20 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
to build you a whole new hospital.”
One of the principal arguments for
leaving the E.U. is that it will liberate
Britain from the bloc’s amazing array
of rules. Since Brexit was dreamed up
by the right wing of the Conservative
Party, it is generally assumed that part
of the goal is to become a low-tax, small-
state competitor to mainland Europe—a
nirvana sometimes referred to as “Sin-
gapore-on-Thames.” But this
is in conflict with the aspira-
tions of the millions of peo-
ple who voted for Brexit in
the hope of better public ser-
vices and a more responsive
government. While in office,
Johnson has made no attempt
to align these contradictory
desires. He has promised to
hire twenty thousand new po-
lice officers and maintain a
dramatic increase in spending on the
N.H.S., while enacting tax cuts for
higher earners.
A former senior civil servant told
me, “I think the Johnson strategy is ba-
sically to say, ‘I get it. And I’m not a
kind of Thatcherite.’ But then to cou-
ple that with a very hard-line Brexit
position.” He continued, “It might work.
But, economically, by the mid-twen-
ty-twenties, we’re going to be in a lot
of trouble.” The independent Institute
for Fiscal Studies forecasts that, under
Johnson, government borrowing will
be double the amount previously esti-
mated, and that public spending will
rise at its fastest rate in a decade. In
Manchester, Hancock described La-
bour’s “Corbynistas” as “hellbent on de-
stroying everything that’s made this
country great.” According to the I.F.S.,
Johnson’s spending as Prime Minister
is roughly in line with Corbyn’s most
recent electoral promises.
The hot events in Manchester were
held by the Brexiteers. During May’s
tenure, a group of some eighty Con-
servative M.P.s, known as the Euro-
pean Research Group, teamed up with
the Northern Irish Democratic Union-
ist Party to repeatedly scuttle her Brexit
proposals. The current chair of the
E.R.G. is Steve Baker, a born-again
Christian and a former engineer, who
has spoken of his wish to “tear Parlia-
ment down and bulldoze the rubble
into the river,” for its behavior since
the referendum. Baker’s predecessor
in the job was Jacob Rees-Mogg, a
tall, preternaturally posh former back-
bencher who is now the Leader of the
House of Commons. In early Septem-
ber, footage of Rees-Mogg, lounging
in the House of Commons as if he
were at a Roman bath, had gone viral.
He was unavoidable in Manchester:
recording an episode of “The Mogg-
cast,” signing T-shirts at
the souvenir shop, loom-
ing above cocktail parties.
One afternoon, I went
to see Baker and Rees-
Mogg speak at an event
organized by the Free
Market Conservatives. A
banner featured a quote
from Epictetus, the Greek
Stoic philosopher: “Is free-
dom anything else than
the right to live as we wish?” Baker and
Rees-Mogg were appearing with An-
drea Jenkyns, another member of the
E.R.G., who, like Baker, was one of
twenty-eight so-called Spartans who
voted against every form of May’s Brexit
agreement. Winning over the Spar-
tans, as well as the Democratic Union-
ist Party, would be essential to passing
any deal with the E.U. that Johnson
proposed. The room was packed.
The crowd had come for Rees-
Mogg. He arrived ten minutes late, to
great applause, wearing a dark double-
breasted suit. Even to a British per-
son, Rees-Mogg is a figure out of time.
His voice, a plangent, plummy thing,
is like an artificial-intelligence simu-
lacrum of how the upper classes spoke
in Edwardian England. “Do you re-
member what all the panjandrums
had to say?” Rees-Mogg asked, recall-
ing the dire warnings ahead of the
Brexit vote. “Plague of frogs. Death
of the firstborn. Economic recession.
Merely if we had the temerity to vote
to leave. Against that pressure, against
the I.M.F., against the O.E.C.D.,
against all the other sets of incom-
prehensible initials, we revolted. We
said, ‘We will not be told what to do
by acronyms. We are not having an
acronymocracy.’”
One of the riddles of English na-
tionalism, as personified by Rees-Mogg
and Johnson, is how seriously to take
it. (Rees-Mogg has six children; thesixth is called Sixtus.) “A lot of this
stuff sounds like it is sort of panto-
mime, this right-wing stuff in Britain,”
Stewart told me. “Because the tone in
which they do it is all a bit Gilbert and
Sullivan.” Like other unlikely populist
figures, Rees-Mogg operates within an
ironic shimmer, knowing what people
have come to hear. His descriptions of
the perfidy of the British élite have the
ring of an insider. “We found ourselves
up against the British establishment
at its least attractive,” he said. “People
who pretend to do one thing and do
another.”
At the end, Rees-Mogg took a ques-
tion about the Brexit Party—which
was set up by Nigel Farage, in January,
to campaign for an immediate depar-
ture from the E.U.—and the threat it
posed to the Conservative Party at the
next election. (Rees-Mogg’s sister An-
nunziata was elected to the European
Parliament for the Brexit Party in May.)
Rees-Mogg replied that everything
rested on delivering Brexit on Octo-
ber 31st. “If we do, we win,” he said. “If
we don’t, we lose.”
For years, Rees-Mogg was a mar-
ginal figure in Parliament. In 2012, he
suggested that the county of Somer-
set should have its own time zone. Be-
fore he joined Johnson’s administra-
tion, this summer, he had voted against
the governments of May and David
Cameron a hundred and twenty-seven
times. After his event, I went to a meet-
ing organized by the Conservative
Group for Europe, one of the last re-
maining Europhile factions within the
Party. It featured mainstream Con-
servative M.P.s—all former minis-
ters—who had been ejected from the
Party. The meeting was in a confer-
ence room at a hotel next to the con-
vention center. I arrived a few minutes
before it was due to start, at 7 P.M.,
and ended up sitting next to Peter
Hebden and Simon Wrenn, two Con-
servative elected officials from Hert-
fordshire, just north of London.
It was the end of a long day. They
had thought that there might be free
food. Hebden, a former policeman,
held an empty wineglass in his lap.
The men joked about having voted for
the Brexit Party in the European elec-
tions. “You wouldn’t be able to admit
it if you had done it yourself, could