Brexit is the monster under the bed Liz Truss is desperately trying to ignore
There is a book that foresaw with precision this summer’s Conservative leadership contest, although it was first published in 1980. It is a thin volume about denial and negligence, making its point with few words and colourful illustrations. It is called Not now, Bernard by David McKee.
The titular hero is a boy who tries to alert his parents to the presence of a child-eating monster in the garden. They are busy with other things. “Not now, Bernard,” says the father, striking his own hand with a hammer. “Not now, Bernard,” says the mother, watering a plant.
The monster eats the boy.
The next resident of 10 Downing Street will find the garden crawling with monstrous economic and political menaces. A chorus of Bernards is raising the alarm. Economists, MPs, former Tory ministers, charities, trade unions, businesses, local councils – all can hear rustling in the bushes where a beastly crisis lurks, ready to savage the new prime minister.
Anyone who pays an energy bill and does a weekly shop can feel the claws of a budget squeeze closing around the nation’s windpipe. There’s an ogre in the health service. “Not now, Bernard,” says Rishi Sunak. There’s a fiend in the financial outlook. “Not now, Bernard,” says Liz Truss. There are devils in your policy details. “Not now, Bernard!”
Then there is that other monster, the one that has become such a fixture in the garden that even the opposition seems not to notice it any more. Can we talk about Brexit? Not now, Bernard!
Britain’s self-exclusion from continental markets is not the biggest cause of present economic pain but it will be hard to imagine remedies in the absence of any rational audit of that decision or any reexamination of the ideological fixations that provoked it. But for
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