Britain is in the grip of an existential crisis that reaches far beyond Brexit | Aditya Chakrabortty
Posted by The Editor on May 29, 2019 1:00 am
Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservative leadership, Conservatives, Dominic Raab, European Union, Michael Gove, Michel Barnier, Politics, Sajid Javid, UK news
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Nearly three years after the referendum, Westminster has still not come to terms with the grievances that drove the result
The person who is best qualified to hold up a mirror to British politics today is neither a minister nor an academic. He is not even British. No: he is, of course, Michel Barnier, the French-born servant of Brussels. In his 1,036 days as the EU’s chief negotiator, he has sat for numbing hours opposite Theresa May, haggled with David Davis and Dominic Raab and their junior ministers and faced down countless Whitehall officials. He is the outsider who knows our system inside out. So when he popped up right at the end of the BBC’s fly on the wall Storyville documentaries on the Brexit negotiations, I leaned in to listen.
Barnier doesn’t do florid, so his words leapt out … It wasn’t even Brexit at all. The UK is in a crisis as big as the country itself.