The British Conservatives have been the unapologetic defender of capitalist interests in the United Kingdom for the last century. But as their party leads Britain into a new era after its departure from the European Union, its relationship with big business appears more strained than ever before. As the historian David Edgerton argued last October, “Brexit is the political project of the hard right within the Conservative Party, and not its capitalist backers,” most of whom wanted the softest Brexit deal available if the project couldn’t be stopped altogether. Boris Johnson has dragged them into a place few could have imagined occupying a few years ago, even after the Leave vote of June 2016.

The Tory Chancellor Sajid Javid had a blunt message last month for readers of the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of Britain’s Europhile bourgeoisie: “There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule-taker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union — and we will do this by the end of the year.” British capital could like it or lump it as far as he was concerned: “There will be an impact on business one way or the other; some will benefit, some won’t.” Javid had no sympathy for any firms that found themselves in the latter category: “We’re also talking about companies that have known since 2016 that we are leaving the EU. Admittedly, they didn’t know the exact terms.”

That was quite an understatement: almost everything about the Brexit process seemed to be up for grabs until the general election of December 2019 gave a decisive majority to Boris Johnson’s hard-Brexit platform. The reaction from the Financial Times’s readership was incredulous, as the letters page made clear (“It is the government that has failed to prepare,” “What were companies supposed to be ‘preparing’ for?,” and the pithy “What’s Javid smoking?”).