May’s imaginary NHS dividend is farcical – Brexit has broken the Tories

There’s no more money. That was the essence of the lecture the cabinet got on Monday, eight years after Labour’s Liam Byrne left a note for the incoming Conservative government saying much the same thing: the cupboard is bare, so forget it. This time the chancellor, Philip Hammond, was presumably firing a warning shot over cabinet ministers tempted to pull the same trick as Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, widely suspected of having threatened to resign if the NHS didn’t get its cash, but it could also be read as a howl of frustration at the extent to which Brexit has broken the Tories.

For a Conservative chancellor to rip up manifesto tax pledges made only a year ago is the equivalent of setting fire to your hair in public; Tory voters don’t necessarily expect generosity but they expect financial competence, and they hate surprises. Yet that is what Hammond will surely now have to deliver to fund the NHS’s birthday present, and given the looming crises in housing and criminal justice, it may not be the last time he does it.

Magic beans would be a more reliable source of funding for public services than the much-hyped “Brexit dividend”, given the official forecast is for Brexit to weaken the public finances by £15bn a year, rather than grow them, and the £9bn we nominally save by leaving was already mostly earmarked for other things. But still, cabinet remainers are obliged to pretend in public that Santa is real, because to do otherwise would embarrass those charlatans who won a referendum partly by pretending otherwise.

So we’re left with the farcical spectacle of fiscally responsible Tories – the ones who did warn upfront against leaving the EU – having to go against all their instincts to spare the blushes of the financially reckless, who made promises with money they should have known they wouldn’t have. Boris Johnson was apparently absent from Monday’s cabinet, by the way. But you probably guessed that.

To recognise all this is not to be churlish about the promised £20bn itself. It’s not enough (it’s never enough), and it doesn’t help social care or public health, but it’s not nothing, either. It won’t transform the NHS for the better but should stop it getting immeasurably worse; people on waiting lists will be treated a bit faster than they would otherwise have been; they won’t wait on trolleys this winter quite as long as they otherwise might; and some nurses teetering on the brink of resignation after not having had a pay rise since forever might stay. It’s staving off decline rather than solving the problem, but lives will be eased, lengthened or even saved as a result.

The one grimly cheering aspect of the political mess, meanwhile, is that rightwing Tory MPs will have to shut up and play along with the sort of classic tax-and-spend policy they’d once have agreed to only over their dead bodies. It’s that or admit their precious Brexit dividend is a mirage, and higher taxes are the only way out of a mess they have themselves created.

But none of that obscures the fact that Theresa May can’t say where the NHS money is coming from, still less where she’ll get the money likely to be needed further down the line for other crumbling public services. She can’t say both because she doesn’t yet know (the precise mechanism for raising much of it is reportedly yet to be agreed), and because being explicit about the difficulties would require admitting that the Brexit dividend doesn’t really exist.

This is a truth so unbearable to leavers, who won partly by claiming otherwise, that it can’t be voiced in public. (Or at least, not ahead of this Wednesday’s big Commons vote.) So she’s forced to grit her teeth and pretend that yes, this is the windfall Vote Leave promised on their rotten bus – jolly well done them – while knowing perfectly well that Brexiters’ chief legacy is to starve the nation of cash just as the taps most need to be turned on after years of austerity.

The Tories have spent decades attacking uncosted spending promises, warning that if opposing parties can’t say where the money’s coming from then either they’re hiding something or you can’t count on it actually happening. Fair enough, but they can hardly claim otherwise now they’re the ones shaking the magic money tree. And thus is everyone in this sorry saga hoist by their own petard – except, of course, those who got us into this mess in the first place.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist