The Ghost Dance of Rejoin

“A decade on, the taboo is broken!” heralded the jubilant front page to last week’s Observer.  Since none of the things that the Observer might get excited about have come anywhere near taboo status in at least the last four decades, readers might have been left scratching their heads as to what this was in reference to. Were it not, that is, for the accompanying illustration — four bright yellow stars arrayed in a circular quadrant on a sky blue background — leaving bleary-eyed Sunday headline perusers in no doubt that it was in fact a nod to polite society’s most mandatory political opinion. 

The article itself stated that Keir Starmer was “being urged by senior Labour figures and business leaders” to usher Britain back into the European Union. This message was endorsed, in no particular order, by Neil Kinnock, a former president of the Confederation of British Industry, the chief executive of a trade association for creative types, and the managing director of a token private sector business. It referenced the bogeymen of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, the darkening geopolitical atmosphere, and Britain’s sluggish economy — which is to say, it followed the tried and tested format of around ten thousand articles that have been published in half a hundred titles since the referendum and, allowing for a few contextual changes to keep it up to date, could have been published at any time in the last decade. 

As has often been the case with this type of article in the last ten years, it came amidst what appeared to be a coordinated flurry of Remain/Rejoin messaging by a variety of figures simultaneously, presumably intended to convey the impression of spontaneous political momentum (we have not heard from Sir John Major so far, but there is still time …). The piece made reference to the intervention of Philip Rycroft earlier in the week, who had written in The Times in similar terms. For those of us who spent time working in the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) during its brief but turbulent existence between 2016 and 2020, the appearance of two of our former Permanent Secretaries in the news in one week was cause for happy nostalgia. In keeping with their profiles at the time, Rycroft’s intervention was of a lower profile and less politically controversial than that of his DExEU predecessor Sir Olly Robbins. 

Despite both being consummate civil servants in the Whitehall tradition, Robbins and Rycroft were two very different variations on the theme. Robbins cut a dashing figure that was something between enigmatic and charismatic, and clearly felt most at home in the atmosphere of political high drama. In the early days of DExEU, he gathered about him a coterie of the most ambitious high flyers from across Whitehall, who judged that the small new department was the centre of political gravity, and that Robbins’ slipstream was the clearest route upward in the system. Robbins had been offered the job by Theresa May on the understanding that he would report directly to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, without a Secretary of State.  You can therefore imagine his surprise and alarm on his first day in the role, when David Davis strode into 9 Downing Street, as he imagined it, as Robbins’ political superior. 

This political cop-out would come to define May’s premiership, and there is no way that an opinion column could possibly do justice to the intrigue and drama of the subsequent two years, nor even a book (somebody will one day need to write an opera about it). It made Yes Minister look like an episode of Dinner Ladies. The jealousy pervaded every corner of the department, and even as its most humble dogsbody, your columnist was drawn into the Machiavellian curation of email copy lists and meeting invitations. It was in this context that Philip Rycroft was brought in as Deputy Permanent Secretary, to concentrate on the smooth-running of the department and, as relations soured, to act as an honest broker between Robbins and Davis. Eventually, it all became too much — Robbins was moved upward and aside out of the department, and Rycroft became Permanent Secretary. 

Where Robbins was arch and intellectually flamboyant, Rycroft was unassuming but quietly reassuring. He had previously served as director general of Nick Clegg’s department during the coalition government, and then as deputy head of the organisation within the Cabinet Office that coordinates relations between Westminster and the devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. The softly spoken Yorkshireman was devoted above all to the orderly discharge of government business, reconciling parties, tribes and factions as he did so. Whilst there were certainly some who joined the department from elsewhere in Whitehall because they enjoyed the drama at the political action, many others were genuinely ill-at-ease with it all, and Rycroft’s calm, professional leadership had a soothing effect on frayed nerves. 

He was as unpolitical as he was unpretentious. There were a tiny number of us in the department (other than the ministers and spads), perhaps seven or eight at most, who had voted for Leave in the referendum — identifiable to one another only by our not constantly moaning about Brexit. Rycroft won our reflexive admiration simply by virtue of not being Robbins. We were under no illusions that Rycroft was anything other than a Remain voter himself, because he was clearly instinctively averse to boat-rocking of any kind. But you would never have known it from anything he said, and those junior or middle ranking officials who were at the more voluble end of the anti-Brexit spectrum knew better than to indulge in it within his earshot. All of this makes his intervention last week the more surprising. 

Rycroft was not, as some wrongly assumed from his appearance and demeanor, a boring man. He was thoughtful and occasionally humorous. It is unfortunate that the same cannot be said for his piece in The Times. As with the Observer’s subsequent article, it recycled the greatest hits of the Remain/Rejoin genre. These include the automatic attribution of all subsequent policy failures after 2016 to the decision to leave the EU, and the invocation of economic metrics without reference to counterfactuals or international comparators. It also involved little reference to the EU itself — certainly not its momentous underlying political logic. This is standard practice in British europhilia, where the focus is only ever on Britain and its internal shortcomings, with the EU playing the role of an eternal and unchanging matriarch behind whose protective skirts we ought to seek shelter. 

It is understandable when, after a long career of service, a figure who had been required to keep their counsel decides to cast aside neutrality in order to make a crucial point — but it seems a waste to break the illusion of impartiality in order to say something that so many others have already said to such little effect. Yet the truth is that there is very little demand, neither from the forces who are clearly now preparing to relitigate 2016, nor from anybody else, to make a clear and original case for Britain’s place in the European project as it actually exists. Instead, the goal is simply to portray Cameron’s decision to call the referendum and the decade that followed, as an illegitimate aberration which will naturally be reversed. EU membership is not presented on ideological or practical grounds; merely on normative ones. 

So it seems that our national discussion over our relationship with the EU will simply recover well-trodden ground. Well, two sides can play at that game. The “Case for Europe” in Britain has never been made from first principles as it was on the continent. The Tory grandees of Macmillan’s generation saw it in terms of an alternative “role” for men such as themselves to play on the international stage in the absence of Empire — and Heath thought of it as an enforcement mechanism for market norms, the case for which he was unable to make himself domestically. To the British people, the argument for joining the EEC and remaining in the EU was only ever offered as a cure for domestic economic malaise, and more recently as a means of avoiding “friction” between ourselves and our neighbours over the Channel. 

There was seldom any reference to what the Treaty of Rome ultimately set out to establish, or to the vision of avoiding another continental war by transcending the nation state in favour of a pan-European identity. Trade-offs relating to money or sovereignty were never addressed by British Europhiles other than in the most dismissive of terms, and in the run up to the referendum, the Remain side seemed to regard any appeal to the notion of sovereignty as borderline obscurantism. This is because the appeal that EU membership holds to them is largely aesthetic rather than political in nature, other than personal administrative conveniences. As a result, they were completely incapable of addressing fundamental constitutional questions, or defending the EU’s basic political legitimacy. Instead, they concentrated on issues like queues at passport control, or mobile phone roaming charges. They quite rightly lost the referendum because of this. 

If Labour want to add a “Rejoin the EU” promise to their manifesto in 2029, they can go ahead, and make Nigel Farage’s day

In the aftermath of the vote, a few of those who had been semi-interested or disengaged from the campaign suddenly embraced a “European” identity in opposition to Brexit — adopting the EU flag as a symbol and talking about the intrinsic beauty and fraternity embodied by the EU project. Nobody in Britain had really done this before 2016, and most of these people were completely oblivious to the forty years of political discussion that had gone before. These people were an obstacle to those who understood that the easiest way back in was to wait for the next moment of low national morale and the right parliamentary arithmetic — but they have now largely got bored and moved on.  So now, here we are again, with the same arguments about marginal trade figures and ancillary benefits being made, just as they were back in 2016, and 2017 and 2018. The only difference being that we now have a government minded to go along with it.

To which we can say, so what? If they can’t be bothered to engage meaningfully with the issue, there doesn’t seem to be much point in making a rebuttal. It’s not like they’d listen to it anyway. If the current government wants to make themselves and their clients in the civil service feel better by handing over regulatory autonomy to Brussels for the next few years, they can knock themselves out. They haven’t overturned the decision that was made in 2016 and they would be incapable of doing so if they tried. Whatever changes they implement now will simply be reversed by the next government. And if Labour want to add a “Rejoin the EU” promise to their manifesto in 2029, they can go ahead, and make Nigel Farage’s day.