Boris Johnson speaks at a Vote Leave campaign event, 2016. Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA Archive/PA Images.
At last. After two years of weird, stifling repression, a realisation. There cannot be a Brexit ‘Independence Day!’ There can be only different ways of being within our European domain. Boris Johnson, formerly the UK’s Foreign Secretary and the face of Brexit, and David Davis a long-time anti-European who headed the special Brexit department, were finally obliged to sup with reality and threw up.
Both resigned from their high offices of state after a cabinet away-day meeting at the Prime Minister’s country house of Chequers, on Friday 6 July. This agreed to propose to the EU a future relationship based on a single ‘rule book’ for goods that will in effect be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice. The approach is spelt out in the White Paper issued yesterday. The inescapable reason for this is, as I’ve shown, that our lives in the UK are inextricably part of Europe’s magnificent regulated space – one that Britain helped to create. Given this, the Chequers’ proposals are the least form of integration possible. But a form of integration they are. In the words of the White Paper: “the UK would make an upfront choice to commit by treaty to ongoing harmonisation with the relevant EU rules… [with] participation by the UK in those EU agencies that provide authorisations for goods in highly regulated sectors”.
