Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 17:45 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
4 Opinion
W
hen answers are in short
supply, sometimes the best
we can do is try to ask the
right questions. Some of
those dive into legal and
constitutional arcana, as
experts try to work out how
Boris Johnson can climb
out of the hole he has spent this last week digging ever
deeper for himself. Now that the opposition parties
have refused to accede to his cunning plan for an
October election, and will next week see passed into
law their demand that he seek an extension of Britain’s
EU membership, he’s left with a series of unpalatable
alternatives – from breaking the law to resignation to
tabling a motion of no confi dence in himself.
Still, even if it’s later rather than sooner, polling day is
coming. So here goes with the three questions that will
decide the next election and, with it, the fate of Brexit.
First, when? N othing is certain, despite yesterday’s
move to block a poll before 1 November. What’s at stake
here is the context in which the election will take place.
Johnson’s preference has always been to face the voters
before the exit deadline, lest he be cast as having failed
in his “ do or die ” mission to leave by 31 October. This is
the prize the opposition has agreed to deny him, forcing
him, they hope, to confront the electorate in November
as a failure, guilty of either treachery or incompetence.
Their hope is that Johnson’s inability to take Britain
out of the EU will pump new air into the Brexit partyballoon, thereby splitting the leave vote that Johnson
had bet everything on uniting around himself.
But there’s risk here too. Some Labour MPs fear that
fury among pro-Brexit voters will be at its peak in the
immediate aftermath of 31 October, as those voters
realise they’ve been cheated of Brexit once again. In this
view, leavers will rally to Johnson’s cry of treachery,
seeing him as their defi ant, relentless tribune. They
won’t be diverted to Nigel Farage because Johnson will
be supplying the same populist drug, as illustrated by
his slash-and-burn antics this week. According to one
former cabinet minister, “He has decided to beat the
Brexit party by being the Brexit party.”
Second question: what cuts through? Or, put
another way, what’s the signal amid all this noise? For
those watching closely, glued to Twitter or following
rolling news, the last week has been extraordinary. If
they’re not sharing pictures of a languid Jacob Rees-
Mogg sprawled on the Commons benches, expressing
contempt for parliament in physical form, they’ve been
gasping at the gall of a Tory PM purging his party of some
of its grandest fi gures , two ex-chancellors included, and
at the remarkable feat of a new prime minister losing his
fi rst four Commons votes. But how much of that gets
through to the vast bulk of voters, who might catch the
odd bit of news on TV, a few headlines on commercial
music radio or via Facebook? While your Twitter feed
was spitting outraged noise at the culling of Nicholas
Soames , it’s possible that the signal was “PM fi ghts hard
for Brexit.” An example came on Thursday night, when
Johnson delivered a speech in front of a phalanx of
police cadets, wilting in the sun. In Westminster world,
following the entire event live, the focus was on the
sinister, Trumpian use of cops as props and on the PM’s
bizarre incoherence. But the fi ve-second clip on the Six
O’Clock News showed a PM backed by police saying he’d
rather be “dead in a ditch” than delay Brexit. Despite the
noise, that signal might be all he needed.
Third question: who unites their tribe? This will be
decisive, and it’s why the battle over timing has been
so intense. If Johnson can unite the pro-Brexit tribe ,
he can win – not least because there are more than 400
parliamentary seats that voted leave in 2016. Hence his
35%, core vote strategy. Labour’s only hope is that it can
pull off , and improve on, what it achieved in 2017, when
it brought most remainers under its banner.I
f there is a strategy underpinning Johnson’s
recent moves, it’s that desire to ensure hardcore
Brexiters have no need to look elsewhere. But it’s
fraught with peril. For one thing, it all but writes
off the 39% of Conservatives who voted remain,
discarding seats in Scotland, London and the
south-west. For another, it assumes that onetime
Labour voters in the Midlands and northern
England who voted leave, and even for Farage, won’t
have a visceral resistance to voting Tory. But they might.
Meanwhile, Labour has to hope that the last two years
of triangulation on Brexit will somehow be forgotten
and forgiven by committed remainers. Recall that four
in 10 Labour voters backed the Liberal Democrats in
May’s European elections. How can Labour win them
back? In an October election the pitch would have been
simple: vote Labour to block an imminent no-deal
crash-out from the EU. But if and when an extension has
been granted, that appeal will lose much of its unifying
urgency. Keep an eye too on the so-called Clause V
group that will draw up the next manifesto, in which
Len McCluskey and the pro-Brexit fi gures in Jeremy
Corbyn’s inner circle loom large. If what emerges is a
manifesto promise of a Labour Brexit, two things will
happen. Labour spokespeople will tangle themselves in
knots, as they explain that Labour will both seek a Brexit
deal and campaign not to Brexit. (For a preview, watch
Emily Thornberry’s discomfort on Thursday’s Question
Time .) And the Lib Dems will have a chance to make a
breakthrough, promising a policy as unambiguously
against Brexit as Johnson’s is for it.
There are other questions too, of course. Rarely
has there been more uncertainty about an imminent
election, from its date to its likely outcome. Only
one thing is already known: the stakes are almost
unbearably high.T
he character is called Mr President.
He’s a fussy little man who walks
briskly down a red carpet. The Russian
anthem is a clue, as are the golden
Kremlin doors. Yes, it’s Vladimir Putin,
making an appearance on a London
stage in A Very Expensive Poison ,
Lucy Prebble’s reimagining of the
story of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko’s murder
by Russia’s FSB spy agency, based on my 2016 book.
Reece Shearsmith plays Mr President with dark
charm. He addresses the audience directly. “Whenever
you tell a story you tell a lie,” he begins. The scene is
marvellously chilling. Mr President is compelling. He
has the best lines and we laugh with him. But does this
make us complicit in his deeds?
Prebble has written a play for our age. Her Mr
President is an alluring populist who deftly uses
humour to achieve his goals. He captures our post-
modern moment in which unscrupulous off -stage
politicians have realised – or perhaps rediscovered –
that truth is for suckers.
In 1998 the actual Litvinenko , an intelligence offi cer,
met Putin, his new boss. Litvinenko had denounced
his own FSB agency and accused its leadership of
corruption and crimes. His reward was suspension,
threats, arrest. He escaped to Britain. In exile, he
believed himself safe, a British citizen.
On stage, Putin appears in the Litvinenkos’ fl at,
alone. He picks up an ashtray from the table and
casually repositions it on the fl oor. It’s a small and
sinister gesture. Prebble’s message: we, the audience,
need to pay attention. Details matter.
I had my own ashtray moment. I arrived in Moscow
soon after Litvinenko’s murder in November 2006.
Was the Russian state behind his death? My question
led to a break-in and other intrusions. On one occasion,
FSB ghosts opened the window next to our small son’s
bed. We lived on the 10th fl oor. The message seemed to
be saying: take care, or your kid might tumble out.
Putin refused to extradite the murderers – Andrei
Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Lugovoi became a deputy
in the state Duma. He even won a medal.
The play uses evidence revealed in 2015 at a
public inquiry. The actual killers may be far away ,
but A Very Expensive Poison suggests that art can
be its own form of justice. The judge who presided
over the public inquiry concluded that Putin had
“probably” approved the assassination. His words
and Litvinenko’s death-bed testimony appear in the
play’s moving closing section.
The Litvinenko story is many things: a horror story
from the cold war transplanted to 21st-century London,
a parable of Russia’s dark return to authoritarianism, a
tale of Jacobean revenge. It is also a human drama. It is
about love and loss. At its centre is Marina Litvinenko –
a woman trying to navigate her way to the truth, across
a treacherous sea of lies and temporising.Jonathan
Freedland
Luke
Harding
The three
questions that
will decide the
next election
On the stage,
Litvinenko gets
the justice he
was denied
Nigel Farage in Lincoln this week PHOTOGRAPH: JOE GIDDENS/PARELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws