When Boris Johnson announced that he would be supporting the campaign to Leave the EU in the referendum campaign of 2016, The Mumbler stated that in his humble opinion, Johnson had thought long and hard about what position to take. He had considered whether leaving or remaining would be in the national interests, before making a decision based upon the best interests of Boris Johnson.
It was clear from the outset that Johnson did not actually hold the opinions which he espoused in the campaign. He chose his position based upon a longer term strategic view, that the Leave campaign would not succeed in the referendum and he would go down as the plucky loser who gave it his best shot. He would then benefit from a popularity boost, similar to that garnered by Alex Salmond and SNP after their failed Independence Referendum. This would propel him to become Leader of the Conservative Party and ultimately Prime Minister when David Cameron handed over the keys to Number Ten.
His plan unravelled when Leave won the Referendum, David Cameron threw himself on his sword and Michael Gove stabbed him in the back. Rather than face a bitter fight for the leadership, followed by the difficulty in having to implement a policy in which he didn’t really believe, he took a back seat and chose to lick his wounds while Theresa May did the heavy lifting.
He was content to accept the honour of being Foreign Secretary under a Theresa May’s Prime Ministership. This was a role to which he was totally unsuited (ask the family of Nazinin Zahari-Ratcliffe), but kept him in the public eye and played to his vanities.
As Theresa May produced her plan for leaving the EU at her Chequers Meeting on 12th July 2018, Johnson was wrong footed by the resignation from the Cabinet of The Man Who Knew Too Little, former Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Fearing that Davis might take the mantle of Leader of the Leavers from him, Johnson was forced into a copycat resignation, citing disagreement with the plan, which he had endorsed only hours earlier. Changing his mind for his strategic long term advantage is one of his key characteristics.
When the time came and Boris and his ERG chums finally levered Theresa May tearfully out of Number Ten, he knew his time had come. From the start of the leadership race, he was out in front of all contenders and by refusing to allow his policies to be the subject of scrutiny, he avoided any slip ups and romped home on a promise of “Getting Brexit Done” and “leaving on 31st October”, “Do or Die”. His slogans rarely extend beyond three words, it appears.
It has now become clear though, that his plan for his Prime Ministership was not about “Getting Brexit Done” and this was simply a slogan to persuade the electorate of his Leaver credentials. His sole intention on becoming Prime Minister was to remain Prime Minister for as long as possible.
His strategy on becoming Prime Minister was not to “Get Brexit Done”, but to make sure that the next General Election was fought on the basis of Parliament versus The People, with King Boris leading the people against the democratically elected Parliamentarians. Every action he has taken has been aimed, not at resolving Brexit, but in antagonising Parliament, so that he could claim they were blocking him.
In his Leadership campaign, Johnson said that a new deal with the EU could be obtained in the short term by hard work and concentrated effort. On assuming the Prime Ministership at the end of July 2019, he then made little or no attempt to obtain such a deal. He eventually visited Paris and Berlin in late August to meet Emannuel Macron and Angela Merkel and promised that he would produce a mechanism to remove the Irish backstop whilst abiding by the terms of the Good Friday Agreement within 30 days. He did not meet with the Irish taoiseach to discuss issues until mid September.
This now appears to have been a deliberate strategy, to appear to be doing nothing in order to spook those Parliamentarians concerned that if there was no deal in the offing, the UK would leave the EU without a deal on 31st October 2019.
And it worked.
Whether any work was actually done to prepare the UK’s position is a moot point. If it was done, it was kept under wraps and not shared even with the UK’s Cabinet. After 6 weeks of serving as the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions under Johnson, Amber Rudd resigned from both the Cabinet and the Conservative whip, citing the lack of activity in securing a deal as her reasons.
Furthermore, at the same time Boris Johnson advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament for five weeks, the result of which would be to prevent Parliament having any opportunity to scrutinise the actions of the Government until the very final moment of the process. The prorogument was only partially successful, after Johnson’s advice to the Queen was deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court. But the actual outcome was to provoke Parliament into rushing through the Benn Act in the few days available to it before the unlawful closure of Parliament.
Johnson has portrayed the Benn Act as an act of surrender, but it now appears that he deliberately herded the Parliamentarians into a position where the Benn Act was the only option left available to them. Whilst Johnson has expressed his total opposition to the Benn Act and repeatedly stated that he would not send the letter the Act might require, it appears to The Mumbler that he deliberately played Parliament into passing the Act, simply so he could oppose it.
To make matters worse, Johnson withdrew the Parliamentary whip from any Conservative MP who had voted against the Government over this matter. This had the effect of shredding the Government’s tiny majority created by its confidence and supply arrangements with the DUP. It gave the rebel Conservative MPs free reign to oppose the Government if they wished, making the Government’s position even more difficult. It strengthened the hand of those in Parliament opposed to the Government’s approach and made the Government seem even more at odds with Parliament. This wasn’t done unintentionally.
Once his unlawful advice on the proroguing of Parliament had been eventually been overturned he produced the plan which he had promised Angela Merkel. It wasn’t much of a plan, to be frank and its reliance upon technology that hasn’t yet been produced gives no explanation as to why it was not brandished in the timescales promised to Angela Merkel. His proposal to have no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, by instead having two borders five miles either side of the border and a no-man’s land of ten miles was laughable in its feebleness. It would have been difficult for him to produce a plan less likely to be accepted by the EU. This further increased the view of Parliamentarians that he had no real appetite for a deal and his proposed deal was simply a gesture. A deal offered up to be rejected. And further evidence if the Parliamentarians needed it, that Johnson was intent on taking the UK out of the EU without a deal.
Then the enigma of the meeting with Leo Varadkar in Cheshire, where an elusive “pathway to a deal” was declared. The “pathway” (if it can be described as that) lead to a surprising outcome. Normally in a negotiation, both parties open with their inititial position, knowing them unlikely to be accepted by the other party and by a series of compromises on both sides end up with an agreed position in the middle ground that both parties can accept.
The deal when announced was no middle ground. Johnson’s proposal of two borders ten miles apart was totally shredded and replaced with a border in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.
This was a position that Theresa May had rejected as totally unacceptable. It was a position that Johnson himself had said no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
The brilliance of the Good Friday Agreement lies in its allowing Northern Ireland to be considered to be both part of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, depending upon the will of the person making the consideration. The proposal under this deal is that Northern Ireland is nominally within the United Kingdom, but practically part of the EU Customs Union and the Single Market.
The deal is an acknowledgement that a Brexit involving the UK leaving both the Customs Union and the Single Market, and the Good Friday Agreement are mutually incompatible. In order to facilitate such a Brexit, Johnson has had to drive a huge wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, in effect leaving Northern Ireland subject to the EU rules.
Such a deal was bound to be problematic for the DUP. Having sided with the ERG of the Tory Party in claiming that even a temporary membership of the Customs Union and Single Market was not Brexit, they were unlikely to accept that a nominal withdrawal but practical continuance in both would be acceptable. The position of the ERG had become that whilst the UK’s retention of Customs Union and Single market membership was unacceptable, they would accept Northern Ireland’s retention if it meant that England Scotland and Wales could leave. It has a distinct whiff of their sacrificing their principles as they might apply in Northern Ireland in order to achieve them on the mainland.
The crunch day, we were told, was last Saturday, when the Commons would sit on a Saturday for the first time in over 30 years to consider the momentous implications of the proposed deal. It was the only chance Parliament had to agree the deal and so prevent Benn Act taking effect. But then the Letwin amendment was passed and Johnson decided that Parliament would not consider the deal.
Let’s just think about that for a moment. The implications were so momentous and time was of such great essence that Parliament sat on a Saturday. And then at the last moment, the Prime Minister decided that Parliament would not debate the deal after all. As a result the Benn Act came into play and the Prime Minister was required to send the letter that he had denied he would ever send.
The Prime Minister provoked Parliament into the Benn Act and then withdrew the proposed deal from Parliamentary debate, ensuring that the actions of the Act took place. But the blame for this he tried to place entirely at the feet of a Parliament that was failing to implement the will of the people.
When the deal came back to Parliament at the start of this week, it managed to pass through its second reading. There were ten days left for the bill to pass through all its levels of scrutiny, amendment and debate for it to be agreed before 31st October and the UK to leave the EU by the deadline imposed on himself by the Prime Minister.
So to facilitate this, the Prime Minister chose to instruct Parliament that they had only three days to undertake the scrutiny of the bill. Three days to scrutinise a deal that not only took the UK out of the EU, but also required a significant loosening of ties of union between Northern Ireland and the rest of the Kingdom. Parliament, not surprisingly rejected this entirely arbitrary shortened period of scrutiny. It wanted the maximum period available to scrutinise the deal and was prepared to delay Brexit to ensure the deal was acceptable.
Johnson in response, paused the bill, as he had to do to offer another timetable. But no further timetable has been forthcoming. It is as clear a message as it was possible to give, that the Prime Minister is more interested in being seen to be in confrontation with Parliament, than he is in passing his bill.
His latest offer, is that he will allow longer scrutiny of the bill, but only if Parliament agrees to a General Election on 12th December. This is another offer like his “two-borders instead of one” offer to the EU. It is offered knowing that it will be rejected. Rejection will doubtless lead to his claiming once again that it Parliament is frustrating him.
All this makes clear his strategy, almost certainly the plan of Dominic Cummings. It is not “get Brexit done”. It is not “do or die”. It is instead do everything possible to try to put Parliament on the back foot so that he can claim to be on the side of people versus the Parliament. It is to orchestrate unnecessary confrontations with Parliament, so that he can throw up his hands to the gallery and claim to be facing intransigence. He is avoiding getting Brexit done in order to continue these confrontations.
But then he never really thought Brexit was a good idea. He was never interested in Brexit, until it became the vehicle by which he could become Prime Minister. Now Brexit doesn’t matter, so long as he can remain Prime Minister. The Union of the United Kingdom no longer matters so long as he can remain Prime Minister.
His plan to remain Prime Minister is to portray Parliament as being the sole blockage to his delivery of Brexit. He is deliberately delaying Brexit while claiming not to, in order to strengthen his Parliament versus the People’s credentials.
It is appalling game playing.
A mumbler's musings 