It is easy to overlook the fact that something larger is at stake amid the Conservative party’s midsummer mayhem. Something larger, for sure, than Boris Johnson’s petulance or Nadine Dorries’ attention-seeking. Something affecting us all, not just the Tory party. Something that underlies everything else about current British politics and will outlast the current excitement. That something is the future of Brexit.
Yes, Johnson’s latest self-centred lord-of-misrule melodrama is remarkable even by his own standards. Yes, Dorries’ latest career move, going postal in parliament, on the run from her own resignation, is providing a suitably disturbing coda to an already dauntingly disturbing political career. And, yes, Rishi Sunak’s laboriously constructed authority as prime minister is again under threat from the intemperate disloyalty that has become the default setting of a section of the Tory party.
