Nick Clegg: Brexiteers are right to panic – they’ve failed to deliver utopia and are almost out of excuses In politics, if you want to understand your enemies listen hard to their tone. The tone of your opponents normally […]

In politics, if you want to understand your enemies listen hard to their tone. The tone of your opponents normally tells you a lot more about what they’re really thinking than what they say. And the tone of the Brexiteers is increasingly brittle, angry and panicky.

It isn’t just the – now frequent – demented headlines on the front page of Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail (“traitors”, “saboteurs”, “enemies of the people”). It isn’t just the – now frequent – self-absorbed rants from Dominic Cummings, the political apparatchik who helped to run the Brexit campaign.

Cabinet Ministers and senior MPs are at it too. Liam Fox says that the BBC “would rather see Britain fail”. Steve Baker claimed (and later apologised for claiming) that Treasury officials were fiddling the figures to keep the UK in a customs union. Jacob Rees-Mogg accused Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, of being an “enemy of Brexit”. Daniel Hannan MEP says Remainer MPs want to keep Britain in a “subservient status”. Ian Duncan Smith declared that “this Irish stuff” about the border has been made up to block Brexit. And so on.

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“The Brexiteers can rant all they like, but perhaps they should have understood the rules of the game before playing Russian roulette with the future of the country.”

So the tone is revealing – they’re panicking, and the panic is rising with each passing day. The question to ask is why? Surely now that “independence day” on 29 March next year is so tantalisingly close, a tone of growing confidence – not fury and panic – should infuse the language of the Brexiters?

Tonal difference

One revealing clue emerged last week during a toe-curlingly awkward appearance by Suella Braverman, a recently appointed Minister to the Department for Exiting the European Union, in front of the House of Commons Brexit Committee. In evidence submitted to MPs, she admitted that the Government would have to hand over a £40bn Brexit cheque to the EU without any guarantee that a good trade deal would be forthcoming in return.

Predictably enough, the Brexit press and Conservative Brexiteers harrumphed their disapproval. Cummings spluttered that the country will not forgive Ministers when it realises they have “handed over tens of billions for f**k all”.

But have these Brexiters not read Article 50? It is crystal clear: the EU is only legally committed to negotiating the exit of a departing Member State “taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”. In other words, the legally binding terms of exit – notably what money will change hands – are not contingent on a detailed agreement on future relations between the departing country and the EU. The Brexiteers can rant all they like, but perhaps they should have understood the rules of the game before playing Russian roulette with the future of the country.

And they’re panicking – perhaps rightly – because they know that voters will indeed be livid when they realise that, far from delivering a bonanza of £350m per week for the NHS, Brexit involves payments to the EU without any guarantees about the future. If I was one of the anti-Brexit campaign groups, I would already be printing the leaflets that highlight how British taxpayers are being fleeced by the dishonest incompetence of the very people claiming to stand up for Britain.

What the experts say

And then there’s the sheer weight of evidence and expertise which, day by day and week by week, continues to weigh against the self-harming damage of the whole Brexit adventure.

In the space of just a few days, the Governor of the Bank of England announced that the average British household was already £900 worse off before Brexit has even occurred, the head of HM Revenue and Customs revealed that the Brexiteer’s favoured “max fac” customs arrangement would cost the economy a whopping £20bn per year, and the Government itself published plans to turn a 13-mile section of the M20 into a giant car park for thousands of lorries to cope with the severe tailbacks after Brexit (a kind of motorway “Mad Max Dystopia” which David Davis said would never happen).

By now, everyone knows that for the high priests of Brexit, leaving the EU is a faith immune to logical argument. Pesky experts are loftily dismissed as dumb puppets of “the establishment”. Science, data and research are brushed aside by a theological belief in the virtue of Brexit.

“All the signs point in one direction: the Brexiteers are panicking – and they’re right to panic.”

But eventually the facts start speaking for themselves. No one in the country now believes that Brexit is as easy, uncomplicated, rapid or beneficial as they were told in the Summer of 2016. Arrogance and bluster are colliding with the cold realities of economics in an interdependent world.

And – crucially – there is growing evidence that British voters are developing real doubts of their own.

A recent analysis of YouGov’s rolling polls suggests that a million Labour voters who backed Brexit two years ago are having second thoughts, with buyer’s remorse particularly marked amongst voters under the age of 40, especially women and working-class C2DE voters. Other polls have shown a marked increase in pessimism about the impact of Brexit on the NHS.

So all the signs point in one direction: the Brexiteers are panicking – and they’re right to panic. They may have all the tabloids on their side. They may be able to call on the deep pockets of Eurosceptic hedge fund managers. But they’re running out of excuses and they can feel that momentum is starting to ebb away from their cause.

That is why they are now turning on each other like rats in a sack, frantically looking to blame anyone and anything but themselves. They deserve no pity. It is almost two years since they won their unexpected victory. They have failed to deliver the utopia they promised to the country. Now they must be held to account.

@nick_clegg