The urge to bluster is universal among reckless men who have risked everything. They boom that events have proved them right, as if booming can drown the thought that they have made a colossal error. As their mistakes can cause the worst damage, politicians, propagandists and the politically committed in general are the worst blusterers of all.
The front page of the Daily Express of 8 August 1939 contains one of the finest blusters in British history. Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor, had so supported appeasing Hitler he dropped Winston Churchill from his pages for warning of the Nazi threat.
Beaverbrook and his journalists were desperate to prove that they had not betrayed their country. Under the headline “No War This Year”, the Express assured its readers that no less an authority than “Mr Selkirk Panton”, its Berlin correspondent, believed that “Herr Hitler, despite all his mysticism, is a hard-headed, hard-boiled politician… He will not risk everything over some hasty action”.
On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. As luck would have it, on 3 September 2016 – 77 years to the day after its “no war this year” prediction failed so spectacularly – the print edition of the Express led with the headline that Britain was in a “Brexit boom”. Along with the rest of the rightwing press and the politicians who have led us to this pass, the Express is loud in its insistence that the “doom mongers” had been proved wrong.
Now, as then, we see the same desperation to believe that the Conservatives have not betrayed their country and the same refusal to face reality. We are not in recession because the Bank of England has pumped cheap money into the economy with Weimaresque abandon and reduced interest rates to their lowest level ever.
Keynes’s “euthanasia of the rentier” is upon us and might be an appealing prospect if the rentiers whose interest payments were vanishing were the misers of 19th-century fiction. As everyone saving for a pension is a rentier now, however, the Brexit “boom” rests on the bank ordering a miserable future for millions.
The lie direct of the Brexit campaign was that the European Union cost us £350m a week. The bigger lie, which some Leave supporters may even have believed, was that there were no hard choices. We could have it all. Immigration controls, prosperity, access to EU markets, without compliance with EU laws… Whatever we wanted, at no cost at all.
Or as Boris Johnson, a politician who has never made the mistake of believing what he says, told his credulous supporters: “This is a great country and great economy and I think people know we can do brilliantly if we take back control.”
An honest version of Johnson (if you can imagine such a creature) would have gone to the Nissan car workers in Sunderland and said words to the effect of: we may be able to deliver the immigration controls you want if we leave the single market but there is a risk that you will lose your jobs if we do.
The cynicism of Johnson, Gove and Farage’s failure to lay out the difficult decisions shocked the naive. But these men were charlatans fighting a campaign they were prepared to win without honour.
What ought to shock even the most cynical observer of public life is that the deceit continues to this day.
No government minister has gone to farmers in Wales, lorry drivers in Birmingham, Airbus engineers at Filton, let alone car workers in Sunderland, and warned them how the differences between a hard and soft Brexit could ruin their lives.
Tory politicians stay silent because they lack the intellectual honesty to say that Brexit has made Britain smaller. You can see us shrinking in the way leaders at the G20 treated Theresa May as an awkward “crasher” who had got in by mistake ; in Japan’s undiplomatic hints that not just Nissan but all Japanese businesses in Britain will think about leaving if we leave the single market; and in America and Australia’s announcements that securing a trade deal with the EU came before securing trade deals with the UK.
Not that we can secure trade deals just like that. If you wish to get a measure of the mess we are in, read the papers Nick Clegg has produced on the hair-raising practical obstacles ahead.
The right promised it would free us from “Brussels red tape”, to quote one example among many. Yet a new trade deal will result in “significantly more red tape for British companies exporting to the EU as British exporters will have to obtain proof of origin certificates from their national customs authorities”, certificates that will increase trade costs with the EU by between 4% and 15%.
We cannot strike agreements with 50 countries currently covered by our EU arrangements until we strike a trade deal with the EU, because everyone else will want to know where we stand.
We won’t strike a deal with the EU, for – what? – three, five 10 years? How many jobs will be lost and foreign investors driven away in the process is a subject the prime minister needs to start talking about.
Instead of facing up to the scale of the uncertainty, today’s Conservatives kid themselves as their ancestors did in the 1930s. Listen to Conservative ministers and read the rightwing press and delusion is on display everywhere.
Boris Johnson says we are a great country. Not any more. What greatness we possessed came from our alliances. By voting to leave we have ignored the advice of every friend we had in the world. Now we are asking the countries we spurned to help us and they are finding reasons to look away.
The right says the EU will want to give us a better deal out than we had in because the EU nations will still want their exporters to sell to us. They don’t look at how politically impossible it would be for Europe’s leaders to tear up EU rules when they are having to face down their own xenophobes and Europhobes.
They don’t have a shred of evidence that the EU will appease us. Just a forlorn hope and an echo of voices from the time of the British appeasers. They were as convinced that they were dealing with “hard-headed, hard-boiled politicians”, who would do whatever Britain wanted and not “risk everything over some hasty action”. They were as befuddled.