POLITICS | JAMES FORSYTH
Macron. I understand that Johnson will be
happy to talk to EU leaders at this summit
and that ‘a serious offer would be taken very
seriously’. However, if the EU sticks to its
position that the withdrawal agreement can-
not be reopened, then the No. 10 view is that
there will be nothing to discuss on Brexit.
If that summit passes off without any
indication that the negotiations are going to
restart, then it will be clear that no deal is
the most likely outcome. At that point, the
anti-no deal forces in the Commons will act
and, given that Johnson’s working major-
ity is down to one, they may well succeed
in bringing the government down. Inside
No. 10, there is pessimism about their ability
to survive such a no-confidence vote. Theydon’t, however, believe that their opponents
will be able to agree on an alternative prime
minister. One confidant of the Prime Minis-
ter tells me: ‘It is not in Corbyn’s interest to
back some caretaker PM. It would create a
centrist, Remainer party in parliament.’
The campaign that would follow would
be a thoroughly unpredictable affair. We
have never had a nationwide, four-party gen-
eral election before.
Regardless of how much he says he
doesn’t want one, Johnson has been pre-
paring for an election from the moment he
arrived in Downing Street. His first speech
emphasised Brexit, more resources for the
NHS, recruitment of 20,000 more police and
increased education funding. The language
in that speech was Johnsonian, but the sub-
stance of it could have come straight out ofa focus group. The latest Ipsos Mori polling
shows that voters’ top four issues are Brexit,
the NHS, crime and education.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters is
being placed far more directly under John-
son’s control. Isaac Levido, the highly regard-
ed new director of politics and campaigning,
has been told to get the party election-ready.
Ben Elliot, the new co-chair, is tasked with
bringing the money in — the party is desper-
ately hard up and Elliot has the connections
to bring in cash fast. At the same time, the
Tories will learn from Vote Leave on data
and other modern campaigning techniques.
In the past three years, Cummings has been
a frequent visitor to Silicon Valley and has
spent a lot of time thinking about what poli-
tics can learn from tech. Expect those lessons
to be applied in any campaign.
A 1 November election would mean it
took place straight after Brexit day. It falls
on a Friday rather than a Thursday but I
am told that this isn’t a problem — it is just
another convention that elections take place
on Thursdays. If the UK had left the EU, it
is hard to see what the Brexit party’s cam-
paign pitch would be; Johnson would have
succeeded in his plan to put them back in
their box. On the other side, anti-no deal
forces would have to decide whether they
now wanted to go back into the EU, which
will feel like a more extreme position once
the UK has actually left, or simply reopen
negotiations as soon as possible.
An election like this would be dominated
by Brexit, and that would cause problems
for Jeremy Corbyn, who has attempted to
maintain strategic ambiguity on the issue.
This worked very successfully for him in- In 2019 it could be his downfall.
An election on the first day of a no-deal
Brexit is risky for Johnson too. Whatever
disruption there was at the borders would
be on TV screens as voters went to the polls.
Others would question if it was right for the
government to delay the vote until straight
after such a nation-defining moment, and
the pound would be sinking.
Few things are certain right now, and no
one could be confident in predicting how an
autumn general election would unfold. But
that is where we appear to be heading.
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Shots podcast.T
he United Kingdom is a country gov-
erned, in large part, by convention —
but in the heat of the Brexit debate,
those conventions are beginning to evap-
orate. The Speaker of the House of Com-
mons overturned long-standing procedure
to limit Theresa May’s room for manoeuvre.
The opposition used a humble address to
the sovereign to force the publication of the
government’s full legal advice on the with-
drawal agreement, though the convention is
that such advice is confidential. Parliament
then impinged on the executive’s crown pre-
rogative powers by passing a law dictating
how the prime minister must behave at an
EU summit.
Under May, Downing Street sighed at
such behaviour but grudgingly accepted it.
Boris Johnson and his team have a different
response. If their parliamentary opponents
want to push the constitutional boundaries,
then they’ll do the same. The personal motto
of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s senior
adviser, is ‘with a pirate, a pirate and a half,
with a gentleman, a gentleman and a half’.
As we now know, Johnson would not
resign if he was defeated in a confidence
vote, as most would expect him to. Instead,
he would — as the fixed-term parliaments
act allows — use the following two weeks to
try to put together a majority. If he could not
do that, he would go to the country and fight
a general election after 31 October. The talk
in Whitehall is that the election could be on
the day after Brexit, 1 November, which
would mean the UK would leave the EU
during the election campaign.
Given that an exit date of 31 October
is already in law, there’s logic to this posi-
tion — but critics cry foul. They argue that
during an election campaign, a government
shouldn’t take any decisions that bind the
hands of its successor. They would almost
certainly challenge any attempt to try to
leave the EU by default. One Tory campaign
veteran predicts that this autumn will see
‘an election and a Supreme Court fight over
whether we can leave or not’.
Downing Street’s strategy has ensured
those who want to try to block Johnson from
pursuing a no-deal Brexit will feel obliged to
act as soon as parliament returns in Septem-
ber. This increases the importance of the G
Summit in Biarritz at the end of this month
— the first face-to-face meetings between
Johnson and Jean-Claude Juncker, Don-
ald Tusk, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Remember, remember, the first of November
One Tory veteran predicts ‘an
election and a Supreme Court fight
over whether we can leave or not’‘I’m passing this on in strict no confidence.’