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Seven weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters during his state visit to London that Boris Johnson, “would do a very good job” as prime minister, adding; “I think he would be excellent.” This character reference is now to be tested, and it will fail – Boris Johnson will be a disastrous prime minister for the United Kingdom. Anyone in Ireland who wishes success for the UK, which should include everyone, will pray that his premiership is brief.
His predecessor, Theresa May, failed to deliver the undeliverable, a version of Brexit guaranteeing frictionless trade with Europe while departing the arrangements which make it possible. She succeeded the author of the 2016 referendum, David Cameron, who quit the morning after the vote, having forbidden the Whitehall civil service from making contingency plans for a Leave majority - a distinct possibility according to contemporaneous opinion polls. May then promised, in her first major speech, a version of Brexit including uninterrupted trade and departure from both the single market and the customs union, provoking the departure of officials who advised that these promises were inconsistent.
Johnson and Brexit
The period since has been a tussle, not with the EU-27 but with reality, and the country has landed itself with a new prime minister whose contempt for reality has been on daily display throughout the Tory leadership contest and throughout his political career. Last week he was on TV brandishing a kipper, asserting that an EU regulation requires that postal delivery of kippers be packaged in ice.
This, he feared, would damage the Isle of Man kipper industry, to which he appeared to attach great importance.
A spokeswoman duly appeared at the EU press office in Brussels and explained, with some bemusement, that smoked fish is covered by national regulation, not by the EU. Johnson had just made it up.
He also added some billions, 20 to be precise, to his infrastructure budget, already touching £300 billion for bridges to France and Northern Ireland and a new airport on an island in the Thames estuary.
His latest wheeze is free fibre broadband to every home in the UK (wonder where he got that one from?) which passed unnoticed, unable to compete for coverage with the kipper-waving.
Cameron and May have already been written off as incompetent prime ministers, but Johnson adds a new dimension. It is impossible to imagine that he believes what he says – knowledgeable commentators insist that he is clever, so the only explanation is that he simply doesn’t care.
That Johnson should have been chosen as prime minister measures the depth of the UK’s political crisis
Either true or false will do fine, what matters is how a statement goes down with the priority audience, currently the Brexiteer faithful. Politicians tell small fibs all the time, but Johnson tells whoppers and without the loss of credibility which would normally follow. In this he mimics his admirer, the president of the USA.
That Johnson should have been chosen as prime minister measures the depth of the UK’s political crisis. People have voted for him, including MPs and not just Conservative party members, who have afforded him a bizarre jester’s charter – he is witty and amusing, just ‘being Boris’.
Some have even dismissed the threat of a no-deal crash-out on the grounds that he is a proven liar and will reverse engines.
Since he has committed to exit on 31 October with or without a withdrawal agreement, and only the existing and despised withdrawal agreement is available, there will either be a crash-out, destroying his premiership gradually, or he will betray the Brexiteers and they will end it quickly.
That nothing short of a very ‘hard’ Brexit would satisfy the zealots emerged long after the vote, and Johnson himself repeated during the referendum campaign that the UK would take the option of remaining in the single market
The crisis in May’s premiership flowed from her elimination of options within months of assuming office, Johnson has made the same mistake in advance.
It has been three full years since the 2016 Leave victory and it’s all too easy to forget that it did not commit the UK to any specific form of Brexit.
That nothing short of a very ‘hard’ Brexit would satisfy the zealots emerged long after the vote, and Johnson himself repeated during the referendum campaign that the UK would take the option of remaining in the single market.
He reportedly told David Cameron that the UK could also retain its membership of the European Council as a non-member, which suggests that he has never read even a bluffer’s guide to the treaty.
He also voted for the existing withdrawal agreement on one of the three occasions when it was defeated in the House of Commons.
When the history of these years is being written, the events of 2016 and early 2017 will attract special attention.
With the referendum narrowly lost by Cameron and a Remain-supporting replacement chosen, how did the ‘will of the people’ become an abrupt no-deal Brexit, an outcome absent from the ballot paper?
SHARING OPTIONS: