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Brexit Won’t Solve Boris Johnson’s Europe Problem

After Brexit, Johnson Still Faces Thatcher’s Tory Curse

(Bloomberg) -- After 47 years and one month, Britain will on Friday walk away from the European Union. It represents the triumph of one Conservative prime minister, and the trashing of the legacy of another.

When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, it was under a Tory premier, Edward Heath, and with the full-throated support of the woman who would go on to be the Conservative Party’s greatest modern leader, Margaret Thatcher. She in turn would help to shape the body before deciding it was going in the wrong direction.

Brexit Won’t Solve Boris Johnson’s Europe Problem

The fight that began 40 years ago with Heath and Thatcher has echoed through the U.K.’s oldest and most successful party ever since. Successive Tory prime ministers have paid the ultimate political price and been forced from office, casualties of their colleagues’ pathological divisions over Europe.

Now Boris Johnson is seeking to break the chain. As he writes what he hopes will be the final chapter in Britain’s tortured divorce from the EU, his aim is also to lay his party’s civil war to rest. But as Johnson's Britain leaves Europe, there are signs that the question of Europe might not yet leave him.

Johnson has ridden Brexit to the top of British politics. As the face of the Vote Leave campaign, he is in Thatcher’s euro-skeptic tradition. Yet in the past, he has criticized her for being dishonest with voters about caving in to Brussels. Speaking in 2014, he said: “She and some of her immediate advisers could be quite tricksy about what was really going on.”

With Brexit now just hours away, Johnson aims to turn the national conversation back to the domestic issues British people care more about, such as the health service. There are reasons to think he might succeed. Unlike his predecessors, he has a majority in Parliament large enough to ignore his party’s more awkward members. He has the pro-Brexit British press on his side. And he doesn’t have to deal with Boris Johnson using Brexit as a way to advance his career.

Brexit Won’t Solve Boris Johnson’s Europe Problem

On the other hand, he does still have to deal with Brexit. With just 11 months to negotiate a trade deal with the EU, the pressure will intensify on Johnson to extend the deadline for talks beyond the end of the year. The alternative is to risk an economically calamitous cliff edge exit from the transitional arrangements next January. Resolving that conflict will involve difficult choices.

David Gauke was justice secretary under Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, but Johnson expelled him from the party for opposing a no-deal Brexit. He’s skeptical about the prime minister’s ability to keep a lid on the poisonous issue of Europe. “At some point sooner rather than later, the government will have to make a decision about what type of relationship it will want with the EU,” he said.

A sharp break with the single market will damage businesses and hit the economy, but staying too close to European rules will unleash cries of betrayal from Brexit campaigners, Gauke said. “Steering through that without Brexit erupting as a major issue will be very difficult.”

History suggests that however tired the rest of the country might have become of discussions of Britain’s relationship with the EU, within the Conservative Party there’s a seemingly limitless appetite to argue about it.

For Heath, taking Britain into Europe in 1973 was his great legacy. As a student he’d watched an Adolf Hitler rally at Nuremburg —  he would later claim they came so close that the dictator’s arm brushed his sleeve —  and in World War II he served as an artillery officer.

To those of Heath’s generation, deeply affected by the devastation of the war they had witnessed, European integration was a vital project to secure peace. The loss of some sovereignty was a price well worth paying.

At first Thatcher, prime minister from 1979, agreed. She could see the economic benefits of integration as well. The single market, which Johnson is now determined to leave, was the result of British pushing, and one of her major achievements. But as European leaders talked of pooling more sovereignty, and of overruling national governments to enforce the very regulations that she had been stripping out at home, Thatcher turned against the project.

Her shift helped precipitate her downfall. Pro-Europeans in her Cabinet accused her of undermining Britain’s negotiating position, and her party forced her out. In the short term, it was a victory for their side, but in the long term, the anger felt by Thatcher and her supporters at the way she had been treated mingled to create a sense in the party that Europe was about betrayal — both of the nation and of the Conservatives’ greatest leader since Winston Churchill.

For the man who succeeded Thatcher, John Major, this resentment would fatally undermine his government, as he struggled with a small group of determined rebels who believed — with Thatcher’s encouragement — that they were putting country before party. However hard Major tried to move the conversation on, it kept being dragged back to Europe.

Brexit Won’t Solve Boris Johnson’s Europe Problem

According to David Lidington, elected as a Conservative member of parliament under Major in 1992, it was a problem only made worse by Britain’s crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism the same year. “His government was defined by the ERM crisis,” Lidington said in an interview. “The government’s central economic policy was blown to bits by something coming out of Europe, something Margaret Thatcher was seen to have fought against.”

Major lost power in the 1997 general election, ushering in a decade dominated by Tony Blair’s all-powerful Labour Party. These wilderness years for the Tories were summed up by another party leader, David Cameron, in 2006: “Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life, we were banging on about Europe.”

But even if Cameron could see the problem, he couldn’t escape from it when he won power in 2010. EU integration over the previous decade had angered many in his party. And he discovered that the new generation of Tory MPs were inculcated with the Thatcher-betrayal interpretation of their history. The idea that Britain should leave the EU still wasn’t mainstream among them — as recently as 2015, party policy was to stay in the bloc — but by now it was a rare Tory who would say out loud that membership was an unalloyed good thing.

To Cameron’s generation of Tories, World War II was something experienced through cinematic tales of plucky Spitfire pilots and daring escapes from prisoner of war camps. That gave them a quite different view of a project that involved pooling sovereignty with Germans. When Johnson — who has written a biography of Churchill — talked about Hitler during the 2016 Brexit referendum, it wasn’t, as Heath had done, as a witness to history.

Brexit Won’t Solve Boris Johnson’s Europe Problem

Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph then that the story of the continent was of attempts “to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.” He went on: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.” Martial rhetoric has continued to infuse Johnson’s side of the Brexit debate. He accused opponents last year of wanting to “surrender” to Brussels.

While May was prime minister, Johnson stoked rebellion against her, using Brexit as the main issue. Now that he has the job, can he take the heat out of the topic?

This will depend partly on how many compromises he has to make with the EU in the coming months as trade talks unfold. It will also depend on how pro-Brexit Tories choose to respond.

Lidington, who went on to serve as May’s deputy, said he believed the issue was settled within the party — probably. “My golden scenario is that outside the EU the U.K. develops a close and structured relationship with the EU,” he said. “My nightmare is that people get so bogged down by some issue of the talks that they get into trenches.”

For Johnson, the risk is that the Tory party’s Brexit purists may find the lure of another fight too strong to resist.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net

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