His precarious position won’t be helped by reports of him wanting to spend £150,000 on a tree house at Chequers for his son Wilf with conversations being held about getting Lord Brownlow to pay for it. There is no suggestion Brownlow knew that he was being lined up but it shows that Johnson learned nothing from the wallpaper affair and his connection with the reality of life for millions in this country has been completely severed.
The Tiverton result was an eye opener for many MPs with majorities below 24,000. None of their seats are safe. It would be against everything we know about the Conservative party for him to survive the summer. If he doesn’t realise that he is even dafter than I thought.
He will leave his successor(s) a massive problem in what to do about Brexit, a policy for which he is almost wholly and uniquely responsible. I suspect it is the growing realisation that he will be blamed for leading the nation not to the promised land but to a wilderness from which it will take decades to recover, that keeps him hanging on. He is delaying the inevitable cascade of ordure coming his way
To appreciate the size of the issue, which dwarfs anything an incoming PM has had to face since 1940, read the article written by Sir Ivan Rogers in The New Statesman or take a few minutes to watch the virtual interview with TNE's George Eaton below:
It makes depressing reading and listening, especially so coming from a man I have great respect for.
The piece is titled: Why even the Brexiteers are in despair over Brexit and has the sub-title "Leavers have collided with the reality that the potential benefits of Brexit are far outweighed by the costs."
The written piece is an astute summary of where we are now. A growing recognition - from all sides -that Brexit isn't working and all the mad contradictions inherent in it. He also makes several key points in my opinion. Firstly, that talk of joining the single market - as Tory MP and others suggested recently - is not realistic:
"This is partly because I am a realist about whether either major party could ever reintroduce full free movement of people and partly because, on financial regulation in particular, it is inconceivable that the UK could accept rule-taking in the way Norway does."
I agree with this. The second point is a new one (to me) where he points to the problem of creating a single internal market in the UK and says:
"In creating its own internal market, the UK government is painfully relearning some of the early lessons of Europe’s evolution from a customs union to a common market to a single market. A common external trade policy forces a greater degree of internal harmonisation (for example, ensuring that a product or service that can be legally sold in one part of the UK can be sold everywhere in the UK).
"But it takes no great prescience to see that nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales could deploy exactly the same argument that Brexiteers used against EU market integration."
In other words, to make a UK single market work the SNP (and Wales and NI) are going to have to forego some autonomy, something about which they are likely to be very upset.
Finally, he argues that the EU's integration policy is akin to a bicycle, if you stop pedalling you tend to fall off and therefore the coming years will see EU states and Brussels pressing ahead with closer ties on defence, taxation and everything else. I can see how this works.
But, and here's the rub, Rogers say de-integration (he doesn't use the more obvious word 'disintegration' for some reason) is the same but opposite and therefore Britain is setting off on a road of permanently disintegrating from the EU, which will presumably please many fanatical Brexiteers. It will however do nothing for Britain.
The worst of Sir Ivan's predictions comes in the interview. He thinks Britain will NEVER rejoin the EU and certainly not in his lifetime (he's 62) so not before another 25-30 years or even more. These comments comes towards the end of the interview, around 22 minutes in and 32 minutes in.
Very depressing and disappointing, but I happen to think he's wrong. I am not sure he appreciates the degree to which British industry lags its EU counterparts and at the same time relies on them for support and gains in productivity.
If the EU grows more rapidly and more strongly Johnson's successors will soon be facing the same quandary that Harolds MacMillan and Wilson faced in the 1960s.
