It’s June 24. Remain or Leave has won. Imagine two possible outcomes. David Cameron is the winner who took a gamble that paid off; resolved an ancient dispute bedevilling his country and his party; crowned what (looking back) now appears to have been a superbly judged premiership; and rides towards his career sunset, his legacy secure. Or he’s the loser, tottering from the stage after a disastrously ill-judged decision to ask the British people for an answer that (looking back) it was never in his power to get.
Two outcomes: two sets of consequences.
In the film Sliding Doors there’s a moment for the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow when — depending on whether or not she catches a train — her life could take one or the other of different courses. Will June 23 be for David Cameron that sliding door moment?
I doubt it. Win? Lose? As a Tory prime minister you can’t win on Europe. The issue cannot be settled, the controversy cannot be killed. So whatever the result, you end up with half your party hating you even more than they did before you started. There’s no question of winner-takes-all. If Cameron wins, he still takes only half the Conservative party.
It was always fanciful to think in terms of “resolving” this issue. I blame Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis popularised the idea that deep-seated psychological fractures should be faced up to. The Conservative party has decided to confront its demons. And with 50 days left, the demons are winning.
For nearly a century now the “don’t bottle it up” doctrine has been percolating down to us via shrinks, agony aunts — and finally the prime minister. How the clichés roll. “Lance the boil”, “air your differences”, “don’t paper over the cracks”, “bring it on”.
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David Cameron decided to bring it on.
As it happens I think he had no choice. Sooner or later the Tory right was going to come for him anyway. But the idea that thrashing this one out would somehow settle it, was always cockeyed. We are not heading towards anything we could call closure.
There are so few high noons in politics. Remember that heady dawn after the prime minister announced in his Bloomberg speech that the European issue was going to be hammered out once and for all? At last (some of us trilled) a big referendum was going to clear the air.
Clear the air? You can hardly breathe for the fumes. A few weeks into the official campaign and the Tory right has called its party leader “dodgy Dave”, a “twister”, a liar and a flogger-off of rotten goods. He has been compared to Charles I, who was beheaded. He has been accused of little short of national betrayal.
Michael Gove (who of all the Brexiteers we imagined to be the courteous one) has pictured the nation as hostages, trussed up in the back of a car and driven to we know not what fate. Iain Duncan-Smith has accused the chancellor and prime minister of hypocrisy. And Boris Johnson has insulted the president of the United States.
Some Remain Tories, meanwhile, (and they include me) have depicted the Leave campaigners as economic illiterates, madcaps and obsessives whose ill-considered plans could wreck our economy and plunge a dagger into the EU itself.
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Each side has raged at the other as a threat to national security. And every now and again some poor fool on the Tory back benches bleats that it’s vital that after this row is over, the Conservative party “comes back together again”.
Back together? Are they joking?
How (if you’re the PM or chancellor) do you come back together with people who’ve questioned your patriotism and called you a liar and a cheat? How (if you’re a cabinet Leave campaigner) do you swear fealty on June 24 to a Tory leadership that thinks of you and your friends as deluded ignoramuses?
And these open hostilities at the top are reverberating all the way down through the ranks of Conservative backbenchers and grassroots activists. It is turning into nothing less than an internal civil war, punctuated by intermittent pleas that whichever side wins must afterwards “reach out” to the other side.
Even leaving aside personalities and personal insults, how does a wing of the party that genuinely believes the other wing would sell out Britain’s sovereignty to a bunch of continental despots, “reach out” to those it sees as traitors to our democracy?
And how does that other wing of the party, believing its critics to be in thrall to a paranoid delusion about the ambitions of Brussels,“reach out” to those it considers doom-merchants and fantasists?
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Such has been the schism opening up within the Conservative party. The tension is not new. Rumbling beneath the party’s foundations, half-surfacing every few years in the occasional premonitory tremor, it has haunted the Tories all my political lifetime.
For nearly half a century the party has been living on the political equivalent of the San Andreas Fault that opened up beneath California in 1906. In slow motion over the next 50 days we shall see the earth shaking beneath the Tories’ feet. Then comes the referendum: a pivotal moment, it’s true. But “clear the air”? That’s not what they said in San Francisco.
The comparison with Sliding Doors isn’t neat. Nothing will stop the quake. After the quake it is true that (if we get a Leave result) Cameron’s reputation may lie amid the rubble. But if we get a Remain, his legacy will never have felt less settled.