Boris bluster will land Britain back in the soup
A mad consensus has taken over the Tory Party that has at its core the belief that Boris Johnson, like Churchill in the spring of 1940, is the only man who can save Conservatism, and therefore Britain, from the consequences of its European folly. Even after his lacklustre performance in last night’s BBC debate, in which he failed to say anything of substance while his rivals scrabbled to look relevant, the bulk of party members remain convinced that the former mayor of London is uniquely qualified to tell Europe where to stuff it.
The issue I have with this analysis is that Boris is, well … Boris. He hasn’t the foggiest idea how to renegotiate Brexit. His invocation of October 31 as our new and improved Independence Day, come what may, is no more than cheap rhetoric. Put him in front of Michel Barnier and his team and the resulting confrontation will be over and done with in a matter of hours. Like Mr Toad, Boris will huff and puff about the Backstop. He will blow out his cheeks and draw deeply on his store of Latin phrases. But he will say nothing that remotely smacks of realism. I guarantee it.
Barnier – who has mentally moved on from the British problem, viewing it as an unwelcome distraction from the EU’s more pressing concerns – will wait, impatiently, until the noise stops before restating the fact that either the House of Commons signs up to Theresa May’s withdrawal bill or Britain will indeed, by default, leave the EU without a deal on October 31. Half an hour later, the Frenchman will announce to the world that the UK – having, presumably, declared its intention to renege on its £39bn debt – has made itself officially a rogue state.
Much bluster will ensue. Boris will barrel out of the Berlaymont, uttering meaningless reassurances that all will be well in this best of all possible worlds. He will say that this is what he wanted from Day One. He will pretend that the cash previously promised to Brussels will instead by spent on hospitals, roads and, perhaps even Heathrow’s new third runway, of which, apparently, he now approves, if only for short-term tactical reasons. He will conjure up images of a new Golden Age for Britain, in which the 167 countries that are not part of the EU – China and the US among them – reverse their priorities so that trade with the UK is rated more important, and more pressing, than trade with Germany, France, Spain, Poland and the rest of the 27.
At the resulting general election, he will most likely triumph as England’s Braveheart. He may even win a landslide, depending on how loudly Nimrod and Rule Britannia feature on the hustings. But the Scottish National Party will take all but a handful of seats north of the Border on a promise of a second independence referendum. Nicola Sturgeon will announce that, if necessary, she will follow the example of Catalonia, daring the government in Westminster to arrest her and her colleagues. Within five years – and quite possibly a lot sooner – Scotland will be grandfathered in to the EU and adopt the euro, leading to queues of lorries on the approaches to Carlisle and Berwick. In Northern Ireland, a referendum on Irish unity will become unstoppable, permitting the Nationalist electorate – now reckoned at more than 50 per cent of the total – to join with progressive Unionists in pledging their future to Dublin and Europe.
Chaotic? You’d better believe it. But this is what happens when Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson – Worse and Worser – are allowed to rewrite the Brexit narrative.
England would at this point stand alone, with only the Welsh for company. There would be no United Kingdom. Over the subsequent ten or fifteen years, economic growth would slowly return, centred on the City’s transformation into a gigantic offshore banking centre and an accelerated exploitation of our admitted prowess in information technology and artificial intelligence. Much less likely to recover would be British prestige and global influence. On the military front, we would follow the fleet – the American fleet, that is. MI6 would become a sub-branch of the CIA. At the UN, we would find our permanent seat on the Security Council disputed by the EU, led by France.
Our best course, if we could manage it (if, that is, we could attract enough highly-qualified immigrants), would be to become the South Korea of Europe, albeit lacking an equivalent trade deal with our neighbours. With wages outside of the City-IT-AI nexus falling and with Europe’s back turned against us, Johnson (long since replaced by someone who knows what they’re doing) would be remembered not as a second Churchill, but as a second Lord North, the man whose careless conduct of affairs lost Britain the American colonies in 1783.
The point is that there is nothing “magical” about Boris. This cannot be said too often. The only reason he has become the hot favourite to succeed Theresa May is that the Tory Party is clean out of ideas and sees the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip as a deus ex machina who can be hoisted onto the European Stage, like the king in a Renaissance farce, to pronounce that the confusion is ended and good sense restored. Boris has no “plan”. He never had a plan. He wouldn’t know a plan if it hit him in the face. There is nothing he can say to Barnier that will make a jot of difference to anything. His only hope is that by taking us out of Europe at the stroke of midnight on October 31 he will thereafter be seen as The Man Who Delivered Brexit and thus, like Richard III, an indelible part of our island story.
Alternatively, of course, the newly-selected PM could revoke Article 50, or (à la the third runway) he could throw his weight behind the May plan, or Michael Gove and Rory Stewart could combine to stage a political reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth. There is even a chance, I suppose, that Jeremy Corbyn could call for a second referendum and end up in Downing Street with a mandate to keep us in the Customs Union. Boris doesn’t have to be the end of everything. It just looks that way. Tick-tock, tick-tock.