‘Trumpian Machismo’ Driving Brexit Debate, Says Tories’ Gyimah
‘Trumpian Machismo’ Driving Brexit Debate, Says Tories' Gyimah
(Bloomberg) --
U.K. Conservative leadership candidate Sam Gyimah has accused male rivals of “Trumpian machismo” in believing they’ll be able to negotiate a better Brexit deal than Theresa May.
Gyimah, 42, is running on a platform of holding a second referendum on leaving the European Union. He said in an interview that he’d decided to enter the race because “whilst there’s a wide range of candidates, there’s a very narrow spread of views.”
Of the 10 other people currently in the contest, two -- Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey -- are proposing to leave the European Union without a deal on Oct. 31. One, Rory Stewart, is telling the party they’ll have to accept May’s deal, and the other seven are saying they could secure concessions from the EU, generally by threatening to leave without a deal.
“You’ve got chest-beating men saying they could do what Theresa May failed to do,” Gyimah said. “They’re saying they could go and renegotiate in a Trump way and get a better deal.”
He said this was unrealistic. “We’re where we are not for want of trying. The British government has spent the last two and a half years negotiating with the EU. Most of these candidates who say they’ll get a better deal have been in the cabinet during that time. They’ve approved or been involved in every step of the negotiation of Brexit. So it’s hard to believe that now they can do what working with Theresa May they couldn’t deliver.”
Donald Trump, who left the U.K. on Wednesday after a three-day visit, is a source of fascination to some Conservatives. Last year the leading candidate to succeed May, Boris Johnson, was reported to have suggested the U.K. should emulate the president in Brexit negotiations. “He’d go in bloody hard,” Johnson was reported to have told a private dinner. “There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere.”
That evening, Johnson’s successor as foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who is also running to be prime minister, told a meeting of Conservative members of Parliament that they could learn from Trump. “We talked a bit about Trump and the fact he engages so successfully all the time online,” Nicky Morgan, who organized the event, told reporters. “He talked about Trump tweeting. The fact that he had to wait such a long time to greet him off Air Force One because he was tweeting. He thought we could learn from it.”
Gyimah’s plan for a second vote is anathema to most of his colleagues, and to Tory activists, who largely support leaving the EU. But he says it’s going to be impossible to resolve the question of Brexit without going back to voters. “A general election would be one way of doing that, but it’s clearly sub-optimal,” he said. “The question is not whether you want a referendum or whether you like a referendum. The question is how do you resolve this impasse?”
He described his own proposal as “a credible plan that a new prime minister can deliver and get a majority for in the House of Commons. It doesn’t rely on getting the EU to do what we want.” But although there might be a majority in Parliament for a second referendum, it is probably one involving more opposition votes than Conservative ones.
Gyimah though accused others in the campaign of “taking the path of least resistance and telling people what they want to hear,” which he said would ultimately “stoke disillusion even further.”
“So much of the Brexit criticism of the last few months has focused on Theresa May’s personal failings,” he said. “That has obscured the fact that there are some of these issues that cannot be renegotiated. The fundamental issue in Northern Ireland -- that we want to take control of our border but not have a border on the other side -- simply cannot be dealt with through technology. You cannot wish this challenge away. This is an issue that people haven’t really reckoned with.”
While Johnson has said the Conservatives face “extinction” if they don’t deliver Brexit by Oct. 31, Gyimah said a no-deal Brexit would be similarly risky.
“I do not see how the Conservative Party can pursue no-deal, without public consent, and be an electoral force that wins a majority,” he said. “No deal is an abject failure. You cannot sell failing to get a deal as some kind of great triumph of government policy, especially when it’s accompanied with emergency meetings to manage a mass contingency, which is almost certainly going to be the case. It will be very clear at that point that the government has lost control.”
Along with James Cleverly, who dropped out of the contest this week, Gyimah is the first black man to run for the leadership of the Tories. In the unlikely event he won, he would be the country’s first black prime minister.
“That probably sends a signal to some kid that they can do it,” he said. He smiled, aware that his chances are less than slim. “And do it better. For me, that is a private source of joy.”
--With assistance from Jessica Shankleman.
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson
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