A couple of articles appeared yesterday which help to confirm my own thinking on Boris and a no-deal Brexit. The first was by one of the so-called Lawyers for Britain, Martin Howe QC, a committed Brexiteer par excellence. He makes his argument in the pages of The Telegraph (HERE), where all good Brexiteers find a ready audience. Howe believes we should just quit the EU, leave without a deal under WTO rules and negotiate a FTA with the EU afterwards. All totally bonkers of course and not entirely new. It's a rehash of an earlier paper for Politeia which I covered HERE a few days ago. But he has added an interesting detail.
"Negotiating changes to the WA with the EU, and then getting the necessary legislation through Parliament in time to leave the EU on Oct 31, would be quite impossible. The 175-clause Bill (still kept under wraps) is a horror story packed with contentious clauses. It effectively unrepeals the 1972 European Communities Act, and gives supreme status in our own courts to the WA and the EU laws which it applies to the UK".
This 'necessary legislation' is so explosive it hasn't seen the light of day yet. Nobody outside of government has seen it although I assume some of its provisions must have been leaked. It, or something very like it, will be needed if either Hunt or Johnson manage to get a rewritten deal (itself next to impossible). Howe goes on:
"Even on the optimistic assumption that the changes to the WA were enough to bring on board the DUP and the Tory opponents of the WA, it is hard to see that the Bill would ever get through in unmolested form, let alone by Oct 31".
Think about this. The only deal on the table is the WA but the legislation to get it through parliament has virtually no chance of being passed at all, ever, full stop. Never mind a date in October. I know Howe is right - unless the new PM gets Corbyn and the Labour party on side, something which would utterly destroy the Tory party anyway.
The choice then would be to ask for another extension and probably a second referendum, revoke Article 50 or leaving without a deal.
To help us decide what his choice might be, let's look at another article, in The Times and written by a former Downing Street speech writer Clare Poges. She once worked for Boris and thinks he's not as bad as others like Max Hastings for example, have claimed.
Poges says:
"The caricature of a malevolent or scheming person bears no relation to the person I worked with.
"In fact, his weakness as a politician is rooted in his appeal as a person: his deepest desire is to be liked, to charm, to please people. His irreconcilable promises to various wings of the Conservative Party have been put down to strategic cunning; actually, I would imagine this was more about wanting each person to leave the room with a spring in their step. He wants to please the anti-Heathrow brigade and the pro-business lobby, to please Mark Francois and Matt Hancock on Brexit, please the immigration hawks and the immigration liberals. He loves to cheer people up in the short-term, whatever mess that creates in the long-term".
"In fact, his weakness as a politician is rooted in his appeal as a person: his deepest desire is to be liked, to charm, to please people. His irreconcilable promises to various wings of the Conservative Party have been put down to strategic cunning; actually, I would imagine this was more about wanting each person to leave the room with a spring in their step. He wants to please the anti-Heathrow brigade and the pro-business lobby, to please Mark Francois and Matt Hancock on Brexit, please the immigration hawks and the immigration liberals. He loves to cheer people up in the short-term, whatever mess that creates in the long-term".
The man she describes is actually weak. Unless you're some sort of psychopath, we all want to please others, to be popular and liked, but most of us can see this is not always possible and telling an immediate lie to allow 'someone to leave the room with a spring in their step' is only stacking up problems later. Prime ministers should not do it but it's familiar behaviour by the MP for Uxbridge isn't it? This is why the lies skip off his tongue so easily.
Brexiteers and leavers certainly had a spring in their step on June 24th three years ago. How easy it was to make all those outrageous promises. Eager to please, his imagination dazzled many gullible voters and left them wide-eyed and spellbound at the prospects opening up for global Britain. Off they went to the polling booths, ticked the box marked Leave and sat back. Three years on they are still waiting.
Johnson continues to dazzle, now offering to slash taxes and increase spending on everything you can think of. Yesterday he was in a garden centre in Kent although why he was there was not explained. I assume it was packed with the fully paid up members of the Tory party that he is trying to please at the moment. Or probably not. That was perhaps the best reason of all for him being there.
One day, sooner or later, he will have to disappoint one group or another.
Not leaving the EU is going to send the ERG into paroxysms of fury and will disappoint a good 30% of the population. There will be a lot of anger - but more importantly no damage to the economy.
If we take Martin Howe QC at his word, leaving by October 31st can ONLY be accomplished by crashing out without a deal. This will briefly please the ERG and the Tory party members but will almost certainly put us into recession, severely damage the economy, some of it irreparably, and blight our future prospects for decades. In which case probably 70% of the population will turn on the man who likes to be liked.
He will not even have the benefit that Gordon Brown had in 2009 when the financial crisis hit. At least Brown could say nobody really saw it coming. What will BoJo say? That nobody told me it would be a disaster? Almost every economist you can mention, two thirds of MPs, all the business organisations and the farming community in the country, uncle Tom Cobley and all, have been telling him for the past year or more that it would be catastrophic. No he will not be able to deflect the blame on anyone else.
It would be a disaster made in Johnson's ego. The electorate will never forgive him. He will never be able to appear on chat shows with that impish grin or fawned over in the street by adoring fans. All that will disappear forever. He will be vilified.
And this is why he will never do it.
Neither will he revoke Article 50. To do so would also be unpopular and undemocratic, even we remainers can see that. The only option in the end will be a delay and a second referendum.
It will be his only salvation.
If we take Martin Howe QC at his word, leaving by October 31st can ONLY be accomplished by crashing out without a deal. This will briefly please the ERG and the Tory party members but will almost certainly put us into recession, severely damage the economy, some of it irreparably, and blight our future prospects for decades. In which case probably 70% of the population will turn on the man who likes to be liked.
He will not even have the benefit that Gordon Brown had in 2009 when the financial crisis hit. At least Brown could say nobody really saw it coming. What will BoJo say? That nobody told me it would be a disaster? Almost every economist you can mention, two thirds of MPs, all the business organisations and the farming community in the country, uncle Tom Cobley and all, have been telling him for the past year or more that it would be catastrophic. No he will not be able to deflect the blame on anyone else.
It would be a disaster made in Johnson's ego. The electorate will never forgive him. He will never be able to appear on chat shows with that impish grin or fawned over in the street by adoring fans. All that will disappear forever. He will be vilified.
And this is why he will never do it.
Neither will he revoke Article 50. To do so would also be unpopular and undemocratic, even we remainers can see that. The only option in the end will be a delay and a second referendum.
It will be his only salvation.
