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Boris Johnson to Warn U.K. Against Reversing Brexit Boris Johnson Warns Against a Brexit Do-Over
(about 7 hours later)
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, was expected to argue on Wednesday that Britain’s looming departure from the European Union provides grounds not for “fear but hope,” and to warn critics that efforts to reverse the process would be a “disastrous mistake.” LONDON — No one polarizes opinion over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union quite like Boris Johnson, the flamboyant foreign secretary, who in 2016 helped persuade Britons to quit a bloc that he once accused of trying to unify the continent just as Napoleon and Hitler tried to do.
One of the main campaigners for withdrawal, known as Brexit, in a referendum in 2016, Mr. Johnson is now a proponent of a clean break with the bloc. Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet, in which he serves, is bitterly divided over how to unravel more than four decades of European integration. So why, exactly, would Mr. Johnson try to woo the large minority who voted to remain?
Mr. Johnson’s is the first in a series of speeches by ministers designed to provide some long-awaited detail on the government’s plans for a future relationship with the European Union after the withdrawal, which is scheduled to take place in little more than a year. In a speech on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson called on his opponents to unite around his vision of British withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit, while warning that any rethink of the decision itself would be a “disastrous mistake.”
Once seen as a modernizing, liberal Conservative, Mr. Johnson is now a polarizing figure because of his role in the 2016 referendum — one he adopted after much public reflection. His intervention at this point is being watched closely, by his friends and political enemies, because he is still seen by some as a potential successor to Mrs. May. A second vote would bring “another year of wrangling and turmoil and feuding in which the whole country would lose,” he argued in a speech that skirted around the tough economic questions about withdrawal that have split a bitterly divided British cabinet.
Extracts of the speech, released before it was delivered, reflected the debate within Britain, where concerns at the lack of progress over Brexit negotiations have intensified in recent weeks. Brexit, Mr. Johnson insisted, meant an “outward-looking liberal global future,” and was not “some un-British spasm of bad manners” or a “great V-sign from the cliffs of Dover.”
“I fear that some people are becoming ever more determined to stop Brexit, to reverse the referendum vote of June 23, 2016, and to frustrate the will of the people,”’ Mr. Johnson was expected to say. Many remainers see it as exactly such a gesture — a blend of nationalism and nostalgia — and analysts rated his prospects of winning them over as close to zero.
“I believe that would be a disastrous mistake that would lead to permanent and ineradicable feelings of betrayal,” the speech continues. “We cannot and will not let it happen.” “The idea that he has traction with remain voters is absurd,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, “so it has to be about something else, and that has to be about keeping himself in the public eye.”
In more conciliatory language, Mr. Johnson was expected to try to reassure those who have continuing — or growing — doubts about the policy that “Brexit is not grounds for fear but hope.” It would not be the first time. Last year he caused a stir before the Conservative Party’s annual conference by publishing a lengthy essay on his Brexit vision. More recently, he made headlines with calls for higher health spending, perhaps seeking to justify his widely debunked claim that quitting the European Union would free up around $500 million a week for the National Health Service.
“It is not good enough to say to Remainers — you lost, get over it; because we must accept that many are actuated by entirely noble sentiments, a real sense of solidarity with our European neighbors and a desire for the U.K. to succeed,” he was expected to say. Years ago, Mr. Johnson’s famously dismissed his prospects of becoming prime minister as being “about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or me being reincarnated as an olive.”
But on substance Mr. Johnson seems to be yielding nothing. Writing in the Sun newspaper, he pushed back against those — including some fellow Conservative lawmakers and members of the cabinet — who want to remain close to European Union’s customs union and single market after Brexit. But more recently — and plausibly — he admitted his ambitions, likening his approach to becoming leader to grabbing a football if it “came loose from the back of the scrum,” a term from Rugby football akin to a fumble in American football.
“To those who worry about coming out of the customs union or the single market, please bear in mind that the economic benefits of membership are nothing like as conspicuous or irrefutable as is sometimes claimed,” he wrote. In 2016 that ball slipped, agonizingly, from his grasp after the Brexit referendum, when Mr. Johnson was abandoned by key allies and forced to withdraw from the contest to replace the former prime minister, David Cameron, who quit after the plebiscite. Theresa May went on to take the crown.
“It is only by taking back control of our laws that U.K. firms and entrepreneurs will have the freedom to innovate, without the risk of having to comply with some directive devised by Brussels, at the urgings of some lobby group, with the aim of holding back a U.K. competitor.” But Mr. Johnson may be sensing another moment of opportunity, as Mrs. May struggles to control her cabinet amid calls from some of her own lawmakers for her to step aside.
“That would be intolerable, undemocratic and would make it all but impossible for us to do serious free trade deals,” he added. Brexit has caught her in an unforgiving political vice. A “soft”, departure, protecting business by retaining close economic ties to the bloc, is being opposed by Brexit enthusiasts in the cabinet, including Mr. Johnson.
But a “hard Brexit,” or clean break, of the type such right-wing and Brexit supporters favor, could be rejected by Parliament, plunging Mrs. May’s government into a terminal crisis.
That conundrum has paralyzed decision making in London, leaving Mrs. May looking weak, unable to tell European Union negotiators (or the British public) what future relationship she wants with the bloc.
Mr. Johnson’s was the first in a series of speeches by ministers – including one by Mrs. May scheduled for Saturday - designed to fill that vacuum. But if this speech is any indication, the British public and European negotiators may be disappointed.
Mr. Johnson provided little in the way of new ideas or approaches in his remarks, which a Labour lawmaker, Yvette Cooper, dismissed as “waffly, bumbling, empty.”
Some believe that Mr. Johnson is looking for a pretext to quit the cabinet over Brexit and cause a leadership crisis, and on Wednesday he avoided a reporter’s question about whether he would stay in the government if he should lose the internal debate over the terms of withdrawal.
These are nervous times for Mr. Johnson. He has been weakened by his performance as foreign secretary, which has been criticized as accident-prone and lightweight.
Meanwhile, he has encountered unexpected competition for the Brexit spotlight in the form of Jacob Rees-Mogg, a caricature patrician, with impeccable manners, a socially-conservative philosophy and hard-line pro-Brexit views.
If there is a contest to succeed Mrs. May, the top two contenders will be chosen by Conservative lawmakers, but the final choice is up to party members, now thought to number around 80,000 people.
Among these activists, hard-line Brexit supporters, mainly from an older age category, are thought to be overrepresented. They seem to be warming to Mr. Rees-Mogg, who has transformed himself from a political curiosity to a front-runner for the leadership, finishing above Mr. Johnson in some surveys of party members.
Mr. Rees-Mogg’s rise was accelerated last month when Mrs. May’s botched cabinet reshuffle inadvertently opened a vacancy for him to lead the European Research Group - a gathering of hard Brexit lawmakers – giving him a platform unencumbered by any need to toe the government line. His brand of direct, upper class, speaking has given him celebrity status and won him a set of followers now nicknamed the Mogglodytes.
“He is on your TV, he is on your Instagram feed, he is at the Cambridge Union,” wrote one newspaper columnist, referring to the ancient university’s debating society, and joking that it was only a matter of time before Mr. Rees-Mogg was helping draw the numbers on the National Lottery.
Mr. Johnson’s allies put the best gloss on the rise of Mr. Rees-Mogg, suggesting that his more extreme views (he opposes abortion even in the case of rape, for example) allow Mr. Johnson the political space to promote himself as a more generally acceptable Brexit supporter.
Mr. Bale believes that this new competition has unnerved Mr. Johnson, but also notes that the foreign secretary once wrote a book about Winston Churchill, who was regarded as something of a maverick before he came to power.
“Perhaps the lesson he has drawn is that you can blow it several times, and still, in its hour of need, the country will turn to you,” said Mr. Bale who added that, while the Churchill analogy was very far from apposite, “so many strange things are happening in British politics that it would be unwise to count him out.”