This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
I imagine readers will vividly remember their feelings on the morning after the Brexit referendum ten years ago. Personally, my overwhelming emotion was delight at the British refusal to do what their betters asked of them. As the New York Times put it the next day, “British Stun the World with Vote to Leave EU”.
I also had a more personal reason for enthusiasm. I had spent much of my diplomatic career dealing with the European Union, from postings around Europe to running much of the UK’s last EU presidency in 2005. I had rapidly become a Eurosceptic in Brussels in the early 1990s. I had gradually come to think we would have to leave, and the resulting professional dissonance saw me quit the Foreign Office a couple of years before the referendum. Cameron’s feeble attempted renegotiation in 2016 removed any residual doubts, and I happily voted Leave accordingly.
This was the cause of some frustration for me during the campaign. At the time I was running the Scotch Whisky Association, a large trade association whose members were strongly in favour of membership. It was my job to reflect that view. I therefore found myself somewhat unconvincingly projecting ideas in which I did not believe and hoped would never come to pass.
Happily, some of my private emailing found its way to the Vote Leave team, who promptly leaked it, the cause of some awkwardness with the association members at the time, but at least putting my real views into the public domain.
The referendum result ended this difficulty. I resolved not to be faced with it again and decided to find a way of going back into government and helping with what I could already see would be a difficult and complex departure process.
Theresa May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary made this possible. I didn’t know Boris at all, but I discovered he was looking for an adviser who knew the Foreign Office and sympathised with Brexit. That was obviously a pretty small group of people, so we found each other quickly, and I was back in government by November 2016. The rest is history.
How did we get here?
The truth is that the referendum result was formal confirmation of something we all knew. Britain had never really fitted in the EU. We didn’t share others’ goals, we had never found any reliable allies for our perspective, and our ability to influence developments was declining fast.
Even those in favour of EU membership never made the case in emotional terms, claiming we had a “European destiny” or should support “ever closer union”. Instead, we heard mainly the utilitarian argument that we had to be members in order to stop the EU doing things that might damage us. The British people could see this. If, after 50 years of near-constant advocacy of membership by the leadership of all main political parties and every major institution, voters could not be persuaded that the EU was a good thing, then it simply wasn’t ever going to work.
What we Brexiteers didn’t realise was the fight that the establishment would put up to stop us actually leaving. Right from the start, central elements of a proper exit were in question. As early as Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech in January 2017 we could see that the commitment to leaving the customs union was weak, and once she had effectively lost the election later that year it was game on for the Remain side.
Much of the Cabinet and Conservative parliamentary party didn’t want to leave. We can now see that Gavin Barwell, May’s own chief of staff, was scarcely an enthusiast for it. Who knows what her chief Brexit negotiator, Olly Robbins, really thought, but he certainly behaved as if he was trying to negotiate a Leave that was as close as possible to Remain.
My abiding memory of Robbins symbolises this awful period. Boris had asked him to come to the Foreign Office so we could hear from him directly how the talks were going. Asked about Northern Ireland, Robbins slumped forward onto the desk, head in hands: “I just don’t know what we are going to do, Foreign Secretary. I don’t know what to do.”
With such inspirational leadership, it is hardly surprising that one concession to the EU followed another and eventually drove the country into a constitutional brick wall, with an obviously dangerous and unsatisfactory Withdrawal Agreement which simply would not pass Parliament.
Two years into the job, Boris resigned as foreign secretary in July 2018, seeing that the situation was unrescuable. I left, too, but continued to work with him. We could see by then that the only way to get Brexit done properly was to replace May and her circle and try to get the job done ourselves.
It was a risk for Boris, but not as big a one as many thought. We knew the May team was incompetent and would eventually make a fatal mistake. So they did, when they gave in to the EU’s demand to hold elections to a European Parliament that we were planning to leave. They were held; the Tory Party secured 8.8 per cent of the vote, a historic low, so far anyway; Theresa May went on her way; and Boris, Dominic Cummings, and I as Robbins’s successor were in No. 10 with a very reluctantly granted Conservative Party mandate to sort things out.
We could see there was very little time. Exit day had already been delayed twice, and voters were losing confidence that the referendum result would ever be delivered. If we were to avoid constitutional meltdown, we just needed to get out of the EU on something like satisfactory terms and sort the rest out later.
Obviously, we would rather not have started from where we were. We would never have gone about things in the way that May did, but we nevertheless reluctantly realised we would have to accept major parts of her dreadful deal. It just wasn’t possible to renegotiate thousands of pages of text in three months. We had to focus on the essentials.
The worst aspect of May’s deal was the “Irish backstop”. It was shorthand for the reality that her deal locked the whole country in the EU’s customs union and single market for goods, without a say in them, until the EU could be persuaded that satisfactory arrangements could be put in place for trade across the Irish land border.
We very much doubted that the EU ever would be so persuaded, or that future governments would try very hard to persuade them. So we insisted that the exit deal must, first, allow Great Britain at least to be entirely out of all EU law and rules once the transition period was over; and, second, if Northern Ireland had to go into some aspects of EU rules, they must get a vote to go in and a periodic vote to leave.
We achieved the first, together with a removal of any commitment to a “high-alignment” future for our EU relationship. We did not get all of the second. The periodic vote to leave survived — and remains as an undervalued possibility in Northern Ireland — but we could not keep Northern Ireland out of the customs union, albeit a somewhat attenuated one.
The reason was the Benn-Burt Act (aka the Surrender Act), which, once passed, said that we could not leave the EU without an agreement unless Parliament agreed (which we knew that Parliament never would). Once this Act removed “no deal” as an option, we were reduced to accepting what the EU would give us.
In the circumstances it is amazing we got what we did. The Withdrawal Agreement, endorsed in the 2019 election, paved the way for the UK-EU trade deal we agreed on Christmas Eve 2020, and for something like a proper Brexit, with Britain able, very largely, to do its own thing — if its leadership could keep its nerve.
Where this left us
I’m often asked, “How do you think you did in this whole process?” My answer is “8 out of 10.” We got Brexit done. But of course problems remain. There are two principal ones. The first is the persistence of EU law and philosophy on our statute book. I, and then Jacob Rees-Mogg, planned to deal with this by removing retained EU law from the statute book where it had not been explicitly replaced, and by eliminating the requirement for our courts to pay attention to EU doctrine.
Unfortunately, the next minister in line, Kemi Badenoch, gutted the provisions — first by reversing the burden of proof, so that all such law remained in place unless replaced (and most of it has not been), and second by giving the provisions on courts a separate start date to the rest of the Act. Labour has chosen never to start them.
The second, even bigger, difficulty is the Northern Ireland issue. Boris and I never wanted the Northern Ireland Protocol and we always expected it would come apart under strain, if not perhaps quite so quickly. It is a great pity that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have removed the protocol from our statute book, never came into force, as first Boris, and then Liz Truss were overthrown.
Rishi Sunak promised to continue the Bill, then changed his mind, abandoned it, and decided to go along with the Northern Ireland arrangements instead, rebranded as the slightly modified “Windsor Framework”.
So part of our country still doesn’t get a say in laws which govern it. Any change to goods and trade rules opens up a gap with Northern Ireland and makes the Irish Sea border that bit tougher. Worst of all, our government is now committed to defending and sustaining these arrangements.
None of this can last, and the next Brexit government is going to have to tackle it. But it must be remembered that this is the 2/10 we didn’t get. The 8/10 is supremely important. We are out of the EU institutions. Our Parliament gets to decide things again. We save £15bn plus a year on annual payments into the EU budget. We have new trade deals, notably membership of the huge new CPTPP.
We have cut tariffs on food and other goods we don’t produce. We have a new more flexible subsidy/business stimulus regime. We have new government procurement rules opening more opportunities to local firms and SMEs. We can control our borders again (even if we have stupidly chosen to exercise this power in the most nonsensical way possible).
We have begun to reform financial services regulation, and the City is starting to change its mind about whether it wants to go back under EU rules. We have new rules on clinical trials and agri-technology (if not spiked by Labour’s stupid “reset”). We can change our own VAT rates. We are not caught up in the flow of disastrous EU regulation, notably on digital regulation and AI. And we have a faster and more flexible foreign policy — as shown on Ukraine and much else.
There is a certain kind of Brexit ultra who denies all this, claims that all we have is “BRINO” (Brexit in name only), and that somehow we “never really left”. Some argue that everything we have done was not worth doing because we didn’t get everything we wanted or because it was somehow conceptually mistaken. This is obvious nonsense.
We certainly did not get everything exactly right, but we seized the moment and got done what could be done in the mad political environment of 2019. Critics must grapple with the undoubted truth that, without Boris, Dominic Cummings, and me in the same place at the same time that summer of 2019, we would still be in the EU now. Why would that be better?
What now?
We have to face facts: the Remain zealots have not given up. Much of the establishment — including most of the leadership of the Labour Party — just want to rejoin or get as close to the EU as they can. They are obsessed with the trivial and increasingly discredited estimates for the economic cost of leaving and have convinced themselves that getting closer to the EU will in some miraculous way bring back growth.
Hence Labour’s “reset”, the return of subordination to EU law and the European Court of Justice. Whatever they say now, before long this will become an effort to get us back into much of the single market and customs union, and then to persuade us that we are now under so many EU laws without a say that we might as well rejoin.
This particular argument is so transparent that it will easily be rebutted if we ever get as far as another referendum. But there is another, more subtle, view, set out in Tony Blair’s recent essay, that we should not look to rejoin any time soon because we would be doing it from a position of weakness. Instead, he says, we should seek some new structured strategic partnership which keeps us involved with European policymaking whilst we (as he sees it) sort ourselves out, enabling us to rejoin later from a position of strength.
Some on the Brexit side too seem attracted to a version of this argument, one that sees Europe best organised into a set of concentric circles, with Britain finding a comfortable place on the outer rim whilst retaining some influence on EU policymaking in areas like defence and security.
This argument doesn’t stand up to examination. Those countries in the outer circle, or in the “strategic partnership”, must be involved in some EU policies — for if not, why bother at all? But what happens is that they eventually become policy-takers. The EU works by a constant series of negotiations, with one issue traded against another. The more distant you are from the core, the fewer such cards you have to trade, and the harder it becomes to exercise influence even in the areas you are part of. The core group stitches up outcomes, and everyone else must accept them or leave the arrangement — if they can.
Of course, if the EU could overturn 50 years of history and accept it can have a close economic and political relationship with a European country that runs itself in an entirely different way, without seeking control over it, things might be different. I can’t see it. The truth is that for the EU the only options are membership, subordination or outer darkness.
The next Brexit government, whatever its composition, must face up to these realities. We are not out of the EU tractor beam, and Labour is letting us be sucked further in before we get our hands on the controls once again. Next time we must achieve escape velocity. We must summon up the energy to finish the job. That involves doing three things.
The first is to reverse the reset, or at least those elements of it which subordinate us to EU law and control again, for it is simply anti-democratic to be governed by laws we have no say in. To strengthen their hand in this, both Reform and the Tories need to be making it 100 per cent clear now it’s what they will do.
Second, we must leave the ECHR and whatever bits of UN and other international conventions stop us exercising the sovereign power to control our borders and to say who comes into the country on what terms.
Third, we have to sweep away the remains of the Withdrawal Agreement and the Northern Ireland Windsor Framework: by negotiation if the EU will do it, by overriding them in domestic law if not. The core elements of the alternative arrangements for Northern Ireland, that is, Mutual Enforcement, are now well worked up and can, if necessary, be implemented unilaterally.
Without this, the economic reforms we need will always be hamstrung by the fear of widening the Irish Sea border and by the reach of EU law into our legislation and practice. At the same time, retained EU law, and the provisions under which our courts must look to foreign courts for guidance, should be entirely removed from our statute book, and common law provisions and UK courts must fill the gap.
This will of course be complicated. A proper plan is needed. I’m not sure one yet exists. And of course the EU will resist it, even though they would do better to have a good relationship with an independent UK than a permanently sulky, difficult and unstable bond with a subordinated one. Let’s see. We can’t control that. All we can do is be clear about what we will do, and go about it reasonably and fairly.
And that is the crucial thing. With a clear electoral mandate, this need be nothing like the Brexit wars of ten years ago. Finishing the job is a necessary part of the massive economic and political reforms needed to get the British state functioning and sustainable again.
This technical and political work needs to begin now. It is a great pity that the Brexit job isn’t finished and must be resumed. Still, some tasks may be unwelcome, but are still necessary. Looking back on the sunrise of that astonishing morning ten years ago, we can now see the lesson is simple. Sovereignty is not sovereignty unless it is complete. If it isn’t, what we have risks being lost again. Britain didn’t stun the world only to sidle shiftily back into the EU through some side entrance. The answer to the difficulties of self-government is not to retreat back towards subordination, but to govern better and to finish what was begun. Finis coronat opus. We now know what Britain can do. It’s time to see the job through.
