Dear Jacob Rees-Mogg,
I have been worrying about the difficulties you face in your new departmental role as minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency. On the sidelines you have a job to do in what I called a new department. That is a bit of an exaggeration. I see the address and the telephone number are the same Cabinet Office occupied by David Frost, your predecessor.
You are, realistically, the fifth holder of that office in six years. David Davis was appointed by Theresa May to the Department for Exiting the European Union in 2016, followed by Dominic Raab and then Stephen Barclay before it was closed in 2020. It popped up again when Lord Frost was given the grand title of minister of state in the Cabinet Office with oversight of trade and cooperation agreement and withdrawal agreement. He packed it in at the end of last year, complaining to the prime minister about the direction of travel.
Now the prime minister has demonstrated great faith in you not only to conjure up the potential of Brexit but, at the same time, to improve government efficiency. I would quietly postpone this aspect of your title if I were you. The chancellor would make a bad enemy when you start poking about in the Treasury to try to find the millions lost to fraud. Perish the thought, but perhaps that’s why the prime minister gave you the title in the first place!
You are right about the need to secure cuts by controlling recruitment. Margaret Thatcher was so impressed by the way I did this that she asked me to present my methods to a special meeting of the cabinet. That proved disastrous when the great figures of the time were told by this young ex-businessman that they had to micromanage their departments.
The officials advising you won’t have changed much, and that seems to me to be your first problem. I served in different departments for 19 years. I well remember the first day in each new job. There were all those files bursting with outstanding jobs, with new proposals and with lists of manifesto commitments yet to be fulfilled. Sometimes I was even asked if I had any ideas of my own. It all added up to a formidable workload. You will want to be cautious. You are not the first to seek Brexit gold at the rainbow’s end. Theresa May rightly put Eurosceptic colleagues Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox into the top jobs. Davis resigned because May’s deal was no good. Fox said it was the only deal on offer. Johnson left both out of his government and was denounced publicly by Davis in the House of Commons in consequence.
Five years after the EU referendum, the baton has passed to you and your Cabinet Office team.
Your friends and your supporters in the media will have warned you about these officials. They are an inert, inactive blob, remoaners to every last man and woman, they will say. That is why you have been put in charge. Even a machine as excellent as a Rolls-Royce goes nowhere unless the driver chooses the direction and fills the tank.
That is why your appeal to the people themselves to fill this intellectual void – so eloquently expressed in the Sun – was so ingenious. I was at first a sceptic about this constitutional innovation in the democratic process, taking the rather elitist view that that was what ministers were for.
That is why I felt compelled to try to help. It is important that your invitation reaches the widest audience. You will not want to rely on a few cranks, or on a regurgitated splurge from Nigel Farage. You will want to protect your career from any such association.
So how can we help you to find out what people are really thinking and saying, and thus enable you to reverse the present polls, which reveal that a significant majority of people now think that Brexit is going badly?
A key target for your message must be the small entrepreneurs and the larger British companies, which you must show how to exploit the new commercial opportunities. You must not be put off by that cruel cartoon in the Financial Times that showed a microscope on your new desk through which you could find out what these are.
I am president of the European Movement, and as our contribution, we are going to provide you with a website that will collect the latest news and allow people to register their advice as you have requested. It is possible that you will not like everything they say, but that is an opportunity for you to use your formidable debating skills to rebut them.
You will not be surprised to learn that I was persuaded to make this helpful suggestion by the sort of comments I received in response to my article in the Guardian last month. One told me that Brexit had wrecked his wife’s UK export-to-Europe business.
Then there was the report in the Times of the latest survey by the British Chambers of Commerce into the views of its members. A thousand companies were asked to assess the results of Brexit for them; 320 complained of the disadvantages compared with only 59 who were positive. These are the foot soldiers upon whom you have to rely in your ambition to get this great public debate going. You may have noticed that two of your staunchest supporters, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, did not print the story at all. I suppose we can console ourselves with the thought that the privilege of a free society is the freedom not to publish what you don’t like.
The truth will out. What does it say so far? That the government’s Office for Budget Responsibility has said it expects Brexit to hit the economy twice as hard as the global pandemic.
That the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency says that “since the referendum in 2016, 316 companies have chosen the Netherlands because of Brexit”.
That the president of the National Farmers’ Union, Minette Batters, believes labour shortages related to the end of free movement without adequate replacement schemes led to “40,000 healthy pigs” being “culled and simply thrown away … an utter disgrace and a disaster for the pig industry”.
That the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations says it expects an enormous public relations campaign to portray the deal as a fabulous victory, but that it will inevitably be seen by the fishing industry as a defeat. That the Food and Drink Federation says sales to Europe fell 23.7% in nine months in 2021.
Nothing so reveals the reality of Brexit as the meeting of European leaders in Brussels, in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Our continent faces a threat as severe as anything since the end of the cold war. I am ashamed that the country that in my lifetime saved European democracy has now absented itself as others determine Europe’s response.
There will, Mr Rees-Mogg, be more councils covering the climate crisis, our environment, international crime, control of the internet. In every case we will be absent. That is what Brexit means.
Michael Heseltine is a former Conservative deputy prime minister
