatening to leave the E.U. without a deal if she cannot secure a minimal Brexit. Everyone is worried about their exports, imports, jobs, mortgages, and summer holidays.
“It’s time for common sense!” a Europhile wearing a blue top hat, a yellow waistcoat, blue trousers, and a yellow morning coat bellowed into a megaphone. If the European Union ever sponsored a real circus, as opposed to the unreal procedurals of the Brussels bureaucracy, this is what its ringmaster would look like.
“What do we want? A people’s vote! When do we want it? Now!” a woman in blue and yellow shouted, blocking my path. And so it was that I came to enter the conference with a sticker reading “Bollocks to Brexit” on my lapel.
I saw hardly any Conservatives wearing “Bollocks to Brexit” stickers inside the secure zone, but I saw hundreds of them wearing “Chuck Chequers” stickers. The Chequers plan, announced in July, is Theresa May’s offer to Brussels of terms for a negotiated exit. Instead of rallying a cabinet and party divided by Brexit, the plan broke the cabinet and split the party.
May’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and her Brexit negotiator, David Davis, resigned. Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the anti-E.U. European Research Group, continues to threaten a vote of no confidence if May sticks with the Chequers plan. The party membership is in open revolt. The European Union’s negotiators have said that the Chequers concessions are insufficient anyway. Yet Chequers remains the May government’s policy.
“I haven’t seen many government staff, special advisers, or officials,” said Susan, who has worked for the party in Parliament and is attending her ninth conference. “Some people might say this is due to people not wanting to be in the firing line.”
Ministers put their heads above the parapet with a visible lack of enthusiasm. Michael Gove, a key Brexiteer who has remained in May’s cabinet and supports the Chequers plan, hurried along Broad Street, Birmingham’s rundown shopping thoroughfare, but not quickly enough to evade a fellow Conservative who ran up and shouted, “Michael, when are you going to chuck Chequers?”
Rory Stewart, the ex-soldier turned prisons minister, inspected the rank and file in the lobby of the Marriott hotel that adjoined the conference venue, then took cover in a huddle of advisers. Iain Duncan Smith, who briefly led the party in the early 2000s, contrived to be visible but unapproachable and spent most of Monday holding court in the Marriott’s restaurant, which was fenced off from the lobby and bar by a low wall and potted plants and guarded by a gate. Liam Fox, the minister for international trade, refused to answer my questions about party members’ criticisms of Theresa May.
“I’m escaping,” Fox told a friend, as they descended the stairs into the mad scrum of the Marriott bar.
“Where to?”
“Korea,” Fox laughed.
Normally, the main hall of a Conservative convention is packed with dutiful applauders. In Theresa May’s theater of the absurd, the stalls were often half empty. On Sunday, May’s new foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt made headlines by calling the E.U. a “prison” and implicitly comparing it to the Soviet Union, but the hall was only half full. Nor did that many care to hear chairman Brandon Lewis’s vision for the Conservatives’ future. On Tuesday, even fewer turned up when Sajid Javid, the new home secretary, called for the party to reach out to ethnic minorities, and expounded his plans for a merit-based immigration system that will treat E.U. applicants no differently from anyone else.
The real action took place in the media and at fringe events. Everyone followed the media dueling of Boris Johnson, who called Chequers “entirely preposterous” and “deranged,” and May’s ally and finance minister Philip Hammond, who said that Johnson had “no grasp of detail” and was living in “fantasy world” if he thought the E.U. would grant Britain a Canada-style free trade agreement. And almost everyone voted with their feet and headed to the small events. It was hard to find a seat at the panel talks on “popular capitalism” hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies and its online think tank, CapX, or Policy Exchange’s panel on how to involve millennials in “home-owning democracy.” It was impossible to get into the building at any event featuring Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“When we said we wanted to leave [the E.U.], we wanted to leave,” said Ron Ramage on Monday afternoon. Ramage is a district councilor from Braintree, Essex, in the pro-Brexit commuter belt east of London. “We’re not doing it the way people voted for. It’s not going to work.”
Ramage had just come from “Brexit Means Brexit,” an event hosted by the anti-E.U. Bruges Group. “Priti Patel, who’s my MP and an ex-cabinet minister, was there. We had [ex-agriculture minister] Owen Paterson, who’s very vocal. We had Andrea Jenkyns, a new MP. She’s only been around for three years, and she’s asking the prime minister, ‘Why does Brexit mean Remain?’ The meeting was absolutely packed. Like Owen Paterson said, we are the mainstream of the party.”
I asked if Theresa May had lost her legitimacy as party leader. “Yes,” Ramage replied. “Every one of the MPs at that fringe meeting said she should have stood down, and I think that’s right. She’s got a bit of a thankless task, and it is going to be difficult, but she’s just not going the way that we want. We want to leave, but Theresa May wasn’t for leaving. Look what happened to Boris Johnson. He’s been kicked into the long grass for now, but he’s still there.”
While we were talking, the cover of the London Standard’s afternoon edition showed Johnson running through a field in his jogging kit. The punditry saw this as a calculated mockery of May’s claim that the naughtiest thing she had ever done was to run through a field of ripe wheat as a child. Johnson’s ideas on naughtiness—the philandering that recently ended his second marriage, the clowning for the cameras and the public, the intriguing for office and the top job—charm the membership for the same reason they irritate his parliamentary colleagues. He is not a team player. Ramage chooses his words carefully.
“He can be a loose cannon in some respects, but I am a big fan of his, very much so. But whether he could be the right man for the leadership is another thing.”
Johnson made a flying visit on Tuesday. He spoke at Conservative Home, a fringe venue, but his speech was the main event of the entire conference. People queued for four hours to get in. “The energy in the room was electric,” one attendee told me. “There was definitely a sense that something historic was happening.”
The Chequers terms, Johnson said, were “politically humiliating for a two trillion pound economy” and would make it “difficult, if not impossible” for Britain to make trade deals with non-E.U. states. Chequers was an insult to British democracy and a liability for the Conservative party.
“We will not only be prevented by the Chequers deal from offering our tariff schedules,” Johnson argued. “We will be unable to make our own laws—to vary our regulatory framework for goods, agrifoods, and much more besides.”
“This is not pragmatic, it is not a compromise. It is dangerous and unstable—politically and economically. My fellow Conservatives, this is not democracy. That is not what we voted for. This is an outrage. This is not taking back control: This is forfeiting control.”
Analysts frequently link the surprise Brexit vote of June 2016 with the electoral victory of Donald Trump later that year. Both phenomena are interpreted as economically and culturally isolationist, reactions against immigration and open borders. But Johnson, the de facto leader of the groups that won the Brexit referendum, is very much a “globalist,” and not only because he was born and partly schooled in New York City. To Johnson, and to many other Conservatives, Brexit is an opportunity to extract the U.K. from the E.U.’s regulatory tentacles and the eurozone’s sluggish economy, and integrate Britain into global markets. While Donald Trump talks of imposing tariffs, free-market Brexiteers talk of escaping the tariff-bound European Union.
In September, Johnson visited Washington to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award. His remarks at AEI’s annual dinner were the first round of an apparently coordinated push for American support for a post-Brexit free trade deal between the United States and the United Kingdom. In the following days, Owen Paterson made the case at the Heritage Foundation, and Daniel Hannan, the most prominent pro-Brexit campaigner in the Conservative delegation in the European parliament, argued similarly in the Washington Examiner.
“If we get it right,” Johnson said on Tuesday, “then the opportunities are immense. It is not just that we can do free trade deals. In so many growth areas of the economy, this country is already light years ahead. Tech, data, bioscience, financial services, you name it. We can use our regulatory freedom to intensify those advantages.”
Johnson’s impassioned speech was received with cheers, whoops, and a standing ovation. But the time for action is running short. “The situation is critical,” Shanker Singham of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) told me. While Theresa May insists that there is no alternative to Chequers, the European Research Group has offered new proposals for maintaining a “soft” border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which will remain in the E.U. In late September, Singham and his IEA colleague Radomir Tylecote published “Plan A+,” in which Britain would pursue free trade agreements with the United States, China, and other foreign partners; deregulate financial services; and seek a goods-only free trade deal with the E.U. “We need to pivot to this plan as soon as possible,” says Singham.
‘One thing we all know about Boris is that he’ll put on a really good show,” Theresa May told a BBC interviewer after Johnson’s assault on her premiership. She kept smiling, like a combatant in the Wars of the Roses who has just been jabbed in the policies with a hot poker and is trying not to show it. “There are one or two things that Boris said that I am cross about,” she admitted.
May took the stage on Wednesday swaying like a drunken spider to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”—perhaps not the right choice for a leader widely seen within her own party as a usurper of Brexit who can’t put a foot right. Her speech was meant to be the finale, but it was an anticlimax. Everyone watched it because they wanted to see if she would flinch or if, as happened at last year’s conference, she would be rendered incapable of speech by a coughing fit while the scenery collapsed around her. Instead, she was the game mediocrity, the dutiful incompetent, that she always is. The title of her speech, “Campaign 2022,” was an invitation to a Jeremy Corbyn prime ministership. The question, as it has been since May took office in the summer of 2016, is how long she has left and whether Johnson will time his run against her correctly.
Of course, her party applauded her. The script requires nothing less than a happy ending. But the conference was an embarrassment for May. All her grinning and bearing cannot hide the distrust of the membership and the hostility between the majority of Conservative MPs, who voted for Remain, and the majority of the rank and file, who strongly support Brexit. The parliamentary Conservatives can hide from the press, and they can hide from the voters until 2022, but they cannot run from their own membership. Not even Liam Fox. Unless, that is, he had North Korea in mind.
The longer Boris Johnson talks about May’s failings, the less likely he looks as a candidate to replace her and the more he looks like a farceur than a serious actor. Being Boris, he could not help but over-egg the soufflé of his verbosity on Tuesday. Condemning the E.U.’s arrogation of powers over the British Parliament, he jocosely accused Theresa May of treason: “It occurs to me that the authors of the Chequers proposal risk prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire, which says that no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country.”
The law of praemunire was taken off the statute books in 1967. Johnson was speaking metaphorically and appealing to the patriotic emotion that May seems incapable of arousing. The politics of Brexit are not mere theater. They run deep into history and the very soil, and they have caused a civil war in the Conservatives—civil, because they’re still the Conservatives, but a war nonetheless, in which only one side can win.
“I’m here to represent the heritage of Bosworth Field,” one of the four men in armor at the entrance to the venue told me. In 1485, a Welsh adventurer named Henry Tudor defeated Richard III’s army at Bosworth, near Birmingham, and ended England’s medieval civil war, the War of the Roses. As Henry VII, he founded the Tudor dynasty and laid the foundations of the English state—the state that the Chequers plan would permanently turn into a province of the European Union.
“Plans are going ahead to build a driverless car testing track on the western side of the battlefield,” the knight explained. The men in armor, like the badger lady who was standing with them despite their polite requests that she return to her sett, felt that they were an endangered indigenous species. They were laying siege to the conference, politely but firmly, with an insistence that suggests no electorate will ever endorse Chequers.
“It’s part of our heritage,” he said. “It’s important to us. It was the decisive battle of the War of the Roses. It’s one of three major events that changed our history. You’ve got the Norman Conquest of 1066, Bosworth in 1485, and the Battle of Britain in 1940. This is like chipping away at war memorials. It’s not right, is it?”
