JOHNSON DOUBLES DOWN YET AGAIN

After last week's rebuff, Johnson appears to have doubled down again, sending a defiant message in The Sunday Express with the provocative title: Listen up, Brussels! We ARE leaving in 25 days so swallow your pride.  And Sky News pick up the thread from the same story.  It is a bit of belligerence mixed with bluster, lies and fake olive branches and is clearly the work of Johnson himself.  Nobody can match him for writing this sort of disjointed rubbish.

Express readers will be taken in but of course, that is exactly as he intended.  The subheading is this:

"AFTER decades of campaigning, three years of arguments and seemingly endless months of pointless delay, it is now just 25 days until the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union comes to an end. We will be packing our bags and walking out on October 31. The only question is whether Brussels cheerily waves us off with a mutually agreeable deal, or whether we will be forced to head off on our own."

In the article itself he says the proposals from last week were a "practical compromise that gives ground where necessary while still protecting the UK’s interests and delivering the Brexit this country voted for."

Therein lies Johnson's problem. The Brexit 'this country voted for' is not on offer and never has been even though he promised it was - it is having our cake and eating it as well.  Caught in the vortex of his own overblown 2016 rhetoric, he is starting to panic as the moment of truth approaches.

He acknowledges that he (actually 'we' in the text - nothing like spreading the blame is there?) has made compromises that not everyone will be happy with but he knows yet more and much bigger ones are being demanded and will have to be conceded if a deal is to be agreed.

Let us recall when he first became PM there was talk of him not even entering negotiations with the EU but waiting for them to come to him. We all know what has happened since as he scuttled off to various European capitals to beg for a deal. Last week, his 'proposals' finally appeared and although a temporary concession on regulatory alignment for NI was included they didn't go nearly far enough for Brussels.

From all that he has done, although not by what he has said, it is clear we must fold sooner or later. We need a deal most of all and he will eventually acknowledge it, just as Mrs May had to. There is no sign of the EU buckling, no matter what empty bluster Johnson comes out with. They have not compromised one iota and as Barnier makes clear in The Observer, they don't intend to.

That other bastion of the pro-Brexit press, The Mail on Sunday, has an interesting article claiming that attempts by Johnson to jet off to meet Merkel and Macron have had to be cancelled because the German and French leaders refused to rearrange their diaries. They have given up on him.

But perhaps most important is the reported row between Johnson and Cox, the Attorney General, following legal papers that were submitted confirming the PM would submit the letter asking for a delay. Cox is said to have threatened to resign if he does not comply with the law:

"According to multiple sources, Friday’s Government submission to the Court of Session followed an animated encounter between Mr Johnson and his law officers – including Mr Cox and Lord Keen, Advocate General for Scotland – on Wednesday evening."

"One source said that Mr Cox and Lord Keen told the Prime Minister that, if the Government did not make clear it would not break the law, the Prime Minister would face ‘resignations’, adding: ‘Boris was absolutely furious but he had to back down'."

So Johnson is facing serious, premiership threatening problems at every turn as his officials work to rejig proposals ready for tomorrow morning in Brussels. I assume that as I wrote yesterday we are edging very slowly, very reluctantly back toward the existing backstop.  And it will once again fail in parliament.

I want also to point to the leader column of the Mail on Sunday. This is it:

The Mail On Sunday COMMENT

NOW is the moment of truth in the United Kingdom’s long struggle to extricate itself from the European Union. For years many British people have suspected that the EU is not really interested in anything except more Europe.

It is almost impossible to negotiate departure from a body which has no real understanding that a member nation might wish to regain its independence, or any real belief that a such a nation should have that right.

Boris Johnson has put forward plans for a compromise which are sensible and thoughtful. He has taken account of the real worries of the Irish government and people about the revival of a new hard border with Northern Ireland.

These plans have growing support from all sides at Westminster, and are a realistic basis for a lasting compromise.

We shall now see what the EU’s superficially emollient and smiling leaders are really made of, when the chance of a civilised, negotiated parting is placed before them.

They seem not to understand that it is not the EU keeping us in or stopping us 'regaining our independence'.  It is the UK that has twice asked for an extension, not the EU. The negotiations are not really about leaving at all. This was decided the instant the Article 50 notification went in on March 29th 2017. We can leave when our sovereign parliament thinks it's right, when the economic damage is minimised and not before.

This is now Johnson's insoluble problem.

And to end, I noted this quote from the FT in July 2019 when Johnson was running for PM:

Johnson now presents himself as the man to sort out Brexit and “pitchfork this incubus off our back”. One Tory MP sighs: “He’s the one who put it there.”

On November 1st the incubus will still be there and Johnson's disastrous premiership will be drawing to a close.