One day, when Boris Johnson is no longer prime minister and the full catalogue of his frauds is compiled, a special place will belong to one that got him elected in the first place. Before he attended any lockdown parties, before there were pandemic rules to break or lies to tell about the breakage, there was the promise to Get Brexit Done.
It is not done. That is why Johnson’s government is drafting a law that would give ministers the power to override the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit deal. This is the very treaty that Johnson hailed as “great”, “excellent”, a fulfilment of all his negotiating ambitions. If that were true, he would not now be planning to set it on fire.
Sound familiar? It should do. It is the latest sequel in a hackneyed franchise with a formulaic plot. In the Brexiteer imagination it is an action adventure movie. Brussels has taken a portion of UK sovereignty hostage. Plucky Boris must go in, all guns blazing, to retrieve it. In such escapades of derring-do, playing by the rules and respecting treaties is for remoaner softies.
A recap from previous episodes: to avoid reimposing a hard border on the island of Ireland, a special customs regime was agreed for the North that requires checks on some goods crossing from the British mainland. Johnson signed up to this. Ministers now claim it was never meant to be a permanent solution, by which they mean Johnson lied to his European counterparts as well as his voters. He never intended to honour the deal.
Until now, the government’s agitation has been expressed by fingering, but never quite pulling, the trigger on article 16 – the break clause written into the Brexit deal. But article 16 is a route to more negotiation and mediation within the scope of the treaty itself. It is a conventional weapon. The new device being assembled in the Downing Street bunker goes nuclear.
Will it be detonated? Veterans of past Brexit wars will be familiar with the cost-benefit equation. It comes down to a test of where Johnson thinks his short-term self-interest lies. The theory is that it takes a proper crisis for Brussels to take notice of British grievance. Currently, the EU is addressing the Northern Ireland question in technical, legal terms, via the commission. Johnson wants to escalate it to a deal between political leaders. He thinks a British prime minister shouldn’t have to haggle with bureaucrats. He should be stitching something up with Paris and Berlin. That’s how it worked in the old days. But in the old days Britain was a member of the EU. That isn’t how it works for “third countries”.
A downside to confrontation is that it would be divisive at a time when western nations are striving for solidarity over Russia’s attack on Ukraine. On that front, Johnson thinks his credentials as a stalwart friend of Kyiv are sufficiently well established – and noted in Washington – that he has wriggle room to make demands over Northern Ireland, a subject on which the Americans might previously have slapped him down.
But status as the most pro-Ukrainian leader in the room doesn’t get Johnson as far as he thinks in Brussels, where he isn’t in the actual room. He needs goodwill from Emmanuel Macron to shift diplomatic dials for him on the European council. The French president, with a newly acquired domestic mandate but a lot of trouble in his in-tray, won’t spend any political capital doing favours for a man he mistrusts, having dealt with him before.
The prime minister has never been one for cultivating foreign alliances, since it requires consistency and reliability. His interests are more parochial. Also, wounded by Partygate, his focus is now on the bare-knuckle fight for survival. To that end, a conflagration of EU issues might help to thaw relations with the rightwing faction that traditionally settles the fate of Tory leaders. It would irritate moderate MPs, but they aren’t as ruthless or as organised.
No rival for the leadership will risk criticising an act of hardline Brexit revivalism. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, fancies the top job and is notionally in charge of negotiations over Northern Ireland. She would not have chosen a manoeuvre as wantonly vandalistic as the protocol override bill, but she is said to be reconciled to the move. The chancellor has previously been an obstacle whenever No 10 has wanted to pick fights with Brussels, channelling Treasury anxiety about the cost of a trade war. But Rishi Sunak is badly diminished by recent political missteps around tax – the ones he raised for voters and the ones his non-domiciled spouse avoided paying. Johnson no longer sees him as a threat.
Cabinet has not discussed the plan to sabotage the Brexit deal in law. Much depends on elections next week. The Stormont assembly poll in Northern Ireland could trigger a crisis by making Sinn Féin the largest party. Unionists would then lose the right to name the first minister – a loss of political primacy that would be mostly symbolic, but culturally intolerable for that reason. Meanwhile, if council elections in England reveal massive discontent with Johnson, Tory MPs may be spurred to move against him.
Then there would be double temptation to go all in with a Brexit bust-up. Johnson would say that only scrapping the protocol could ease tensions in Northern Ireland (although in reality the election there will probably show a majority in favour of keeping it). The override law might not even need to be passed. The prime minister would be most interested in the spectacle – a battle with Brussels, obstruction in the House of Lords, the fulminations of remain-supporting liberals; a fireworks display to get the old Eurosceptic core vote oohing and aahing in appreciation, just like the old days.
Would it work? Probably not. The pledge to Get Brexit Done had such breadth of appeal because it raised hope of ending the toxic, self-involved national drama over an issue that most people had not considered all that important before a choice was forced on them in a referendum. Only a fanatical minority misses the fight enough to restart it. And today’s Johnson has lost the knack that his former self had for turning crisis into carnival. His levity no longer gets him leniency from an audience that has heard just a few too many lies. Still, there would be a certain tidy symmetry if his downfall included a Brexit bill that offered false resolution to a crisis without end – his last great dishonesty in office being a mirror of the first.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
