What just happened
- Fighting between armed factions in Sudan killed nearly 100 civilians and brought the country to the brink of civil war (more below).
- Four people died in a mass shooting at a 16th birthday party in Alabama.
- Phantom of the Opera ended a record-breaking 35-year run on Broadway.
The band of Brexiteers known as the European Research Group was once the most consequential faction in the UK’s Conservative party. They played a key role in bringing down former prime minister Theresa May and bringing in her replacement, Boris Johnson.
So what? Last month Johnson and the ERG seemed to be mustering for another assault, but their rebellion fizzled. There are caveats (see below) but the signs are that Johnson’s leadership ambitions and the ERG’s authority have been all but killed off. If so, history may record the spring of 2023 as the season the Brexit fever broke at last.
Compare and contrast
- January 2019: 118 Conservative MPs vote against May’s Brexit deal, resulting in the largest-ever defeat of a Tory prime minister.
- March 2023: only 22 Tories oppose Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework, designed to ease trade restrictions across the Irish Sea and reboot the UK’s relationship with Europe. That’s fewer even than the ERG’s core “Spartan” group, which held out to the bitter end of May’s premiership.
On the same day that Johnson squirmed in front of parliament’s privileges committee last month, Sunak’s deal sailed through the Commons – allowing him time to enjoy a game of cricket with England’s T20 team.
Three crucial facts help to explain the change:
- Thanks to Sunak’s inherited 66-seat majority, and Labour support in the Windsor Framework vote, parliamentary arithmetic is in his favour.
- MPs are fed up with talking about Brexit, not least because polls show its political salience is fading – and the next general election is looming.
- Many ex-ERG personalities are now ministers, meaning they are selling the Windsor deal rather than fighting it.
Of these, none is as important as Steve Baker. He was the central organising force back in the ERG’s heyday, utilising WhatsApp to direct the eurosceptics.
Now Baker is a Northern Ireland minister. He praised Sunak’s fudge and angered his own followers by warning that Johnson risked turning himself into a “pound shop Nigel Farage”.
A row on WhatsApp, branded “childish” and “petulant” by ERG sources, cemented that division – but not before Baker disbanded the very forum he had created.
ERG at sea. ERG loyalists insist it still has a part to play in British politics. “Just because you don’t hear much from the ERG and ERG members it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve gone away,” David Jones, deputy chair of the group, tells Tortoise. “As they say in the Navy, the submarine remains at sea.”
Others disagree. One former Vote Leave campaign member said: “The ERG is dead, dead, dead. Some people will say it was dead already but I think the Windsor Framework put the final nail in the coffin.”
Legacy. There is consensus on one thing: the ERG has left an indelible mark. Copycats like the Northern Research Group, the Common Sense Group and the Conservative Growth Group have sprung up looking to emulate the power and profile the ERG once enjoyed. None has come close to succeeding – yet.
Succession. It’s worth watching a new umbrella initiative calling itself the Five Families. As reported in this week’s Slow Newscast, it’s a new, ad hoc coalition bringing together the Tories’ rightwing factions and hoping to apply pressure on issues ranging from small boat migration and the culture wars to cutting taxes and levelling up.
Work is afoot among the families to see where their policy Venn diagram overlaps. Sunak has already changed tack on planning reform and immigration to head off potential rebellions. If the five become an organised unit, there’s every chance they could force his hand on other issues.
The ERG might be dead, but its ghost looms large.
Fox settles?
Is Rupert Murdoch about to settle out of court to avoid the humiliation of a trial that would lay bare propagandising by Fox News? The Delaware Superior Court Judge presiding in the case of Fox v Dominion Voting Systems certainly had a busy Sunday. Late yesterday he postponed by a day the start of a trial at which jurors would hear how Fox executives allowed the broadcast of what they knew to be false claims (“really crazy stuff”, said Murdoch) that algorithmic voter fraud by Dominion machines rigged the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favour. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages but is said to have dropped a claim for $600 million in lost profits. That could put the parties in a mutually acceptable landing zone. Fox has money to burn but the reputational damage it has already suffered could be terminal.
Musk’s rocket
The giant steel Starship rocket mounted on a SpaceX super-heavy booster on the Texas Gulf coast may well crash and burn when launched today, or later if its first launch window is missed. Elon Musk gives it a 50 per cent chance of performing as planned in this first launch as part of the monster launch package designed to take astronauts to the moon and Mars. The spacecraft alone, without the booster, failed multiple times before finally nailing its first safe landing in May 2021 – but the fact that a landing is even contemplated says much about the widening gulf of ambition between SpaceX and Nasa, which gave up reusing spacecraft when it pensioned off the Shuttle. Nasa’s plan A is to use the Starship to take its Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface – and it has no plan B.
