PM Boris is bounding into Britain’s future

Boris Johnson is on a whistle-stop tour of Britain. Picture; AP.

Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, but to be a political journalist in Brexit London is very heaven. With apologies to William Words­worth, Britain under the new regime is surely the most compelling site for contested Western politics in the world. Even the perennial drama of Donald Trump and his sworn enemies looks pale and pedestrian by comparison.

Boris Johnson has hit the ground running. There is a lot of Scott Morrison about his approach to leadership. He’s not going to die wondering what would have happened if he had given the top job his best shot. Like Morrison at the start of his tenure, Johnson’s numbers in parliament are dire, his prospects seemingly bleak, he has rows and rows of enemies, detractors and sneering character assassins.

Much as was the case with Morrison, no one really thinks he can pull it off except, apparently, BoJo himself. As he set out on his inaugural tour of every part of Great Britain I continually expected him to burst out with: How great is the north! How great is Scotland! How great is Wales! And he did do that really, except he did it with the emollience of a classics scholar who has spent several decades as an immensely successful newspaper columnist, author and broadcast personality.

Like Morrison, Johnson has brought tremendous new energy to government. Not just his own energy, which is prodigious, but a new energy in organisation. He understands that in securing Britain’s departure from the European Union he has both to achieve a great deal administratively and simultaneously to campaign relentlessly to bring the people with him. He must create public opinion momentum to put pressure on parliament, the civil service, the media and every part of the British establishment that so thoroughly hates Brexit and has tried to frustrate it at every turn.

So he has brought in the genius of the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, to refine, energise and in many ways execute the perpetual campaign the Johnson government must become for as long as it is in office. And he has given his once close friend and later bitter rival, Michael Gove, a hard Brexiteer himself and perhaps the government’s most competent minister, the task of overseeing the urgent and ludicrously delayed serious preparations for leaving the EU without a deal, which becomes more likely as each day passes. A small war cabinet will meet every morning and be the executive driver of the government. It has a unity of purpose, to deliver the best Brexit possible by October 31.

Of course a million things can go wrong. Absolutely no outcome is assured. The whole establishment wants Johnson to fail. A minority of his own party wants him to fail. The formidable and malicious machinery of the EU, acting with a comprehensive disregard for democracy and a determination to humiliate Britain comprehensively, wants him to fail. He has been wickedly handicapped by the performance of his predecessor.

Theresa May’s prime ministership emerges as not only the most unsuccessful in modern British history, but as something contemptible in itself. The most important news revelation of recent weeks is the confirmation that she never once threatened the EU figures she was negotiating with that she would walk away and have a no-deal Brexit if they couldn’t agree on a decent deal. Yet in her first comprehensive statement on Brexit she declared that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

Yet the deal she finally got was the definition of a bad deal. The worst imaginable. Under the Withdrawal Agreement Britain would notionally exit the EU but had to continue to abide by all the EU rules and then would be locked into this kind of arrangement forever under the so-called Irish backstop agreement. And Britain could only ever exit the backstop if the EU gave it permission to do so.

May made no serious preparations for a no-deal Brexit but went through the motions of making them. Assuming her first statement — no deal is better than a bad deal — was sincerely meant, then she utterly lost her nerve subsequently. But the fake preparations for no-deal mean she was not bluffing the EU, she was actually lying to her own voters, pretending to have a no-deal option when she wouldn’t do it under any circumstances.

Then when her own party overwhelmingly and predictably rejected the abject surrender of her Withdrawal Agreement she wasted many more months just putting the same deal to parliament over and over again. The only thing she would courageously defend was the abjectness of her surrender. If she had approached her job with 10 per cent of Johnson’s energy and conviction May would have won handsome re-election and Britain would be out of the EU by now.

A lot of things happened this week. The pound fell. This is not a judgment yet on no-deal but a sign of the acute uncertainty of everything and the radical fearmongering of Johnson’s opponents. Up to a certain point, currency devaluation could be good for Britain. A no-deal Brexit means Britain would trade with the EU on World Trade Organisation terms. The biggest single disadvantage of this is that British exports to the EU would face EU tariffs. Most of these tariffs are not very high. Their cost, in terms of an export’s competitiveness, would be offset by devaluation.

Boldly, sensibly and attractively, Johnson’s government decided he would not go to Europe for further face-to-face talks unless EU leaders agreed the backstop provisions would be scrapped. Johnson is 100 per cent right in this attitude. There is no point making endless begging trips to Europe only to be humiliated by a ruthless bureaucracy exercising its core skill; tying its democratic critics and opponents in endless knots of bureaucratic blather and process torture.

Johnson said: “We’re not aiming for a no-deal Brexit, we don’t think that’s where we’ll end up. This is very much up to our friends and partners across the channel.” Many British analysts believe he is bluffing. More importantly, they believe the EU believes he is bluffing, or that even if he is not bluffing the House of Commons won’t finally let him enact a no-deal Brexit.

But that is a very vexed question, and very unclear. There’s a lot a determined government can do. And once Britain is out, it’s out. The EU would never readmit it on acceptable terms and that half of Britain that hates what the EU has become would never accept the craven terms Brussels might offer for readmission. Johnson is giving the project of securing a sovereign, democratic, self-governing future for Britain his best shot. More strength to his elbow. Just now, he’s the greatest show on Earth.