Brexiteers fear being stitched up by the establishment

THE Brexiteers are one of the most successful pressure groups in British history—arguably the second-most successful after the Anti-Corn Law Leaguers who inspired the creation of The Economist in 1843. They persuaded David Cameron to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. They won it against the massed ranks of the British and global establishment. And they persuaded Theresa May to pursue the hardest possible Brexit, despite a narrow victory. Not bad for a group of “swivel-eyed loons”, as Mr Cameron’s clique called them.

But are the loons snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? A growing number of people on both sides of the Brexit argument calculate that they are. Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director of Vote Leave, thinks that Brexit is being “irretrievably botched”. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a pro-Leave journalist, says that “the quixotic bid for British independence has failed”. On the Remain side, Jonathan Powell pronounces hard Brexit “dead”, killed by the conundrum of the Irish border.

The first Brexiteer to recognise that their treasured project was turning into a “train wreck” was Mr Cummings, a man who combines tactical genius with a rare ability to see the big picture. Mr Cummings argues that Mrs May made a fundamental strategic mistake in triggering Article 50 (which starts the clock for taking Britain out of the EU within two years) before she had prepared a coherent plan for leaving. Akin to “putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger”, this shifted the balance of power irretrievably towards Brussels.

Other Brexiteers are now catching on. On June 6th Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, delivered an agonised speech to a group of Conservative donors which was recorded and leaked. Mr Johnson argued that Britain runs the risk of ending up in “a sort of anteroom of the EU” and blamed this unhappy prospect on a combination of insufficient will on the part of the prime minister and strong resistance on the part of the establishment. He claimed that Britain needed a strong leader like Donald Trump—“he’d go in bloody hard”. He called the Treasury the “heart of Remain”. He lamented that Britain was so terrified of short-term disruptions that it would sacrifice long-term gains.

Nor was this just Boris being Boris. In the same week David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the EU, threatened to resign over the question of putting a time-limit on a “backstop” plan to remain in the EU’s customs union, and accused Mrs May, in private, of practising a “blancmange” style of leadership. Guido Fawkes, a pro-Brexit website, raises the possibility that Leave supporters have been “played”. The Brexiteers are busily creating a stab-in-the-back theory that they can use to explain their defeat and rally support in the future. Mrs May is a Remain voter who has sold out the Brexiteers at every possible opportunity, the argument goes. The establishment has done everything it could to frustrate the will of the people, often working in secret with the Brussels bureaucrats, with businesspeople stirring up fear of economic calamity and Olly Robbins, Mrs May’s chief adviser on Brexit, massaging her into a more Euro-friendly position.

The feeling of betrayal is already making for some ugly politics. On June 12th, almost two years to the day after Jo Cox, a Labour MP, was murdered by a deranged neo-Nazi for her “treason”, the Daily Express splashed the headline “Ignore the will of the people at your peril” on its front page. Anna Soubry shocked the House of Commons by revealing that at least one fellow MP was going to vote against their conscience after receiving threats, and that one had gone to a public engagement with “six armed undercover police officers”. Things are likely to get uglier if the EU insists that the free movement of people is the price of a softer Brexit, with the UK Independence Party roaring back to life and Brexiteer MPs campaigning against Britain’s “vassal status”.

Almost every passing headline deepens the Brexiteers’ gloom—and whets their appetite for more tales of betrayal. Mr Trump has made it clear that Britain won’t be exempt from his America-first trade policy. Arron Banks, a businessman who gave £12m ($16m) to one of the Leave campaigns, has been accused of having nefarious links to Russian officials (though a Commons select committee failed to land any blows on him and he left early for lunch). Paul Dacre, a fierce Brexiteer, will retire on November 14th as editor of the Daily Mail, to be replaced by an old-Etonian Remainer. Peter Kellner, a pollster, points out that 13 out of 14 recent polls suggest that the majority of people think that voting to leave was a mistake. The most striking number was that 28% of Labour Leavers no longer back Leave. This raises doubts about the Conservative strategy of advancing into the Labour Party’s industrial heartland on the strength of Brexit.

A counter-insurgency is born

It would be a mistake to underestimate a group of people who turned a crackpot fantasy into an era-defining vote. The Brexiteers command at least 60 solid votes in Parliament and have repeatedly shown that they are willing to burn down the village in order to save it from the Eurocrats. Mrs May’s strategy of kicking the can down the road gives them further opportunities to exert their influence in the future.

But the Brexiteers don’t have an obvious champion who could replace Mrs May. Mr Johnson is too buffoonish, Michael Gove is too cerebral and Jacob Rees-Mogg is too absurd. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act gives the government enormous power to survive rebellions. Many Brexiteers are worried that Tory fratricide could deliver Britain to Jeremy Corbyn, ensuring that, rather than becoming more like Singapore, as they want, it would look more like Venezuela. Above all, this week of high parliamentary drama revealed that the Tory Remainers are at last willing to fight for their cause with the same ruthlessness and style with which the Leavers have fought for theirs.