Johnson is said to want the word Brexit banned this year and has apparently formed a trade negotiating team, Taskforce Europe, with the word Brexit notably absent. Some hope. We will never stop reminding him of it. He might want it to become the policy that dare not speak its name but we will not let it happen. You cannot plunge the nation into an impoverishing calamity and deny it a name. No, Brexit will be with us for very long time and Johnson will forever be associated with it.
He is behaving like Stalin but instead of political figures being airbrushed out of photographs, words are being erased.
"Michael Gove, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, had been tipped to lead the second phase of the negotiations on the future relationship with the EU.
"The talks are seen as less likely to dominate the news if [David] Frost, who is trusted by the prime minister and his circle, conducts them rather than a cabinet minister.
"Johnson instructed his cabinet before Christmas that when the UK leaves the EU on January 31, ministers should stop talking about Brexit. He said they should treat it as a routine trade negotiation and not an epoch-defining event."
But Brexit is an 'epoch-defining event'. This is the problem. Never has a stable western country defined itself by such a ridiculously chaotic process.
In normal times government policy is the result of much careful planning and analysis. Often nowhere near enough planning and sometimes with a flawed analysis of highly subjective evidence. Occasionally, the objectives are undesirable anyway. But the times we are in are far from normal. Poor as policy making has sometimes been in the past, Brexit is an exceptionally bad example. There was no planning and the complex decision was sub-contracted to those least qualified to make it.
Brexit will be seen by history as the event which disproved the wisdom of crowds.
Johnson himself got the bandwagon quietly rolling with his popular if totally mendacious pieces for The Telegraph about Euro coffins, recyclable tea bags, condoms, bananas and the like. Even if he was a Europhile he managed to enlist an army of Europhobes to the cause, including one Nigel Paul Farage.
In normal times government policy is the result of much careful planning and analysis. Often nowhere near enough planning and sometimes with a flawed analysis of highly subjective evidence. Occasionally, the objectives are undesirable anyway. But the times we are in are far from normal. Poor as policy making has sometimes been in the past, Brexit is an exceptionally bad example. There was no planning and the complex decision was sub-contracted to those least qualified to make it.
Brexit will be seen by history as the event which disproved the wisdom of crowds.
Johnson himself got the bandwagon quietly rolling with his popular if totally mendacious pieces for The Telegraph about Euro coffins, recyclable tea bags, condoms, bananas and the like. Even if he was a Europhile he managed to enlist an army of Europhobes to the cause, including one Nigel Paul Farage.
Farage amplified the message, took over UKIP and managed to persuade voters to elect him and a few like minded cretins to the European parliament. The voters treated him like Screaming Lord Sutch. It was just a joke, a bit of a lark, a protest vote. Nothing more.
UKIP was often thought of a single issue party. But having an issue is not the same as having a policy. Farage never had a policy, he simply railed against the EU for twenty five years. A thinking man might have developed a detailed plan but he was too busy complaining in Brussels, insulting foreigners and downing pints of beer on his EU salary and using donations from Aaron Banks to live like a king.
Things carried on harmlessly until the Tory party realised it couldn't win a majority in a general election while ever Farage was eroding its support base. Brexit began as a policy conceived as the expedient remedy to a political issue. UKIP must be crushed. Brexit was never the answer to some great pressing economic, environmental or social problems. Although this is how it is being presented now. Cameron dreamt it up to outflank Farage and his own right wing.
This fuzzy definition of the fundamental purpose of Brexit is half the reason why its proponents are often arguing a paradox. We are leaving the biggest trade deal with our nearest neighbour in order to sign trade deals with other countries much further away - What? It's about controlling the immigration we could have controlled before anyway. Its about keeping our money when we'll have less of it to keep. And so on and so on. All quite insane.
The real policy was never intended to resolve our relationship with Europe. No. That was because nobody except Farage and a few swivel eyed nutters actually thought membership of the EU was the problem. Certainly, Cameron didn't. Every Tory leader for forty years had to appear as a Eurosceptic even it they were not. It was the essential ticket for the leadership race given the membership of the Tory and UKIP parties were virtually the same.
The policy that became Brexit was one intended to unite Conservative voters behind long-standing mainstream thinking that Britain's place in Europe was a settled issue. Nothing more than that. There was no plan, grand or otherwise.
Cameron, in calling for a referendum while leader of a coalition in 2014, didn't really think he would ever need to fight one. The LibDems would never allow a referendum would they? Winning the 2015 general election was a tragic accident. He perhaps underestimated the average voters hatred of the EU and the joke party, UKIP.
During the referendum campaign Cameron forbade civil servants preparing for the leave side winning. There was to be no planning.
The choice was remaining part of the richest, safest and most successful trading bloc in the world - or leaving and doing...., well, something else. Something completely undefined. Surely nobody was really daft enough to go for Brexit? But in the end, 52% decided they preferred something else. Nobody knew what it was because there was no plan.
Cameron stood down the next day.
Theresa May took over the mantle. At that point Brexit was still unclear but the new PM elect explained it. Brexit meant Brexit. There was still no plan.
To her credit she was the first to try and create a plan. It took two fractious years until July 2018 and thousands of civil servants to arrive at the Chequers Plan. Johnson and Davies immediately resigned. Evidently, the thought of having a plan was too much for them. They needn't have worried. Theresa May's plan was rejected, on the grounds that it was the wrong one for the ERG.
May stepped down and Johnson took over. He was the choice of 99,000 Tory party members. They had no plan beyond selecting a man who they believed could get Brexit done without one, whatever the cost, on October 31st.
In his mind the EU had become like the People's Republic of North Korea where we were all having the soles of our feet constantly beaten with iron bars and thick electrical cables. Getting out of the EU no matter what, has become the national imperative. Where we ended up was of small consequence compared to escaping the clutches of the evil Jean Claude Juncker.
We didn't leave on October 31st. Johnson didn't die in a ditch. He did accept the EU's original Withdrawal Agreement, the one he had resigned over a year before, but even he couldn't get parliament to pass it. This time the moderates blocked it.
Johnson called an election in which he campaigned with the simple three word slogan: Get Brexit Done. We still have no coherent plan and under the imbecile we are unlikely to get one.
Brexit has been a muddle from the outset. You cannot 'take back control' and then proceed by way of a muddle, buffeted by events and making short term decisions to get through next week. This is why we are a laughing stock around the globe. A nation whose reputation for pragmatism and good sense as well as our democratic traditions is now being destroyed by democracy. If there was any sense at all to Brexit, other nations wouldn't be sniggering at us behind their hands. We are stumbling awkwardly like a drunk out of a bloc that half the world would like to belong to, with no idea where we will end up.
Johnson's new year message was that we can look forward to ten years of prosperity. What Brexit will actually deliver is another ten years of austerity, as we will discover soon enough.
But when everything is stripped away, sunny optimism is all Johnson has on his side. It will not cut it. We will keep up the fight. Brexit, the word and the consequences, will be with us for years and years but at the end of it, the UK will become a member of the EU once again. Of this I am certain.
Brexit has been a muddle from the outset. You cannot 'take back control' and then proceed by way of a muddle, buffeted by events and making short term decisions to get through next week. This is why we are a laughing stock around the globe. A nation whose reputation for pragmatism and good sense as well as our democratic traditions is now being destroyed by democracy. If there was any sense at all to Brexit, other nations wouldn't be sniggering at us behind their hands. We are stumbling awkwardly like a drunk out of a bloc that half the world would like to belong to, with no idea where we will end up.
Johnson's new year message was that we can look forward to ten years of prosperity. What Brexit will actually deliver is another ten years of austerity, as we will discover soon enough.
But when everything is stripped away, sunny optimism is all Johnson has on his side. It will not cut it. We will keep up the fight. Brexit, the word and the consequences, will be with us for years and years but at the end of it, the UK will become a member of the EU once again. Of this I am certain.
