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We’re heading for the biggest crisis since Suez Matthew Parris It is horribly apparent that, four months after the referendum, the Brexiteers have no idea where they’re leading us A s in a bad dream, I have the sensation of falling. We British are on our way to making the biggest screw-up since Suez and, somewhere deep down, the new governing class know it. We are heading for national humiliation, nobody’s in charge, and nobody knows what to do. This Brexit thing is out of control. It was really only this week that the scales fell from my eyes. Perhaps it was just the accretion of small observations, mounting in the unconscious mind until the heap broke the surface: but a nascent worry became a conscious horror. For me the horror dawned after a long discussion in a group who follow politics closely. Reading the runes, we were trying to work out — and only in broad outline — what the plan for Brexit might be. Scenarios were conjured, possible game-plans stress-tested. But every guess, followed through, led fast into the nettles. As the dial moved towards the “soft” end of the spectrum of possibilities we repeatedly faced the tiger that the Leave camp so foolishly and cynically rode: immigration. Why ever would our EU partners offer us, post-Brexit, what they would not offer David Cameron before? And what makes anyone think that in the new antagonisms generated across the Channel by our referendum result, the “soft” Brexit that we former Remainers crave will anyway still be on offer? And as the dial moved towards the “hard” end of the spectrum, the massive economic uncertainties attached to the go-it-alone solution came crowding in. None of us knew how realistic the fears of a serious hit to Britain’s economy might prove: but we did know that for many in the Leave camp, and for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, those fears were real. Then we thought about parliament. But when you do, the path of legislative scrutiny crumbles beneath your feet. Before she triggers Article 50 next March (and therefore before negotiations even begin) Theresa May is adamant she cannot show parliament her hand, and one does see her point — even though John Major did risk a Commons debate before he went to Maastricht. But after Article 50 is triggered and the Lisbon treaty’s ejector button has been pushed, reversing the process is practically impossible. After March, parliament can say it doesn’t like the Brexit plan that emerges, it can amend the Great Repeal Bill by attaching conditions, it can even throw the bill out; but still we must leave the EU within two years — and on no terms at all if parliament rejects the government’s terms. Besides, a darker possibility occurs: that the real reason Mrs May doesn’t want to consult parliament on her plans is that she doesn’t have any. Bayonet the wounded all you like, Leavers, but the nation waits to hear your plans It was widely felt that the referendum would be a crystalline moment of national decision. We were to stay on one road or take the other. Yet nearly four months later we find ourselves still at the crossroads, arguing about why we decided to take the road less travelled — and where it should lead. The referendum’s sense of purpose has evaporated and we can see what always lay beneath: competing visions for Britain, each unable to command a majority by itself. They were pooled in the word Leave, and it took them as far as June 23. But no further. The differences now within the Brexit camp are at least as sharp as between them and some of the former Remainers. Some of the veteran and most stalwart campaigners against the EU — Daniel Hannan MEP; columnists such as Christopher Booker, Andrew Lilico and Iain Martin — are prominent among those growing queasy about where Brexit could lead. And from Mrs. May herself? Silence. Allow me to switch the gender in my take on Benny Hill’s parody of a faux-heroic Edwardian poem: They said it couldn’t be done; They said she could never do it. So she took that job that couldn’t be done — And she couldn’t do it. Several of us emerged from that discussion among pundits this week, each with our own perspective, but all with the same response. We were looking at a very serious impending road accident. “What the ****?” we were saying to each other. The scales, as I say, fell from my eyes. For my friend, Times colleague and Leave campaigner, Michael Gove, to spend every paragraph — yes, every paragraph — of his column yesterday railing against the side that lost the European referendum campaign attests more eloquently to suppressed panic than anything we the vanquished could write. Edvard Munch’s The Scream hovered over his words. The Freudians call it displacement activity, and it tells us so much. To our intense disquiet we find the victors, hollow-cheeked, still stalking the battlefield, kicking irritably at corpses, months after their war was won. Bayonet the wounded all you like, Leavers, but the nation waits to hear your plans. You have the baton. Where are you going to run? Blaming The Guardian, blaming The Times, blaming fat British businessmen, blaming golf, Marmite, Japanese car bosses and the governor of the Bank of England, lashing out at the “doom-mongers” and “naysayers”, the “international bankers” who would “talk our country down”, as though the strong fundamentals of “the world’s fifth-largest economy” that you promised would power us easily through are now candles in the wind, snuffable by a handful of weedy newspaper columnists . . . blaming everyone and everything but your own lack of an agreed plan, is futile. Yes, we Remainers lost the referendum. Yes, we messed up the campaign. Yes, we failed to understand public discontent. Yes, we concede that you are now the pilots. The initiative is yours. We await your proposals and we accept your right — even (as I have written) your duty — to proceed with them. But we want to know what they are. How do you plan to make this thing work? Michael Gove began his column with three short sentences: “Take. Back. Control.” I can reply with one: “How?” Or perhaps in the same vein: “What. Are. You. Going. To. Do?” We ask because the suspicion grows that none of you has the foggiest. And if that’s true then you have betrayed the trust of 17 million people who thought you knew. Before the referendum you assumed the mantle of “us” in a revolt against “them” and profited mightily from that assumption. But now you’re in charge. You’re not Us any more: you’re Them, the new Establishment, the powers that be. You are the experts we were enjoined to scorn. So scream — because the people’s anger will be terrible. Terror groups seek weapons to stage Paris-style atrocity ESTELLE SHIRBON/REUTERS Terrorists have tried to acquire mass casualty weapons to carry out Paris-style atrocities in half of the recent plots foiled by counterterrorism police. Mark Rowley, the national lead for counter terrorism policing, said yesterday that five of ten plots uncovered in the past two years involved attempts to obtain explosives or firearms. The terrorists were thwarted because of tight gun laws and the protection afforded by being an island, he said. Mr Rowley was speaking at the launch of a public appeal, in conjunction with the National Crime Agency, to try to stop both illegal and legal weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. Concerns have been heightened amid a record level of gun seizures in London and similar spikes across a number of cities. Mr Rowley and Lynne Owens, the agency’s director-general, called for people to tip off the authorities if they knew someone trading illegal weapons. They also want information on anyone who is “cavalier” about the way they store legally owned weapons, because 800 legitimate firearms go missing every year. There are additional concerns about the 750 armed criminal gangs who might be persuaded to supply firearms to terrorists if they were the highest bidder. Mr Rowley said: “You’ve got some very bright, determined, clear-thinking people who buy into and fully commit and are drivers of Daesh [Islamic State] propaganda and terrorism, and then you do get gang members, criminals, people who are already angry, difficult people causing problems in communities who perhaps get given a more clear purpose for their violence by a terrorist ideology, whether they pick that up on the streets or in prison. “Those gang criminality links are an issue that concerns us and we have seen evidence of it potentially linking firearms into terrorism.” Ms Owens said that disrupting the supply of guns has “never been a more significant priority” and expressed concerns about terrorists using the “dark web” to secure arms, “Currently we believe we hold an advantage,” she said. “There is low availability of illegal firearms in the UK compared with European and international partners but it is not an advantage that we take for granted, and to maintain that advantage we must not stand still.” There are thought to be thousands of illegal guns in circulation in Britain. Last year the NCA sent 884 weapons to the National Ballistics Intelligence Service for forensic analysis. Ms Owens warned that weapons smuggled through east Europe still presented a significant threat. “Criminal networks, who think nothing about who they sell firearms to, present a significant route by which extremist groups will try to access the sort of weapons used in recent attacks in Europe”.