Brexit is a mood, not a policy – and Liz Truss captures it in all its delusion
There’s a conundrum at the heart of the Conservative party leadership election, and I don’t mean the question of who will win. The more intriguing riddle is this. We know that Tory party members are overwhelmingly pro-Brexit: 79% of them voted leave, according to YouGov. We also know how important “Europe” is for the Conservative faithful, especially when choosing a leader: it’s why they were ready to overlook all considerations of experience, qualifications and electability when they picked an obvious dud like Iain Duncan Smith over Ken Clarke in 2001.
Now consider the choice facing the Tory selectorate. Liz Truss campaigned hard for remain in 2016, warning, presciently as it turned out, “just how difficult it would become to do business” if we were outside the European Union, having to “fill in 50 boxes on a form every time we wanted to export something”. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, was an ardent Brexiteer, not just in the referendum campaign but for decades before: he was writing jeremiads against Brussels when he was 16. Given all that, leaver Sunak should be miles ahead of remainer Truss. And yet YouGov has Truss beating Sunak among Tory members by 24 points. How can that be?
The answer is that Brexit does not always mean Brexit. Or rather, the meaning of Brexit is not confined to its literal definition. There’s both more and less to it than mere advocacy of a British exit from the EU. It is, in a formulation first used, it seems, by the novelist Nick Harkaway, more of a mood than a policy. Regardless of her stance on the policy, Truss embodies the Brexit mood. And Sunak doesn’t.
It’s partly cultural. Sunak could be a mascot for the slick, hi-tech, high-finance, international elite. The billionaire inlaws, the CV, the
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