(opinion) Mr Johnson swears off an early election, but his sweaty aroma says otherwise
Mr Johnson swears off an early election, but his sweaty aroma says otherwise
Andrew Rawnsley
Sun 28 Jul 2019 08.00 BST Last modified on Sun 28 Jul 2019 10.25 BST
Britain’s briefest prime minister was George Canning in the early 19th century who lasted just 119 days. He had the excuse that he died. A new record will be set if Boris Johnson is impelled to call an autumn election and the voters put the boot to his backside. The May premiership will have been followed by the mayfly premiership. He will be deposited in the dustbin of history as the fool who clawed all the way up to the pinnacle of the greasy pole, only then to almost instantly plunge off it. He has sufficient self-knowledge to grasp that this ignominy would be hugely satisfying not just to the great swaths of the country who would think that fate richly deserved, but to many of his colleagues as well. So when he swears that he has no intention of calling an election before the end of October, I almost believe him. My hunch is that he is extremely scared by the idea. Like many of his kind, outward bravado is the bluffer’s mask on a pulsating mass of insecurities.
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The most compelling reason to think that he will choose, or be forced into , an election is the trajectory he is taking on Brexit. During the leadership contest, some Tory moderates tried to reconcile themselves to the spectre of a Johnson government, or to rationalise their desire to get a job in it, by telling themselves that he would soften his approach once he had blagged his way into Number 10. There’s been absolutely no indication that he is tempering his position; rather, he is hardening his red lines. Brexit ultras now occupy every senior ministerial position engaged with the enterprise and he has doubled down on his demands that the withdrawal agreement be ripped up.
The supposed logic of ramping up preparations for a no-deal outcome is that this will induce the EU to blink and drop the repeated insistence of its leaders that the agreement can’t be reopened. They will then buckle and give him concessions that they wouldn’t offer to Mrs May. Now ask yourself this: how likely are Europe’s leaders to make themselves look very stupid in order to make Boris Johnson look very clever? Especially when most of them continue to think that no deal is a bluff, because they believe Britain’s parliament won’t allow it?
I suspect that, deep down, he knows that there is a vanishingly slight chance of securing a radically recast agreement. So the best educated guess about where he will get to in the autumn is this. There will be no better deal with the EU and parliament will prevent him from leaving without one. There would then be three avenues forward. One: he could seek another extension to the deadline for withdrawal. This would be a humiliating betrayal of his solemn pledge to his party that Britain is leaving “come what may” on Halloween and that would put rocket boosters on support for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. Two: he could seek to resolve the deadlock by calling a fresh referendum. Mr Cummings used to argue for a two-stage plebiscite, but trying to take that course now would shatter the cabinet and detonate the Tory party. In these circumstances, option three – calling an election to seek a mandate for a no-deal Brexit – looks like his only viable choice. It could anyway be forced upon him by a successful no-confidence vote in the Commons.
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