Remain candidates included in the Tory leadership race? They’re having a laugh!
It should be a straightforward task for the government to enact the will of the British people after the recent EU in-out referendum. Of course there are those patrician politicians from the Remain side who think the electorate can’t be trusted. Some are even trying to invoke stratagems ranging from remaining in the EU due to legal technicalities, to negotiating an exit that would look indistinguishable from our current relationship with the EU.
David Cameron is to be commended for his unequivocal acceptance of the people’s will and his honourable resignation, realising perhaps that the leader of the Remain campaign would be the wrong person to lead the exit negotiations.
But even more honourably, his resignation was probably dealing with the perception rather than the actuality of the situation. After all, David Cameron’s leadership can have played no small part in the Tories rather surprising overall majority in the last election. Combined with his period as leader of the previous coalition government, he’s generally regarded as a politician who can be trusted: indeed the very in-out referendum on the EU is the fulfilment of one of his election pledges. There are many who feel he should have taken a much more detached and statesmanlike view of the referendum, being prepared to carry on as PM and give the country the stability it needed whatever the result of the referendum. As has been mentioned before in this blog, at the very least he should never have been the leader of either side.
It would therefore seem that David Cameron may have been the only Remain campaigner that the country would have trusted to deliver a timely and appropriate exit from the EU. So it seems complete nonsense that any other Remain candidate should put themselves forward in the Tory party leadership race. After all, it would be someone who we don’t know about in terms of their leadership qualities or their true feelings and commitment to leaving the EU. Given that the majority of Tory MPs voted Remain, it’s a situation that the public would instinctively mistrust to get the best exit deal. The danger is that the electorate, should there be a general election after the change of Tory leadership, would turn to a party that could guarantee an exit deal more in line with their expectations, for example UKIP if they could get their act together. Perhaps the Conservative party and David Cameron himself may further regret his prominent role in the referendum.
