Johnson's looming difficulty was starkly set out on the front page of The Telegraph on Friday morning. Poor old Mark Carney was accused, as he frequently is, of "reviving Project Fear with no-deal Brexit 'shock' warning". Readers of the right wing pro-Brexit press are as we know, inured to any such warnings and simply don't accept there will be any serious problems with a no deal Brexit.
But our new prime minister is set to spend £100 million on a public information campaign which will, presumably, set out what no deal actually means for businesses and ordinary people like us and what planning the government is doing to mitigate the impact. But if it's accurate it will be 'scaremongering' and if it plays down the dire consequences it's just more useless spending and can hardly be effective.
As Professor Chris Grey puts it in his latest blogpost:
"That planning reveals one of the many paradoxes of Brexit. To the extent that it involves an honest and open portrayal of the effects of no-deal Brexit, then it demonstrates the extraordinary damage and disruption that will be caused. To the extent that it does not honestly and openly portray those effects, then it cannot function as effective planning.
"This paradox, which is coming to prominence now, has again been apparent for a while. The need to invest in no-deal planning was one of the many demands Brexiters made of Theresa May. Only in that way, they argued then as they do now, would the EU be made to see that Britain was serious in being willing, and able, to leave without a deal. Yet when she gave in to that demand, they immediately denounced it as Project Fear Mark 2."
The leaked internal report which Sky News got hold of makes clear what the civil service thinks - although the Telegraph and the Mail and Dominic Cummings would presumably dismiss the whole lot of them as secret remainers plotting secretly to thwart Brexit.
So, the public information campaign is going to have to tread a very fine line between reassuring people that everything is under control and motivating them sufficiently to do something to avoid the chaos in November. It will have to carry a credible threat that things will be bad for the EU 27 but manageable for the UK in order to keep up the pressure on Brussels. No easy task.
"This paradox, which is coming to prominence now, has again been apparent for a while. The need to invest in no-deal planning was one of the many demands Brexiters made of Theresa May. Only in that way, they argued then as they do now, would the EU be made to see that Britain was serious in being willing, and able, to leave without a deal. Yet when she gave in to that demand, they immediately denounced it as Project Fear Mark 2."
The leaked internal report which Sky News got hold of makes clear what the civil service thinks - although the Telegraph and the Mail and Dominic Cummings would presumably dismiss the whole lot of them as secret remainers plotting secretly to thwart Brexit.
So, the public information campaign is going to have to tread a very fine line between reassuring people that everything is under control and motivating them sufficiently to do something to avoid the chaos in November. It will have to carry a credible threat that things will be bad for the EU 27 but manageable for the UK in order to keep up the pressure on Brussels. No easy task.
There is a neat irony to all this. If anyone could ever be accused of scaremongering it's Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson and The Telegraph. What were all those mischievous columns that Johnson wrote in the early 1990s with fake news about our abattoirs were about to be closed, coffin and condom sizes standardised or mushy peas banned? He pumped out a lot of lies and myths and they were all designed to scare us that the EU was somehow hell bent on destroying the British way of life.
For him and the pro-Brexit press to accuse anyone of scaremongering now is rank hypocrisy.
Now, I'm off to a street stall in Sherburn this morning.
