you?” Wrenn said. “No,” Hebden said.
“I couldn’t possibly admit it.” They
were relaxed about a no-deal Brexit.
“It’s what people politely refer to as a
rebalancing of the economy,” Wrenn
said. “That is, a load of people getting
fucked over, isn’t it?”
The Party rebels—Alistair Burt, a
former Foreign Office minister; David
Gauke, a former Justice Secretary; and
Grieve, a former Attorney General—
sat at a table at the front. The room
had a low ceiling and spotlights, and
the men were hemmed in by micro-
phones and reporters. Grieve explained
that they had voted with the opposi-
tion parties in Parliament to stop John-
son from taking the country out of the
E.U. without an agreement because it
would disproportionately affect the poor
and the elderly. “We are all absolutely
united that precipitating a no-deal de-
parture is unacceptable,” Grieve said.
“No, we’re not,” Hebden heckled.
“Are we?”
Grieve pressed on. Over the week-
end, the right-wing Mail on Sunday
had reported that the government was
investigating him and the other rebel
M.P.s for “foreign collusion,” alleging
that they had received funding and
legal assistance from European sources.
Johnson described the situation as “very
interesting.” (A Downing Street offi-
cial later admitted that there was no
investigation.) “What are we, as Con-
servatives, to make of this behavior?”
Grieve asked his former Party col-
leagues. “It really goes to the heart of
what we are.”
Gauke, a former member of the
E.R.G., spoke toward the end. He de-
scribed the rapid evolution of the Con-
servatives under Johnson. Faced with
the impasse in Westminster, the Party
was widely reported to be preparing
for an election campaign, in which the
Tories would pivot to sweep up work-
ing-class Brexit supporters who have
traditionally voted for Labour or for
Farage’s populist parties. “We are going
to be dragged in a particular direction,”
Gauke said. “It means the Conserva-
tive Party becomes much more aggres-
sive, much more confrontational, much
more divisive. We are no longer the
party of Churchill; we are more the
party of Trump.” Next to me, Hebden
booed loudly. At the end of the meet-
ing, Grieve checked his phone to see
what kind of abuse he was receiving
on social media. “I don’t know where
it is from,” he said of one message,
smiling. “Hopefully not from some-
body in the room.” He read it out: “You
are a foul traitor.”W
hy was it so difficult to agree on
a Brexit deal? The word that
defined Theresa May’s struggles—and
that became a metaphor, a pretext, a
synecdoche for everything that was
impossible—was “backstop.” Early in
Britain’s negotiations with the E.U.,
which began in June, 2017, the bloc in-
sisted on setting a default relation-
ship—a backstop—in the unlikely event
that trade talks failed. For the island
of Great Britain, the options were clear
enough. For the island of Ireland, the
problem was close to metaphysical.
Until the late nineties, the border
between Northern Ireland and the Re-
public of Ireland, which has almost
three hundred crossing points, was a
frontier guarded by soldiers in watch-
towers. In 1998, the Good Friday Agree-
ment, which largely ended the Trou-
bles, gave citizens of Northern Irelandthe right to identify as Irish, British, or
both. It also committed the two gov-
ernments to an ambitious program of
coöperation, which was made simpler
because they were both members of the
E.U. Now, twenty years later, when you
call for an ambulance near the border,
it can come from either side. Fifty-six
per cent of voters in Northern Ireland
opposed Brexit.
In February, 2018, the European
Commission suggested a “Northern
Ireland-only backstop,” in which the
six counties of Northern Ireland would
stay inside the main E.U. structures
until a new permanent relationship
could be established. The proposal
called for regulatory checks on either
side of the Irish Sea—creating an in-
ternal border, more or less, which, May
said, “no U.K. Prime Minister could
ever agree to.” In response, she proposed
a “U.K.-wide backstop,” in which the
whole country would retain some Eu-
ropean regulations, plus additional
ones for Northern Ireland, until the
negotiators figured out what to replace
them with.
May’s backstop was her undoing.
Everyone found a reason to hate it. E.U.“If it doesn’t make me scream, I get rid of it.”