Theresa May, the British public didn't actually 'vote for Brexit with their eyes open,' you know

It shouldn’t need stating that Theresa May has no mandate for the Brexit she unravelled today. Because the only question was in or out, we stumbled blindly first into the chaotic Brexit-means-Brexit stasis of recent months, and now towards a miserably insular future

The 'Three Brexiteers': (from left) International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Brexit Secretary David Davis (PA)

Political leaders lie, like the rest of us only more brazenly, and we become inured to it. The lying – be it blatant, or by omission or more often through self-serving half-truths – comes so regularly and so brazenly that you eventually stop asking the Paxman question (why is this lying bastard lying to me?) and grudgingly accept it as a fact of life.

Very occasionally, however, a politician tells a lie of such cynical magnitude that it rekindles the white hot rage of the unsullied idealist.

The lie Theresa May told today may not look like a whopper at first glance. It may not look like a lie at all. In the strictly physiological sense, she spoke the truth.

Yet when the Prime Minister said that the people who voted for Brexit “did so with their eyes open”, she told a monumental lie of monumental personal significance.

By the most pedantic construction, she was being honest. People who voted for Brexit did have their eyes open. What alternative did they have when voting on a binary-choice ballot when closing one’s eyes confers a roughly 50 per cent chance of voting the wrong way?

Literally, May was quite the George Washington. But assuming she meant it metaphorically, she was every inch the Donald Trump. As she very well knows, most people who voted for Brexit did so in the pitch dark, because the implications of leaving the EU were wholly obscured. They were pretty nebulous until today, actually, but on the 23rd of June they were unknown and unknowable.

In nuptial terms, the range of potential outcomes implied by the monosyllabic “OUT” was almost limitless. It might have meant an attempt to rescue a loveless marriage by reinventing it as an open one – together in the week, a little light swinging at weekends – along Norwegian lines. It might have meant the bitterly contested, I’ll-take-you-for-every-penny-you-bastard-even-if-the-legal-fees-bankrupt-me-too divorce we now see stretching seductively ahead. It could have meant anything in between.

Some Leavers voted for the hideous divorce, and some for the open marriage. But most voted with no firm idea of what leaving would actually mean.

Some loathed the EU as an irksomely interfering undemocratic mega-bureaucracy, or bought into the fantasy that EU payments were responsible for the chronic underfunding of the NHS, or were steered by race-baiting in the reactionary press.

Others voted less against Brussels than London, and the patronising metropolitan disdain of a smug elite. Some, sick of the drudgery and lack of opportunity, were screaming in the wind. Some, thinking Remain a dead cert, cast a token protest vote, and woke to the news on 24^th June with regret. There were loads of reasons, intellectual, too, but primarily emotional, why people voted Leave.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t need stating that Theresa May has no mandate for the Brexit she unravelled today. If it does, YouGov said it with a poll today which reveals that 39 per cent of the public want a hard Brexit, 25 per cent soft Brexit, and 23 per cent touchingly still wish to remain in the EU.

And this is after having more than six months to acclimatise to the result. Back in June, when leaving seemed so unlikely, fewer than 39 per cent of Leavers, perhaps far fewer, will have wanted to leave the single market and customs union. Much like David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, most will not have given such trifling ramifications a moment’s thought.

Apologies to the PM if it’s my amnesia playing up again, but I can’t recall her delineating precisely what a Leave vote would mean when she was “campaigning” for Remain. Actually, I can’t remember her saying anything during those febrile weeks, when she kept her mouth shut to avoid offending either Tory wing on the off-chance that a job opportunity would arise.

It was an act of criminal incompetence, and a historic tragedy, that the referendum question was so insanely stark. Had there been a range of sub-questions about free movement of goods and people, immigration control, judicial independence and so on, the public will would have been more discernible.

Instead, because the only question was in or out, we stumbled blindly first into the chaotic Brexit-means-Brexit stasis of recent months; and now towards a miserably insular future as Grand Cayman without the nice weather of Philip Hammond’s imagination.

So be it. If May thought herself clever for hiring Boris, Liam Fox, David Davis and Andrea Leadsom, her meretricious trick of shackling the Brexiteers to their punishment jobs has lost its protective value now.

With her banal but colossal lie about having a mandate, May takes full ownership of the future. That future might rain eternal glory on her, or make her a dangerous rival to Cameron for the title of Worst PM Ever. The chances are it will be more nuanced than either.

But whatever ensues, she must not imagine that she can shield behind the “popular will”. With this Brexit, she is acting in outrageous defiance of that will. The future is on her head and hers alone, and she would do well to open her eyes to that.