Now Damian Green is gone, prepare for a hard Brexit

Green's special status in the Cabinet was about more than his point of view on Europe – it was about the fact that he was always available to back the Prime Minister in whatever untidy, messy mucked-around compromise she came up with

(PA)

There’s an old saying in politics that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up” that finishes off political careers. A poignant one too, for Damian Green and his old friend Theresa May. Obviously I’m touched that their acquaintanceship goes back nearly 40 years to their time at Oxford together (especially because the university, it has to be said, can also incubate life-long hatred) but what really matters now is how poignant that saying is for the country. The fact is that it makes hard Brexit, for good or ill, just a little more likely.

For Green's special status in the Cabinet was about more than his point of view on Europe – a long time Europhile who must have found the views of some of his “colleagues” bonkers – it was about the fact that he was always available to back the Prime Minister in whatever untidy, messy mucked-around compromise she came up with.

If the Chancellor or the Home Secretary backed her, then the position would be viewed with suspicion by the hard Brexiters; if her point of view was endorsed by Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, then the opposite. She has, in other words, lost her ability to impose a compromise – any compromise – on her fractious Cabinet.

In such circumstances politics will turn binary, and, given that the chances of staying on or a final referendum are still less than of leaving, a hard Brexit is a more inevitable outcome than it might otherwise have been if the Green office computer hadn't had some dodgy thumbnails on it or hands hadn’t once brushed across lower limbs.

You can argue it is a tragedy that the economic destiny of a great nation, its living standards and millions of jobs can be determined by such things as a few “misleading and inaccurate” statements, and a tendency for middle aged randiness. Like the butterfly’s wing in the Amazon eventually leading to a monsoon in the Philippines, a brush of a finger below a lunch table is going to wreck one of the largest economies in the world.

I do wonder what they make of this over in, say, Paris, Rome, Moscow or Washington. But there we are.

With Green gone the Eurosceptic fundamentalists have a more dominant position in the Cabinet and on the various cabinet sub-committees that are now going to be engaged in endless ruminations about their vision for a “Global Britain”. They are joined by those with the zeal of the converted, such as Jeremy Hunt, whose stock has certainly risen over the years he has looked after the NHS for the Conservatives, the job from hell.

The voices in favour of a “soft “Brexit – Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd – are formidable, but the balance has tipped away from them. Who knows, in fact, what May’s instincts really are, beyond a visible distaste for the European Court of Justice (which, they say, she might have got muddled up with the European Court of Human Rights, which caused her so much bother as Home Secretary)?

As the civil servants draft and redraft whatever summings-up May can manage in her cabinet and its sub committees, the nuances and sub-clauses and conditions will inevitably take on a more Eurosceptic tone. Given that Michel Barnier also seems to be doing his best to push Britain into a hard Brexit, by ruling out any kind of “bespoke” deal that May could possibly broker in her party and Cabinet, that is indeed the door whence we are headed.

With Green gone, so the hopes of some sort of softer Brexit begin to evaporate.

You don’t have to have a “First Secretary of State” or a “Deputy Prime Minister”, de facto or de jure, to run the country. But it can help.

Lots of prime ministers have managed happily without one. They usually arise because of special circumstances – Nick Clegg in the Con-Lib Dem Coalition; John Major appointing Michael Heseltine, complete with a an office the side of a tennis court, when he was so weak he would have given anything to hanging onto the premiership.

Often it is about political balance. Margaret Thatcher, on the libertarian right of her party, famously said “every prime minister needs a Willie” (she had no sense of humour, so the double entendre was accidental), referring to the “wet” Deputy Prime Minister of the day, Willie Whitelaw.

Tony Blair had John Prescott as Old Labour counterweight to New Labour. The thing about all off these figures was their usually strong and harmonious relationship with the man or woman in Number 10; differences were respectfully addressed, advice taken, compromises agreed.

Sometimes, and further back in history, are examples of prime ministers appointing deputies, de facto or de jure, who were given the role as a consolation prize, and whose resentments never soothed (Harold Wilson and George Brown in the 1960s; Harold Macmillan and RA Butler in the years before, for those that care, and also Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, where the eventual hostility caused her downfall).

For Theresa May it is hard to see anyone in the Cabinet, or outside it, who could be trusted in that fashion, not least because she herself finds it difficult to trust anyone, or so they say.

As she looks around at the tarantulas, vipers and sharks in human form sitting around the Cabinet room I’m quite sure she’s right not to trust any of them. Michael Gove? Boris Johnson? Andrea Leadsome?

The Tory leadership election last year revealed, if further proof were needed, just what a back-stabbing me-before-party-before-country-before-morals gang we have ruling the UK. She’s on her own, and soon Britain will be too.