The hard Brexiteers couldn't lie their way to peace, so now they have returned to war

Johnson, having inhabited high office and come up thousands of leagues short, really does seem to imagine it must be the world at fault in some way

'Losing your job for telling lies about history would be enough, for most people, not to do it again' (Getty)

I happened to be standing around a yard away from Nigel Farage at 11pm on 23 June 2016 when he stared down the barrel of a large bank of television cameras, admitted that he expected defeat and then added, “Win or lose this battle tonight, we will win this war. We will get our country back.”

It was clear then that Remain had won but that the Brexit question, far from being over, was about to get far nastier and far more shameful than it had ever been, even in the disgraceful weeks that had just been and gone.

A few hours later, of course, everything had changed. Now Leave had won, and it was immediately clear that the coming years would be an even more unedifying spectacle, as Brexiteers, having lied their way to referendum victory, would soon be in government, reaping their own hateful whirlwind when they failed to deliver on their promises.

What was not foreseen though, at least not by me, is that when the Brexiteers failed at peace they would simply revert to war. When they lost in victory, they would fight the battles of defeat. And this is the most grotesque spectacle of all.

Monday mornings in Westminster now have a familiar feel to them. Boris Johnson has written some transparently ridiculous rubbish in his Daily Telegraph column, and at 11am, the prime minister’s official spokesperson goes to their morning briefing with Westminster’s journalists and explains why it is transparently ridiculous rubbish.

This Monday morning, as a pleasing incidental note to the usual Johnson concerto of lies, entered Bernard Jenkin. If you live more than half a mile away from Big Ben, his is a name you will almost certainly have never heard before, which is not to say that his interjection is not worth writing down.

Last week, the boss of Jaguar Land Rover told Theresa May, at a conference on “zero-emission vehicles”, that a no-deal Brexit would cost his firm £1.2bn and lead to thousands of job losses. The business of car assembly relies on the frictionless passage of goods through Dover, and is one of the first things that is likely to go wrong in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Does Bernard Jenkin not care if it does go wrong?

Traditionally, when the bosses of UK car companies speak up about how terrible Brexit will be for their industry, someone like Owen Paterson pops up to tell them that, actually, they’ll be able to get cheaper car parts from thousands of miles away in South America, because he knows more about it all than they do.

Arguably Jenkin should be applauded for managing to go one better. Now we know that, in fact, the boss of Jaguar Land Rover is just “making this stuff up”.

In the run-up to the referendum, virtually everything Jenkin and his acolytes said has now been shown to be lies. There would definitely be a free trade deal, because German car manufacturers would bring down Angela Merkel if she didn’t make sure they could sell us our cars. Nigel Farage actually said that. What happened in the end was that German car manufacturers lobbied Angela Merkel to preserve the single market at all costs, which was far more important than any potential loss of access to Britain.

They were all found out to be hopeless, months, if not years, ago. That they are now reduced to popping up on the radio to claim that a car manufacturer is telling lies: well, as you might have heard at playgroup years ago, the level down to which Jenkin and co have dragged us all, it tells you far more about them than about anything else.

Which brings us conveniently on to Johnson’s latest column. The Chequers agreement, we now know, would mark the first time anyone in Britain has “acquiesced with a foreign power since 1066”. Obviously this is historical rubbish, written by a man who lost his first job at The Times for writing historical rubbish (he was fired for making up quotes supposedly from a historian), and has since written a biography of Winston Churchill which has been widely attacked and discredited.

The column itself pertains to the much discussed potential “backstop” for the Northern Irish border problem. As the prime minister’s spokesperson painfully pointed out, the problem Johnson rails again was agreed by the cabinet in December, during which time he was foreign secretary.

Having spent two years in government as the worst holder of high office in living memory, in my view, the fact that Johnson is back firing out ridiculous newspaper columns and still hopes to return to high office tells you everything you need know about the man.

Two years ago, I attended Johnson’s first major press conference as foreign secretary. He was with US secretary of state John Kerry: Kerry and the entire rest of the room winced as a US reporter went through some of Johnson’s greatest hits from his column-writing days, including describing Hillary Clinton as a sadistic nurse on a psychiatric ward, and the usual old racist stuff about African “piccaninnies with watermelon smiles”.

Johnson offered a defence with which I had some sympathy. That he had been a journalist for decades, and that it is hardly surprising there would be some embarrassing bits to be found in the whole body of his journalism.

I happen to think it is true that the lives of politicians should not always be judged as if they had been politicians from birth. In your earlier life you have a right to say and act in a different way to how you should when you have the dignity of your nation invested in you.

Since then, however, Boris Johnson has failed to achieve anything at all in high office, and so has returned to writing incendiary embarrassing columns as a way to propel himself back in to the centre of things yet again, from where his own recent words and actions can do nothing beyond embarrass him and all of us.

Losing your job for telling lies about history would be enough, for most people, not to do it again. For most people, feeling the burn of embarrassment from your own past columns would be enough, if you aim for high office once more, to not return to writing them again.

But on rare occasions, in rare people, it can be too overwhelming to resist. Johnson, having inhabited high office and come up thousands of leagues short, really does seem to imagine it must be the world at fault in some way, and that the only thing to do is carry on as normal, and give the planet time enough to right itself and realise it was wrong.

The really depressing thing is that he might yet be right.