The Observer - 04.08.2019

Section:OBS 2N PaGe:41 Edition Date:190804 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 3/8/2019 17:46 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Observer
  Comment & Analysis 04.08.19 41

Those familiar with 24 , the

jeopardy TV series in which Kiefer Sutherland as Agent

Jack Bauer is tasked with saving the world by any means

necessary, will have had fl ashbacks. An Armageddon

Clock has been installed at Conservative campaign

headquarters counting down the time to Brexit by day,

hour, minute and second. Another digital timepiece is to

be installed in the prime minister’s offi ce.

This is one of several theatrical props intended to

super charge the atmosphere. As if the stakes were not

already vertiginous, they are being raised further as a

conscious act of government policy. After a rummage

down the back of the Treasury’s sofa, Sajid Javid declares

that he has found another £2bn to add to the £4bn-plus

already committed to contingency planning for a crash-

out Brexit. It is very doubtful whether that extra money

can be sensibly deployed in the short time left before

the end of October. To the government, announcing the

money was the most important thing, making it one

of the most expensive press releases in the history of

political propagandising. We are told that Michael Gove

is chairing daily meetings of the XS committee, the “war

cabinet”, to supposedly “turbocharge” preparations for

no deal. And more than £100m will be consumed by

one of the country’s “biggest ever public information

campaigns” to warn everyone what they have to do to

prepare for the worst.

Who is all this Armageddon theatre designed for?

Which audiences are expected to be infl uenced by

making a drama of the crisis? The ramping up of fears

that we are careering towards a no-deal Brexit has

certainly made an impression on currency markets,

where the pound has been sold down to its lowest

level since the immediate aftermath of the shock of the

referendum result in 2016. Companies are becoming

more terrifi ed that the menace of no-deal Brexit is a real

one. The trade body representing car manufacturers

warns that there is an “existential threat” to the health

of our largest goods industry, which accounts for the

employment of a million people. The National Farmers’

Union forecasts the mass slaughter of cattle. Some on

the Johnson team purport to be pleased that sterling is

plunging, industry is quaking, farmers are frightened

and nerves are shredding. They claim it as vindication of

a strategy designed to convince everyone that a no-deal

Brexit is a serious prospect , not just an expensive bluff

so transparent that the EU will see through it.

European leaders don’t need an Armageddon Clock

to tell them that we could be under 90 days away

from a calamity Brexit. Mr Johnson is refusing to open

negotiations – he has yet to even deign to meet them –

until the EU concedes that the withdrawal agreement is

dead. The EU is relentless in its insistence that they can’t

be re opened. Neither side is budging. I expect you’d like

to hear that this is posturing for public consumption

while private backchannels have been quietly opened

between Number 10 and European capitals to begin a

conversation about fi nding a way forward that avoids

disaster. I’m afraid I can’t give you that consolation. I’m

told by those who should know that the prime minister’s

envoys to the EU are simply repeating in private what

he is megaphoning in public: there will be a crash-out

Brexit if Europe does not blink.

As he points the country at the cliff edge and

depresses the accelerator, does prime minister Johnson

have any idea where this will end? It is a mistake to

think that he does. No one knows what he is really up

to, including himself. In one breath, he tells us that this

is “do or die” ; in another, he sets the odds on a no-deal

Brexit at “a million to one”.

He has to know that there is a strong possibility that it

will mean an autumn general election. The least credible

message from Number 10 is that it is not contemplating

this outcome. The Vote Leave band has been reunited in

Downing Street and the Cabinet Offi ce ready to reprise

the tunes that took it to a narrow win in 2016. We now

have a government dominated by the frontmen of the

Leave campaign and populated with its strategists. They

gained their reputations not for their achievements at

governing, but for their abilities at campaigning. What

they did in the referendum they will seek to repeat at the

election that may very soon be upon us. They will try to

re mobilise and re unite

the coalition of voters that

delivered them victory

three years ago. That

coalition fractured during

Mrs May’s prolonged and

futile effort to fi nd a Brexit

deal that could secure the

approval of parliament.

If enough of it can be

glued back together and

marshalled behind the

Tories, this offers what

is probably their only

plausible path to victory.

Our recent Opinium poll did not locate a majority in

the country for any one Brexit outcome. It did fi nd 45%

of respondents agreeing with the proposition that, if

the withdrawal agreement can’t be renegotiated, Britain

should “go ahead with Brexit on 31 October even if it

means leaving with no deal ”. And 45% is enough to win a

parliamentary majority in the British system, especially

if the opposition is fragmented and the alternative

candidate for the premiership is extremely unpopular.

Mrs May tried a more tepid version of this strategy at

the outset of her “I will deliver Brexit” election in 2017.

This backfi red for many reasons. She was a campaigner

so hopeless that she could not sell water to a man dying

of thirst. Labour’s face-both-ways position worked

then, as fudging does not now, and Jeremy Corbyn

successfully encouraged voters to think about issues

other than Brexit. The few Tory gains made from Labour

in Leave territories such as Mansfi eld weren’t enough

to compensate for the losses suffered by the Tories in

strongly Remainer constituencies such as Battersea.

Those who think that Mr Johnson can succeed where she

failed do so on the basis that opinion around Brexit has

become more intensely polarised, that he is an infi nitely

superior retail politician to Mrs May, his campaign

team is much sharper and Mr Corbyn’s reputation has

so decayed that he cannot repeat his expectations-

surprising performance in 2017.

This Tory strategy for winning an election makes

some very big and risky assumptions. One is that the

gains harvested by the Conservatives at the expense of

Labour among Leave-supporting voters will outweigh

Tory losses in Remain-supporting constituencies. Nearly

every top Lib Dem target is a Conservative seat, while

Scottish Nationalists are hoping to scalp Tory MPs

north of the border. The other perilous assumption is

that Nigel Farage’s party will fade away or fold up. The

leader of the Brexit party is enjoying being the object of

renewed attention and displays no signs of wanting to

retire again. He declares that he does not trust the prime

minister and he has a bitter history of mutual loathing

with Number 10’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings.

One lesson from the Brecon &

Radnorshire byelection is that the Brexit party doesn’t

have to do all that well – it polled barely a double-

digit share on Thursday – to hurt the Tories. If the

Conservatives could have added the Brexit party vote

and that of Ukip to their tally, they would have held the

seat with just over half the vote , rather than narrowly

lose it to the Lib Dems. They’d hope to put a harder

squeeze on the Brexit party in a general election, but

couldn’t be absolutely confi dent. All the hazards of this

strategy will be multiplied many times over if an election

takes place after 31 October. In one scenario, we would

still be in the EU, breaking the Tory leader’s “absolute

commitment” to his party that Britain will be out “under

any circumstances” and hugely boosting the Farag ist s.

In the alternative scenario, Britain has tumbled out

of the EU without an agreement. That is no longer

a threat or a promise. The countdown has reached

zero and no deal is a reality. Even in the less chilling

versions of a crash-out Brexit – the ones that don’t

involve supermarket shelves being stripped bare by

panic-buying and children dying for lack of life-critical

medicines – I wouldn’t want to be a prime minister

trying to make a case for his re-election when the

country has just suffered a big economic shock and the

currency is collapsing.

My suspicion is that the Armageddon Clock isn’t really

there to count down the seconds to Brexit day. It is there

to remind Boris Johnson how long he has left before it

becomes too late to avoid his own doomsday.

Andrew

Rawnsley

Boris Johnson’s Armageddon Clock:

what is it really counting down to?

(^) @andrewrawnsley
James Cleverly,
Tory party
chairman, points
cheerily at the
newly installed
Armageddon
Clock in
Conservative HQ.
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