Brexiteers In Mourning

After yesterday’s Chequers awayday, and the threat by Theresa May that any minister resigning over her proposals for a Brexit deal with the EU would immediately forfeit their ministerial car and have to summon the local taxi firm to take them to the nearest station, has come the news that every last one of the cabinet rebels has stacked their cards and left the table. The PM won; the rest are losers.

What that means is that it is far more likely that employers like Airbus, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Honda and the rest will be able to continue production in the UK, their supply chains unaffected by border upheavals. It means the real world, which generates the real money, can carry on unaffected by the fantasy soundbite alternate reality of “Global Britain”, “Freedom to strike our own trade deals” and, inevitably, “Make Britain great again”.

But for the anti-EU part of the press establishment and their hangers-on, the news is not what they wanted to hear, and the reaction of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog was typical: “Brexiters have been crushed … The EU will now attempt to force us into an even softer Brexit … Guido cannot understand how DD and co have accepted this … Extremely depressing”. Sob! Sniff! Snot fair!

Today’s editorial from the Murdoch Sun tries to put a brave face on it, telling “A plan may have been cooked up but it still needs to get past the EU - and the continent’s leaders are showing no sign of compromise”, while pundit Liam Halligan, otherwise featured at CapX, Brexit Central and UnHerd, that last the creation of the serially clueless Tim Montgomerie, and so called because nobody bothers with it, is in full whining mode.

“Theresa May’s plans are a fudge and would defraud 17.4million voters who backed Brexit” he complains, before letting slip the sheer dishonesty in his argument. “The protectionist Customs Union, meanwhile, puts high tariffs on the 85 per cent of the world economy beyond the EU” he tells, managing to miss all those Free Trade Agreements which reduce of even eliminate tariffs - which we get by being in the EU.

The Mail tried to warn Theresa May off: “Settling for a soft Brexit could cost the Conservatives the next election, Theresa May was warned last night … the summit came as a poll showed a swathe of Tory voters will abandon Mrs May if she waters down Brexit too much - with two-thirds warning that they would rather walk away without a deal”.

Bit late for that now. It’ll get worse for them later. And it’s no use running pointless stories like “Donald Trump is ready to offer the UK a zero tariff trade deal says the US ambassador to the UK as the President prepares to visit”. Trump wouldn’t be able to identify a trade deal if it jumped up and kicked him in the undercarriage.

The Europhobic press and its pals need to get real: when push comes to shove, no responsible Government is going to screw over the country on the say-so of the economic lunatic fringe. Business has spoken and the PM has listened - and for once, that voice has been heard louder and clearer than our free and fearless press.

So now the Brexiteer faithful are in mourning. Their crackpot idiocy got killed by reality.