What can I learn from my wrong predictions about Brexit?

I need to think about how I can apply those insights to what might happen next

I have looked back over some of my Brexit articles of the past half-year to see if I could learn from what I got wrong.

I started with something I wrote on 6 November. Then, the question was whether the EU and the UK government would ever agree a deal, with the assumption being that, if they failed to do so, we would leave without one. I wrote: “My sources say a no-deal Brexit is likely, but my head says there’s bound to be a deal. Which is right?” Neither, it turned out.

My head was right in that there was a deal – it was agreed the following week – but I didn’t see that parliament would refuse to approve it, and I hadn’t realised there was a third way: that Brexit could be postponed.

The withdrawal agreement was published and agreed by the cabinet on 14 November, but Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned the next day and everyone realised that there would be a problem in getting it through the House of Commons. At first I assumed this would pose a challenge to the Labour Party, and wrote: “It would be an act of historic irresponsibility for Labour MPs to force Britain out of the EU without a deal.” I still thought the choice was the deal or a no-deal exit, and I assumed Labour MPs would do the right thing in the end.

A week later, I realised that “there is a majority in the Commons against a no-deal Brexit”, and that this posed a problem for “an unexpected new group” of Conservative MPs, who I called “Brexiteers against Brexit”. I said: “Their choice could be May’s Brexit or no Brexit.” I now realised there was a possibility we would never leave the EU, and that this might concentrate minds. I asked if Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab really wanted to stay in the EU – in the end, they didn’t, but enough other Tory MPs did vote, in effect, to remain. That was part of the mechanism that led to Brexit being postponed when it came to it.

It took a while, though, to think through the implications of narrowing three Brexit options back to two. I had gone from “deal versus no deal”; to “deal, no deal or delay”; to “deal versus delay”. The Brexit deal was finally put to a vote in the Commons on 15 January, and was defeated by a huge margin, as Tory MPs wanting a no-deal exit and Labour MPs opposed to a “Tory Brexit” combined against it.

Four days later, the headline on my article was: “In a bizarre turn of events, Theresa May could get her Brexit deal through after all – the key lies with Yvette Cooper.” I realised the importance of Cooper’s bill, which tried to block a no-deal exit, but predicted the outcome wrongly: “It could lead to parliament being forced to make a straight choice between Theresa May’s deal and postponing Brexit in order to hold a new referendum. If that is what happens, I think there would be a small majority for the prime minister’s deal.”

This was partly because I still assumed that delay would have to be for the purpose of a referendum – I hadn’t seen that delay could happen simply because the Commons failed to make a decision.

The penny dropped in mid-February. I said to colleagues: “We’re never going to leave the EU, are we?” But I hesitated about writing it. Instead, on 27 February I said it was a possibility: “If the prime minister cannot win the vote on her revised deal, Brexit will be delayed, possibly for ever.” Theresa May had the day before said that a no-deal exit wouldn’t happen against the wishes of the Commons – it followed that she accepted an open-ended delay was now an option.

It wasn’t until 9 March that I wrote: “It’s now clear to me that Brexit probably won’t ever happen.” I should have written it earlier.

The prime minister’s deal was then voted down on 12 March and again on 29 March, forcing her to ask for two extensions in succession. It is now hard to see how we can leave the EU in the foreseeable future. The Commons won’t vote for the deal; Jeremy Corbyn has no incentive to help May; and the EU is always likely to agree to further extensions.

It will be strange to look back on the past three years, when British politics was so dominated by the assumption that we would be leaving the EU this year. As Roy Foster, the historian of Ireland, once wrote: “The most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened.”

The lessons of this retrospective are:

First, I should have paid more attention to the horror across the Commons at the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. This was a stronger force than the notional majority for a soft Brexit.

Second, it took a long time to realise the legal default of no-deal exit on 29 March was not as definite as it seemed. I am grateful to Spinning Hugo, the anonymous blogger, for helping me understand that; and to understand how Commons divisions made any kind of Brexit difficult.

Third (thanks to Neil Morrow), I suffered from the bias of thinking my preferred option was more likely than it was. I thought the prime minister’s deal was a sensible compromise, so I overestimated the likelihood of its passing.

Now, how to apply those insights to what might happen next?

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator