18 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Boris Johnson said, “I’d rather be dead in a ditch” than seek an extension.
LETTER FROM THE U. K.
THE LONG GOODBYE
In the final days of the Brexit negotiations, the future became visible.BY SAM KNIGHT
W
hen does uncertainty become
the worst condition of all? This
fall, more than three years after Brit-
ain voted to leave the European Union,
no one was sure what form Brexit would
take, what kind of relationship we
would have with our nearest neigh-
bors, or whether the whole thing could
still be called off. Theresa May, the first
Conservative Prime Minister with the
job of taking the United Kingdom out
of the E.U., had been forced to step
down at the end of July. The second,
Boris Johnson, did not seem trust-
worthy. There was a departure time—
11 P.M. on October 31st—which the
government tried very hard to con-
vince people was real. On September
1st, it launched a hundred-million-
pound public-information campaign
called “Get Ready for Brexit.” TV spots
showed sparkling European vacation
destinations and advised viewers to
check their travel insurance. There was
a six-second video on Snapchat. Signs
flashed on highways in the rain, tell-
ing truck drivers, “Freight to EU, Pa-
pers May Change.”
But everyone knew that Brexit was
unlikely to happen by Halloween. May
had spent two years negotiating an exit
deal with the other twenty-seven mem-
bers of the E.U., only to fail to get it
approved by Parliament. Johnson, aflamboyant Brexiteer, wanted to rip up
May’s agreement, but there didn’t seem
to be time to start over. He insisted
that Britain would leave, regardless of
how talks went with Brussels. “No ifs
or buts,” Johnson said, outside No. 10
Downing Street. The gulf between what
the government said was going to hap-
pen and what seemed possible, let alone
sensible, grew wider by the day. You
could scroll through an article on your
phone, full of the reasons that Brexit
would not occur on October 31st, and
be interrupted by an ad from the gov-
ernment telling you to get ready.
The ructions in Westminster took
on historic proportions. Johnson lost
his first seven votes as Prime Minister.
In one, rebel Conservative Members
of Parliament joined the opposition to
pass a law aimed at preventing John-
son from taking Britain out of the E.U.
without a deal. Johnson asked the
Queen to shut down Parliament; the
Supreme Court opened it up again. He
called for a general election; the La-
bour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, re-
fused to agree to one unless Brexit was
delayed. The pound fell. Death threats
multiplied. Politicians quoted poetry.
A third of British adults said that Brexit
had affected their mental health. A
man in a clown outfit stood outside
the gates of Parliament shouting, “Save
our bendy bananas!”
Within weeks of the Brexit dead-
line, three very different outcomes were
still possible. Johnson could somehow
defy the odds and replace May’s deal
with a more extreme form of Brexit,
and get it approved by Parliament. He
could seek to disobey the law and take
Britain out of the E.U. without a deal.
Or he would have to ask for an exten-
sion and hold an election, and the whole
sorry story would continue. Newspa-
pers published very complicated graph-
ics, indicating all the branching fu-
tures. Foreigners marvelled at the mess.
One European ambassador described
the situation to me as an “intoxicating
self-blockade.”E
lements of the Brexit crisis have
been there since the beginning.
The referendum on Britain’s member-
ship in the European Union was a mo-
mentous act of direct democracy in a
country that has been governed by Par-ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN