Recipes for disaster: Brexit three and a plot at the Tate over tea
Exterior of Tate Britain | Image by: Yanice Idir / Alamy
4 min read
We met, my guest and I, in the atrium of Tate Britain.
There was a little nod of acknowledgement, but no more: one has to be careful with a clandestine rendezvous. We made our way downstairs to the café and looked about us. Was it safe?
We had come to recreate a series of meetings from early in the last decade that were, if not the most significant in British constitutional history, certainly some of the most self-important.
In 2011 and 2012 Dan Hannan, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless held regular meetings here to discuss how to get Britain out of the European Union. Carswell explained the location to Tim Shipman: “Dan suggested it on the grounds that no MP or journalist would have the aesthetic inclination to ever pop into an art gallery in the afternoon. Not once were we ever disturbed.”
How the three of them laughed at the philistinism of people who had jobs to do in the afternoon! Though, of course, had any of them actually had to work for a living, they might have been exposed to the kind of cruel realities that made Brexit so much trickier than it must have seemed to three chaps pottering about in an art gallery.
The queueing system in the Tate café is complicated, involving telling someone what you want, going somewhere else to pay for it, and then returning to the first person you spoke to, who will hand it over as the spirit moves them. It’s possible that in 2012, the Tate Brexiteers blamed this inefficiency on Brussels red tape, but the system has survived Britain’s independence from Brussels. We order slow-cooked pork in toasted focaccia, and after a few minutes of confusion, it is handed to us. We find a table at the edge of the café.
The meal is delicious, the pork soft and moist, its juices soaking into the warm bread. I resolve to come here more often, then remember that Tate Britain is just a little bit too far a walk from Parliament for a busy person. Looking around us, the place is filled with folk who seem to be enjoying some triple-locked source of income.
Carswell, Hannan and Reckless seemed convinced that the sight of the three of them drinking tea together would have been a major story, leading The Sunday Times and causing alarm in world capitals.
Tate Britain cafe | Image by: Alan Hall Photo / Stockimo / Alamy
In fact, of course, two Eurosceptic backbenchers could have met up with a Eurosceptic MEP anywhere they liked, and no one would have cared. Indeed, had they camped in Portcullis House under a banner that read, “WE ARE PLOTTING TO LEAVE THE EU,” it would hardly have moved anyone’s eyebrows. If anyone in SW1 gave any thought to any of them in 2012, it would have been assumed that this was what they were doing. It’s not as though they had a second topic of conversation.
But it’s tempting when something big happens – a bomb going off, or a country deciding to sabotage its trading relationship with its neighbours – to assume that great effects imply great causes, to seek the secret meetings in glamorous locations where plots were hatched.
And it’s equally tempting for people who believe themselves to be working on a revolution to imagine that everyone is watching them; that at any moment Shipman is going to crash through the windows and reveal what they’re up to.
The reality is that those of us cursed to spend our afternoons sitting at desks might wish that in any of those meetings about securing and winning a referendum, the lads had given 10 minutes’ thought to what would happen the next day.
