Dominic Grieve interview: 'The next six months are crucial. We are running out of time'

Were it not for an unintended political earthquake in the summer of 2016, Dominic Grieve might well have retired a mere former Attorney General. That he has now added such further sobriquets as “traitor” and “mutineer” has surprised him as much as anyone.

It was the passing of Grieve’s amendment in the House of Commons, seeking to give Parliament a meaningful vote on the terms of any deal with the European Union, that caused him and 10 rebellious Conservative colleagues to be branded “traitors” on the front of the Daily Mail, a month after The Telegraph had called 15 of them mutineers.

If there is indeed a Tory HMS Bounty, many see Grieve as Fletcher Christian.

“I’d considered myself a Eurosceptic,” he says, over a cup of tea outside his office. “I never imagined that this is what would prompt me to be so outspoken. It’s not from any wilful decision of my own. But I do see this as a defining moment in modern British history. We are facing a political crisis. It is completely unresolved, and I can’t predict how it is likely to be resolved.”

He is emphatically not retired. Instead, at 61 years of age, David Cameron’s Attorney General is in the middle of what he agrees is the fight of his political life. “If you care about the future of your country, it’s not a very good moment to bail out of politics,” he says. Like Brexit, it’s clear Grieve will be here for the long term, whatever that might mean, but it is the very immediate future that concerns him most.

“The six months we have between now and the autumn are so important,” he says. “It is going to be decision time. And decision time in the sense of what happens in the next six months being a final decision. If people do want to change their mind, and they could if they wanted to, the time is now. It cannot be after March 29th 2019, and frankly it cannot be after the end of the autumn of this year.”

Of course, people in a democracy are free to change their minds, and Grieve is particularly dismissive of people who have “used the referendum as a tool to bully people. To say to them, ‘You must change your mind about whether you think leaving the EU is a good idea.’”

But even if the public were to change its mind, or has changed its mind already, there is nevertheless no obvious method through which that change of mind can be expressed before the UK leaves the EU in March of next year, a moment Grieve describes as the “irrevocable act”.

“I’m not calling for a second referendum,” he says, “But we should not exclude the possibility that people’s opinion may change. And to start from an opinion on an issue that was expressed 18 months ago, where people are bound to have had their opinion influenced since, we must be very careful to listen about what it is they want.”

The consequences of not doing so could not be more serious, for both the Conservative Party and the country. Grieve, a barrister turned Conservative MP and the son of a barrister turned Conservative MP, is in a crowded field, arguably the party’s current grand master for succinctly and ever so matter of factly stating almost to the point of understatement the extraordinary gravity of the situation we are all in.

“It is the most extraordinary conundrum,” he says. “We have an instruction from the electorate, by a small but significant majority, to do something that many of us [in Parliament] think is going to be very hard to achieve without serious damage to the wellbeing of every citizen in this country. It is an ethical conundrum and it is a practical conundrum.”

And it is a conundrum to which a large number of his MP colleagues are reaching for the easy answer, which is not the answer.

“No, the party doesn’t need a new leader,” he says very clearly. “There is no evidence a new leader would do better than the Prime Minister at leading the party, and indeed, in view of the obvious fact that the party remains deeply divided over the way in which Brexit needs to be carried out I think trying to change the leadership of the party would be a great mistake.”

What is needed, and in a hurry, is willingness to compromise.

“People [in the party] have to be willing to be pragmatic, to apply common sense, to have a willingness to compromise with each other. Now I’m not aiming that barb at a particular group, it has to apply to all of us. There has to be willingness to compromise. If people are so ideologically committed to particular models that Brexit has got to fulfil, it is going to be very difficult to have a dialogue within the party that will deliver a coherent policy.”

Grieve has been an MP for 21 years, but politically active for almost all his adult life. Asked what motivated him to get into politics in the first place, Grieve recalls a relatively distant past with curious echoes of the present.

“In the 1970s I thought the country we were in was going down the plughole. We were in appalling social and political decline and I wanted to see it changed. The last 40 years in which I’ve been involved in politics has by and large been a period of remarkable success for the country,” he says.

“There are some problems that are very hard to solve, but this country is in a much better place than it was when I was at university. Some have benefited more than others, but the overall balance sheet has I think been positive, which makes it all the more remarkable that we should be jeopardising this in a very difficult and dangerous world, and it is getting more dangerous very quickly, and yet we are pursuing Brexit.”

And the risk is that Brexit is the catalyst for a rapid return to such times.

“At the moment we [the Conservatives] are greatly helped by the principal Opposition being all over the place. They don’t have a coherent policy on Brexit. They have, to my mind, seriously flawed economic policies that would take this country to economic ruin very quickly, and have been shown to do just that in recent history, in my lifetime. So the prospect of a Labour government fills me with gloom, especially one under its current leader, who is a Marxist, there’s no doubt about it, and he’s surrounded by a group of Marxists, who will wreck the economy of this country very quickly, Brexit or no Brexit.”

The terms of the Brexit debate have become increasingly technical. Canada plus, Norway minus. What will and won’t be included in any transition period. The risk, as Grieve sees it is not that some Brexit big bang arrives but instead “the big sleep”. Even if the next steps are the most urgent, the fight ahead is a long one.

“This transition will feel just like staying in the EU. People will wake up and feel like for all intents and purposes we’re still in the EU. But the irrevocable act will have taken place. We will be gone. We could no longer go back in without renegotiating an entry period, and the state of limbo will be coming to an end, and we will be moving in to a very different sort of relationship, so it will postpone difficult decisions. That is why I am so anxious about the discussions this autumn, because actually transition will lull people into a sense of false security, that they don’t have to make some important decisions about the future relationship. They absolutely do.”

Grieve is not the elder statesman of Remain, that role falls to Ken Clarke, and their views differ markedly too. “I’m a Eurosceptic,” says Grieve. “But I’ve never had any doubt about the massive balance of advantage of our membership. And that is about to be chucked out.”

So just how long could the struggle go on? Grieve says he doesn’t know, but reflects with a curious sense of both melancholy and determination on a career that in simpler times, would be over.

“To have spent 40 years in politics, 21 years in Parliament, eight years in government, either as a minister or supporting the government as a backbencher, and to find at the end of that process we are faced with a political crisis of this kind, which is essentially self-inflicted by a decision of our own electorate, it is quite depressing.

“But equally one’s got to accept that in politics one has to rise to the challenge. There is no point sitting around like the proverbial man of Cape Horn wishing you’d never been born. You’ve got to get on with what you’ve been offered.”

Which is, of course, precisely what he intends to do.