Parris' piece saying that he is leaving the Conservative Party really is immensely silly. I have no joy in saying that. I am someone who has a great deal of respect for him - indeed, someone who has met and enjoyed talking to him. I am truly sorry to see such an unfortunate example of pure Brexit Derangement Syndrome.
In 2016 a Conservative Government held a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave it. Now, Parris believes that leaving the EU is "folly". He might be right: even Dominic Cummings has said that in some of the forking paths of the future, it would be better to have stayed. Lots of clever people agree.
But there are degrees of folly. There is the folly of forgetting your packed lunch at home and having to buy a sandwich instead, and there is the folly of failing to secure your bungee rope before jumping off a bridge. Parris obviously puts leaving the EU (even with Johnson's new and improved deal) in the latter category.
That means that he should have abandoned the Conservative Party when Cameron called the referendum. (Instead: see here.)
Look at it this way: what would you think about a party that called a referendum on something as reprehensible as the slaughter of the firstborn or as self-destructive as the abolition of all formal education? You would not wait a few years after the outcome of that referendum before deciding that that party was not one you wanted to support. Deliberately opening the door to a monster is an appalling thing to do, even if you are confident that you can shut the door before it gets in.
So why has Parris waited until now? He suggests that he is now "unwilling to support a leader who is a stranger to honesty or principle and who surfs a foolish populist wave for the sake of ambition alone, leading a governing party whose centre of gravity has shifted decisively away from the broadly centrist political force Conservatism once was." None of this makes any sense. Johnson is, I grant, a man whose personal life is perhaps more in line with Bill Clinton's than Richard Nixon's (I choose my examples advisedly), but whose time as Prime Minister has been spent doing nothing other than trying to leave the EU. If doing so is surfing a foolish populist wave and shifting away from being a broadly centrist force then I repeat: giving that option to the country in 2016 was every bit as bad - and probably worse. Charming old Cameron and diligent old May were surfers or extremists both.
On the other hand, if you believe, as I do, that the folly of leaving the EU, if folly it be, is well within the range of legitimate decisions a country might make, that becoming a little more like Switzerland or Canada and a little less like Austria is nothing like the slaughter of the firstborn, and that the fact that a majority voted for Brexit provides at least some reason for thinking it a "centrist" position (for what that is worth), then nothing Johnson has done in office merits the bizarre invective Parris has chosen to deploy. The decision that has faced the British political classes since 2016 has been whether the fact of Brexit would be sufficiently disastrous to outweigh the moral and prudential imperative of respecting the result of a high-turnout referendum; the question has been whether to dispense with democracy in order to preserve Britain's half-in, half-out status in the EU. To any reasonable objective observer, even accepting that all the economic forecasts are true (a 3.5% reduction in GDP over 10 years, i.e. an annual rounding error), it is surely clear that there is nothing extreme or "populist" or indicative of "zealotry" or any of the other words Parris uses in deciding that it is better to live in a democracy in which a referendum is respected than to live in whatever alternative system of government the likes of Dominic Grieve, Keir Starmer or the Liberal Democrats would wish for us. At the very least, is it not a reasonable view for Johnson to take? Is it not exactly the same view that May in all her sensible greyness took?
The emotional response to Brexit that has animated so many of our leaders and commentators is going to look very silly in a few years time. "I was right," they will say, looking at a large-ish holiday mobile phone bill and spotting the EU snubbing our diplomats in Davos. But they will say it quietly. And, as their friends and families watch the sun continuing to rise in the east and set in the west, and as new fads and crazes occupy their children, and as new outrages as yet undreamt of animate the opinion columns, and as the people of Britain continue to grumble their way through the minor annoyances that would dominate their lives regardless of the scope of the European customs union, they might wonder why it seemed so important to be right on this issue. Was all that Brexit fuss really happening at the same time as Hong Kong - and Yemen - and Syria - and Greta Thunberg - and Huawei - and Universal Credit and foodbanks and ...?, they will ask themselves in wonder. And I thought that Brexit was the issue worth marching about?
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