Daniel Hannan and the emptying of the Conservative mind

The Brexit right cannot face the mess it has made of Britain

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Daniel Hannan promising in 2015 that the UK would stay in the Single Market. We didn’t, of course

Conservatives once pretended to be tough minded. Leftists might fall for communism and other insane utopian schemes. Bleeding-heart liberals might babble sentimental dross about the inherent goodness in all people.

Conservatives knew better. They understood the truth of Kant’s warning that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” They saw the world for what it was, not as we would like it to be. Reality did not frighten them.

In the late 20^th century, right-wing papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Times and Wall Street Journal prided themselves on having news reporters who told hard truths to conservative readers who, whatever their prejudices, were tough enough to take them.

Following that honourable tradition in the 2010s, the Daily Telegraph hired Peter Foster, one of the best-informed trade and business journalists on what we used to call Fleet Street, and made him Europe Editor. Foster’s great story both at the Telegraph and when he moved on to the Financial Times was Brexit, of course.  Foster did his duty as a journalist and described its failures.

Rather than accept the world as it is, the Brexit right has turned on him. They proved that the days when Conservatives could boast that they had been “mugged by reality” are long gone.  Brexit has forced them to live in a fantasy world, not that they are complaining. They are happy in a nationalist La La Land, and prove it when they turn on anyone who asks them to look out at the dark world beyond their bubble.

Writing in Foster’s old newspaper, the Telegraph  Daniel Hannan denounced his former colleague. I must pause to say to readers who do not know him that Hannan is not just another right-wing pundit. He was one of the forces behind Brexit, and received a peerage from Boris Johnson in recognition of the damage he inflicted on my country.

Hannan played with the idea of taking the UK out of the EU for decades as he rolled around the right and far right from the mid-1990s on. “Hannan may have contributed more to the ideas, arguments and tactics of Euroscepticism than any other individual,” the Guardian said just after the 2016 referendum. And although Nigel Farage might dispute that claim, there’s truth enough in it.

Reviewing Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About It (out next week from Canongate)  all Hannan could manage was a kind of yobbish playground jeering.

His colleague suffers from “Brexit derangement syndrome,” Hannan said. Foster “makes no pretence at balance or nuance. Brexit is presented as an unmitigated calamity with no upsides at all.”

Rather than being a bore and banging on about everything that has gone wrong, Foster should forget about Brexit, Hannan recommended. Indeed, we should all forget about it. Brexit is over. It’s so 2010s. Don’t bother Hannan with all that EU business now.  Don’t be like the “terrifying number of people [who] are unable to move on from the 2016 referendum”. They are nothing more than the modern equivalents of “18th-century Jacobites” lamenting a lost cause.  They “have no real plan beyond insisting to one another that they were right all along”.

It’s worth subscribing to the Telegraph just to see Hannan’s review. It was one of the most unintentionally revealing pieces I have read this year. Hannan could not defend Brexit or offer solutions to a country he helped shove into needless decline. All he could do is tell the British to “move on” rather than hold him and his fellow ideologues to account.

However disreputable his attempts at blame-shifting would still be, Hannan would have a point if Brexit were a single event like the 2007/08 banking crisis. But Brexit is not in the past. We can’t just let it be. It is a rolling destructive process that will never be over until we find the political courage to challenge the world Hannan created.