Hilary Benns' bill got through the Lords on time yesterday. And opposition MPs will reject Johnson's second desperate bid to get an early election when a motion comes before the House on Monday. Cummings' carefully orchestrated strategy will have to be abandoned and a new one cobbled together. This morning we learn MPs are prepared to take legal action to force the PM to comply with the law - surely a first and last in British history.
MPs concerns that Johnson will ignore the law were reinforced yesterday when the PM was found wandering around Scotland trying to find the remnants of his own election campaign where he told reporters, when asked if he would seek an Article 50 extension if passed in law, the
Prime Minister said unequivocally:
“I will not - I don’t want a delay.”
Quite what this means for him and the country we don't yet know. Will he resign, send someone else in his place, break the law or what? Nobody knows, not even the man himself I suspect until Cummings tells him.
In a sign that nerves are starting to affect some ministers, a Guardian report HERE mentions that Michael Gove asked civil servants yesterday to leave the regular (daily I think) meetings of the XO committee at the very top of the no-deal planning operations so that ministers "could air their concerns". It looks like it is not only his brother who is worried about the national interests.
At the bottom of all this is the egregious Dominic Cummings.
It is difficult to think of any individual less well equipped to get Brexit 'done' by October 31st or indeed any other date. Reaching an agreement with the EU which also satisfies the government and a majority of the 650 MPs in parliament requires a skill-set that Cummings simply does not have.
What is needed is goodwill, flexibility, compromise and above all trust. You need to persuade, reach out and carry with you people who may disagree profoundly with you and with each other. Cummings is spiky, arrogant, argumentative, confrontational, driven, divisive and with utterly unshakeable self-belief even when he's wrong - a career psychopath as Cameron once described him.
This is why Johnson, in the middle of a political and constitutional crisis, is winding aimlessly around Scotland's fish markets and leading prize bulls by the nose in some weird photo-shoot opportunities. It looks insane because it is. Having planned an election which he cannot now hold he has carried on as if it was launched last week in Wakefield. There was no plan B so he has carried on with the totally pointless plan A.
Nobody knows what his strategy is. Does he want a deal or is he happy to leave without one? These are hugely different positions and on the surface we could end up with either, more or less on the flip of a coin. This is not how nation states are governed - normally.
Cummings was fine running the Vote Leave campaign. Conning a few million people with easy slogans was easy, but what we are now confronting is way beyond him.
Brexiteers often compare the negotiations with the EU to buying a car, John Baron MP did it in the Commons again last week. But in that kind of deal at the end everyone walks away happy. The dealer makes a profit, the salesman gets his commission and the customer gets his 'bargain'. It is the sharing more or less equally of something positive and beneficial.
Brexiteers often compare the negotiations with the EU to buying a car, John Baron MP did it in the Commons again last week. But in that kind of deal at the end everyone walks away happy. The dealer makes a profit, the salesman gets his commission and the customer gets his 'bargain'. It is the sharing more or less equally of something positive and beneficial.
Brexit is the opposite. There are only negative consequences and the mutual sharing of misery. This is where Brexiteers have a problem. The EU have always been honest about the negative impacts. There are no big doses of reality coming in continental Europe. But in Britain a sizeable chunks of the population, 30-40% or so, still think it's all scaremongering and there are advantages in leaving the EU.
To return to the car dealer analogy. Britain has gone to the showroom with an immaculate 2016 BMW with 30,000 miles on the clock and looks like returning with a tatty ten year old Golf that has done 110,000, having paid a small premium for doing so.
How do you explain that when you get home? Not easy is it?
Right, I am now off to The Great Northern Stop Brexit Conference at the Principal Met hotel in Leeds where Lord Heseltine is set to make the keynote speech. I am thoroughly looking forward to it.
To return to the car dealer analogy. Britain has gone to the showroom with an immaculate 2016 BMW with 30,000 miles on the clock and looks like returning with a tatty ten year old Golf that has done 110,000, having paid a small premium for doing so.
How do you explain that when you get home? Not easy is it?
Right, I am now off to The Great Northern Stop Brexit Conference at the Principal Met hotel in Leeds where Lord Heseltine is set to make the keynote speech. I am thoroughly looking forward to it.
