The Guardian view on Johnson’s campaign pitch: save my job

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/02/the-guardian-view-on-johnsons-campaign-pitch-save-my-job

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Every government since 2016 has been driven mad by Brexit’s central contradiction – that there is an economic price to pay for the UK to take back control of its borders. Boris Johnson leads the most demented to date. He uses “the will of the people” to justify the replacement of parliamentary scrutiny with coercion and deceit. Mr Johnson won power because two-thirds of the Tory members preferred the worst foreign secretary in living memory to his successor. Many feared, to quote Mr Johnson’s hero Winston Churchill, that his was the worst appointment since “Caligula made his horse a consul”.

Mr Johnson has proved better organised and more ruthless than his opponents. If he can, he aims to offer MPs a Hobson’s choice next month of implementing Brexit either via a “negotiated” deal or with no deal at all. Then Britain will leave the EU on 31 October, “do or die”. If his MPs try to force Mr Johnson to ask the EU for a three-month delay to the Brexit leaving date, he apparently will deselect them. Labour should support the Tory rebels, not least because parliament has voted against a damaging no-deal Brexit.

Mr Johnson’s strategy is to save his job rather than Brexit. He casts himself as reasonable and his opponents as unreasonable, placing himself as a populist champion of the people against a remainer parliament. So from the steps of Downing Street he called on Tory MPs not to vote with the opposition, warning this would “chop the legs” from under the UK. Yet European leaders say there is nothing to talk about. Even Mr Johnson’s idea that the Irish backstop could be replaced by alternative arrangements is demonstrably false. The prime minister said he did not want an election, understandable given that he has just entered No 10. The truth is he has a parliamentary majority of one and would struggle even to pass a Queen’s speech. If thwarted by a combination of Labour votes and those of his own MPs, Mr Johnson would attempt to popularise a no-deal EU exit in an election, blaming a liberal elite for stopping Brexit. This would counter the threat of the Brexit party and also crowd out his opponents’ truthful message of no-deal doom.

Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly called for an early election. Labour does not actually need to vote against a motion for an early election; its MPs could deny the government a two-thirds majority by abstaining. The risk here is that Mr Johnson would be able to stoke the belief in leave-voting constituencies that Mr Corbyn was either frit or a remainer. It is hard to see how Labour could not accept Mr Johnson’s challenge. Hostility to immigration was central to the 2016 leave victory. Since access to the EU’s single market and the customs union are irreconcilable with ending free movement of its citizens, Brexiters ought to level with the public over the issue of immigration. But they instead prefer to appeal in populist fashion to voters – yesterday’s “bogus asylum seekers” are today’s migrants storming English beaches.

Since 2007, the UK has been run by six regimes, five Tory and one Labour. But only one has obtained high office by winning a parliamentary majority at a general election – and David Cameron’s mistakes provide an abject lesson of how power not only corrupts but also breeds folly. Being in command often causes a failure to think; the responsibility of power fades as it is exercised. Governments need to be constrained by facts. There ought to be detailed white papers setting out the consequences of departure, rather than a “Get ready for Brexit” information blitz. All misgovernment is contrary to self-interest in the long run, however much it might strengthen a regime temporarily. An election victory for a hard Brexit Tory party would come at a dismal cost to the country: not only would we perversely persist with a counter-productive and probably unworkable EU exit but we will be doomed to sterile enmity with our nearest friends and partners.