269. Brexit

In 2015, Cameron returned to office with a majority of his own even if it wasn’t particularly huge. At least it meant he no longer needed to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems, who’d taken a terrible beating. Labour too had done badly, losing further parliamentary seats.

Cameron’s government still had to deal with two foreign wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, though both now involved far smaller numbers of troops, even if the emergence of ISIS in the Middle East might mean more might have to be sent.

A far more immediate problem was the conflict within the Conservative Party, where Eurosceptics were beginning to become increasingly powerful. That was made worse by the rise of the harder right UKIP, actively campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, in what would come to be known as Brexit. To try to silence his critics, Cameron pledged before the 2015 election to hold another referendum on EU membership, confident that it would vote to stay in.

He was mistaken. A mixture of generalised anger against government leading to a desire to cast a protest vote, together with concerns over poor economic conditions for which immigration was blamed by many, much of it from EU countries, produced a narrow majority in favour of Brexit. Cameron resigned as Prime Minister. Theresa May took over, Britain’s second woman in the post.

Her challenge was to negotiate the Brexit terms with the EU. She tried to strengthen her position by holding another election in 2017 but, rather like the EU referendum, it didn’t produce the desired result. She lost seats and her majority.

She struggled on for another couple of years but eventually gave up and resigned.

It was the dawning of the time of Boris Johnson – the theme for next episode.

Illustration: Boris Johnson by the Brexit campaign bus with its false claim that leaving the EU could save Britain £350 million a week for the NHS. Photo from the Irish Times

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License