There’s still time for a Suez style retreat from Brexit

There is no cosmic law mandating the continuation of a folly simply because it is begun; no rule of primogeniture giving an older expression of the democratic will precedence over any that might follow

“It’s an incomplete report, the government has damned it, and I think therefore we should just push it to one side and say ‘yet another report’,” said Iain Duncan Smith (AFP)

This morning, listening to Iain Duncan Smith taking another holiday to Lobotomy Fantasy Island, the mind flashed back to interviewing Ken Clarke in 2005.

The purpose was to ask the old boy if a third straight Conservative election defeat would presage a third Clarke run for the leadership. Of course he wouldn’t discuss that, but he would reflect on his previous campaigns.

He wasn’t that upset by losing to William Hague in 1997, what with Hague being a bright guy and adequately eurosceptic for the membership. But what, ahem, of losing to Iain Duncan Smith in 2001? His pupils clouded, and he fell unwontedly silent. “Well, yes,” he eventually murmured, “that was a little hard to take.”

It probably still is. Some events are too stridently surreal ever to become wholly normalised. Leicester winning the Premier League. Trump (obvs). Forrest Gump taking the Oscar for Best Picture … Years and years later, the truly epic oddities retain their power to shock anew when they flit into the unguarded mind.

The choice of IDS to lead the planet’s most enduringly successful political party is one of those. The awe washed over me again as he talked on R4’s Today about Government analysis predicting significant harm to the economy under every feasible Brexit settlement.

In the least worst scenario – the softest of Brexits with single market membership – GDP would be 2 per cent lower 15 years later than it would if we stayed. With a free trade agreement but outside the single market, it would be 5 per cent lower. With no deal, the reduction is projected at 8 per cent.

If 2 per cent sounds trifling, consider that if GDP grew very modestly to £2.5 trillion by 2033, that equates to an annual £50bn, while the aggregated income lost over the period could exceed half a trillion. No one can calculate how many preventable deaths would go unprevented due to the consequent shortfall in NHS funding. Or how many promising students would be serving fries with that because of the dearth of teachers and textbooks; or how many people people who suffer mental illness would be left undiagnosed and untreated. But an awful lot seems the safest guess there.

And that’s the peachiest outlook foreseen by clinically unpartisan Government statisticians (or “experts” if you’ll forgive the pejorative). That the least peachy – a no-deal cataclysm – hardly bears thinking about is a stroke of luck for IDS, to whom the concept of thinking falls between an anathema and a technical impossibility.

“It’s an incomplete report, the Government has damned it, and I think therefore we should just push it to one side and say ‘yet another report’,” he intoned. “Ministers have clearly not evaluated this report yet. Therefore we should say, ‘Look, it’s deliberately leaked because it gives a bad view, and therefore we should just put it to one side and leave it alone’.”

With the flurry of recent movies set at the time of Dunkirk, there has been much talk about the Second World War’s psychological influence on Brexit sensibilities. There’s something in that. As ever, only more so, everyone wants to be Churchill.

But hearing Duncan Smith reaffirmed that much the better analogy is with the First World War. Donkeys are leading us into a futile, self-destructive battle for reasons that become less comprehensible with each dismal dispatch from the front.

If IDS has the Churchill fantasy, he is in fact Stephen Fry’s General Melchett. Cossetted, rent-free in his father-in-law’s Home Counties pile, far removed from the post-industrial trenches where the futures of the neediest will be sacrificed, he ignores bad dispatches with all of Melchy’s magisterial insouciance.

As a Scots Guard, his rank rose no higher than Lieutenant, and he never saw action. But had he been a First World War General, and handed a document projecting the loss of 30,000 troops for the loss of 1.2 inches of Belgian mud, he’d have scrunched it up with a cheery, “Yet another report giving a bad view, Darling. Best put it to one side and leave it alone, eh? Now be a good fellow and inform Blackadder the balloon goes up tonight.”

At the back end of the Brexit panto mule, sunbeams of realism penetrate the fog of war. Liam Fox’s remarks to the Sun (since unconvincingly denied), that the IDS Ultra Brigade will have to suck up a softish Brexit, acknowledge the lack of a Commons majority for the suicide option. Henry VIII powers cannot be stretched to “restore our parliamentary sovereignty”, glorious as that irony would be.

But for anyone without Duncan Smith’s knack for pushing the inconvenient to one side (as pioneered whenever he was warned about the impending chaos of his Universal Credit), this report should be a call to arms.

Whatever the settlement, every economic sector and every region of the UK will suffer. Yet settling for anything beyond the status quo of full EU membership is not inevitable. This fight isn’t over. Although national lunacies like the conduct of First World War and Brexit have strong internal dynamics, there is no cosmic law mandating the continuation of a folly simply because it is begun; no rule of primogeniture giving an older expression of the democratic will precedence over any that might follow.

If that will is changing, as the polls seem to detect, there is still time for a Suez-style retreat, on the calculation that even an epochal global humiliation is a far smaller price to pay than 8 per cent, 5 per cent or even 2 per cent of GDP.

If there are lions on the Labour front bench who don’t agree with Armchair General the Lord Duncan Smith that this report should be put to one side – and particularly the leader of the opposition – it really is high time we heard them roar.