The Independent Group shows UK politics isn’t about left vs right, it’s a battle of enablers, careerists and zealots

You’ll often see people suggesting that politics today is not so much divided by left and right as it is between reasonable and crazy, the latter frequently seasoned with a pinch of good old-fashioned nastiness.

The launch of the Independent Group by people from group one, as a reaction to both main parties becoming dominated to a greater or lesser extent by group two has thrown that into sharp relief.

The Independent Group’s formation led no less than former prime minister Sir John Major to sound the alarm. Major urged the members of group one who might be mulling joining it to instead stay in their parties and fight the extremists on the grounds that our democracy, with its first past the post electoral system, relies upon having two more or less moderate and electable main parties.

Neither of them are in that camp right now, drawing their support largely from their voters’ fears of the other lot rather than from an endorsement of their programmes. Major fears that we risk watching them drifting further off into la la land if and when the Independent Group is buttressed by more defections.

Other commentators have questioned whether they’re even capable of being salvaged.

They might both be right.

The binary division between “team crazy zealot” and “team reasonable” oversimplifies it, however, as binary divisions often do. There are, in reality, perhaps five main groups and at least some of our current politicians have their feet in more than one.

Group three is made up of the enablers; the people who facilitate the zealots, and kowtow to their demands to a greater or lesser extent. Chancellor Philip Hammond is a good example of one of these.

This morning, he told BBC Breakfast that “there may be an opportunity to bring a vote back to the House of Commons” on May’s Brexit deal by next week. Admitting that “the House of Commons knows what it is against” but “has struggled to come up with a clear message to the government about what it wants as a way forward to avoid that outcome”.

He is clearly aware of just how dismal the Brexit “deal” Theresa May has stuck limpet-like to is, and he’s even more cognisant of the damage that a no-deal Brexit will do. His department prepared the figures analysing the impact on UK plc of both, after all.

But as his boss takes the nation ever closer to the iceberg, he’s done little more than raise the odd disapproving eyebrow in the direction of the crazies around him, at least in public.

If the Treasury is, as Boris Johnson once claimed, the “heart of Remain”, it is beating with about the same power mine was able to muster when I was in an induced coma after being run over by a truck.

It’s telling that when Matthew D’Ancona, the Conservative writer and thinker, and a determined occupant of Camp Reasonable, singled out “a group of decent, patriotic ministers” in cabinet who are well aware of the sticky situation Britain faces, he noted that Hammond was in it only “on a good day”.

You could make the case that Sir Keir Starmer occupies a similar equivocal position in Labour.

He’s been quite a bit more feisty than Hammond has and his supporters would tell you he’s playing a key role in inching Labour to where it ought to be were it interested in providing an effective opposition, and where its members overwhelmingly want it to be – which is backing a Final Say referendum.

But he’s still basically toeing the line, and we may get to the point where his doing that becomes counterproductive, serving to actively enable Jeremy Corbyn’s cynical ploy of backing a Brexit that will wreak untold damage upon the working people Labour is supposed to care about, without having any of the mud stick to him.

Cynical and stupid. Because that mud will stick, as another shadow cabinet member, Clive Lewis, recently made clear.

Like Hammond, Starmer is at some point going to have to make a choice. Coming down on the wrong side of it will mark him out as an enabler and leave him just as covered in brown goo as Corbyn.

Camp four is made up of head-in-the-sanders; people who are deliberately and wilfully blind to ugliness in their midst.

There are some who would put May in that group, given the way she has persistently visited Crazytown with the express aim of courting the no-dealers in the European Research Group, while at the same time refusing to even meet with the three camp one Tory defectors – Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston – prior to their jumping ship for the Independent Group.

However, there is another theory that no deal has become her default option, which would make her Crazytown’s mayor.

There are a lot of sheep in this group too. It’s often said that Labour whipping in favour of a Final Say vote would change the parliamentary arithmetic. Given the crisis the country faces, that shouldn’t be necessary but the bleating masses on the Labour side make it so.

In camp five are the cynical careerists, the people who are equally as aware of the cancers in their parties as the enablers, but who have put climbing the greasy poll above all else.

If they have only ruins to rule, so be it, just as long as they rule.

Step forward Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt as the best examples on the government benches.

Johnson fits in this group too. On the Labour side, you could make a case for Emily Thornberry. This lot might be even worse than the crazies who are at least honest about their ideological commitments.

Groups three, four and five are making life extraordinarily difficult for the reasonable, moderate, and sensible politicians in group one, the people whom any country needs to succeed.

And it’s thanks to them that the choice facing group one – join the Independent Group or follow Major’s advice – is one Hobson would recognise.