Anna Soubry, the vocally pro-Remain Conservative MP, has been branded as ‘ridiculous’ by former Conservative chancellor and prominent Leave campaigner, Lord Lamont.
Speaking to the BBC he said ‘I don’t want to be rude about Anna Soubry, but I think she does sometimes tend to go over the top’. If we’re going to be all ‘people in glass houses…’ about this, some people might argue that the Leave campaign’s hysteria-inducing hyperbole of a campaign for Brexit was a little ‘over the top’.
Why did Lord Lamont call Soubry ‘ridiculous’? It’s all because she has said that she will ‘quit the Conservative Party’ if it is ‘taken over’ by hardline Eurosceptics like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. She called on the Prime Minister, Theresa May, to ‘stand up to’ 35 ‘hard ideological Brexiteers’ including Johnson and Mogg.
Speaking to Newsnight, she said ‘they are not the Tory party I joined 40 years ago and it is about time Theresa May stood up to them and slung ‘em out. They have taken down Major, the took down Cameron, two great leaders neither of whom stood up to them.’
Soubry made it clear that she will quit if May doesn’t challenge Brexiteers, saying ‘if it comes to it I am not going to stay in a part which has been taken over by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. They are not proper Conservatives. Unless Theresa stands up and sees off these people she is in real danger of losing huge swathes of not just the parliamentary party but the Conservative party.’
In particular, Soubry is concerned that softer suggestions as to how we might reframe our relationship with the European Union such as remaining in the single market and customs union or negotiating our membership of the European Free Trade Association have been completely mothballed because, as she sees it, the influence of Brexiteers within the party is too strong.
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There is something of a civil war going in within the Conservative Party. They are divided much in the same way our country is along narrow lines of those who want to leave the European Union and those who do not. With that in mind, Soubry’s position is surely far from ‘ridiculous’ as Lamont suggested. She has been making legitimate political arguments in line with the interests of those who did not vote for Brexit in the same way that Brexiteers say they represent the interests of those who voted in favour of Brexit.
Both Remainers and Leavers have, at times, been guilty of presenting dangerous dogma as fact. The cases for and against Brexit re far from closed, regardless of what it’s inevitability suggests. Lamont’s dismissal of Soubry as ‘ridiculous’ certainly feeds into that narrative. You could argue that both pro and anti-European Union political perspectives are valid but, Brexit aside, there are other reasons to exit a party which has Jacob Rees-Mogg as a member. Let’s not forget that he is more than a Brexiteer. Mogg has said he opposes abortion in all circumstances which must be an untenable position for someone in public office to hold in 2018. Abortion is legal, the debate is over.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.