short for Deliver Brexit, Unite the country, Defeat Jeremy Corbyn, Energise. It seems obvious that any
election campaign launched before Mr Johnson has actually delivered Brexit would not “defeat Jeremy
Corbyn”. It would, rather, suffer from the glaring fact that he hadn’t actually delivered on Brexit.
Like his ill-starred predecessor, Mr Johnson has one job to do – getting the UK out of the EU – and he
cannot afford to go to the country before he has achieved it. Whether that happens on 31 October or not is
secondary. The voters would not take much of a different view if the Brexit legislation was signed off on,
say, 5 November, another symbolic date. The important point is whether Mr Johnson has done what he has
based his entire political career on doing. If not, he risks humiliation at the polls, and a record short
premiership.
Brexit, until and unless it is either achieved or abandoned, stands as the most potent threat to the future of
the Conservative Party in decades, if not generations. On the one side it is having its support cannibalised
by the Brexit Party. The Farage-ists are simultaneously infiltrating and destabilising the Conservative Party
and threatening to stand in all 650 seats in the UK, even against their Eurosceptic allies and, apparently, the
DUP.
On the other side, the Liberal Democrats are also tearing a lump out of the Tories’ more pro-EU wing, with
talk of defections. The lesson of the Peterborough and Brecon by-elections seems to be that the
Conservatives and the Brexit Party are competing for the same vote, and splitting it. Meanwhile, the
Remain forces are getting better at putting up a united front, even without the Labour Party.
Even though Mr Johnson may be well ahead of Jeremy Corbyn, in such a four- or five-party system (if we
include Greens, Plaid and the SNP), and with a complex web of pro- and anti-Brexit alliances to be
forged, it is impossible to call a pre-Brexit general election. It would, in any case, be virtually impossible for
either main party to win an overall majority, let alone a healthy one. After Brexit, if it happens, the Brexit
Party and the Liberal Democrat challenge would fade away.
It is reported that Dominic Cummings wants to defy parliament, the palace and constitutional order and
convention by threatening an election campaign which allows the Brexit due date of 31 October to fall
during a period when parliament will be dissolved. The thinking goes that a vote of confidence lost by the
government would indeed mean a general election – but only after a fortnight of horse-trading. If a new
government cannot be formed, then Mr Johnson can call a poll at his leisure, allowing Brexit to simply
happen in the meantime, as is called for under the legal fallback of the Article 50 and withdrawal agreement
legislation.
The suspicion must be that it is more of the same old bluff. The government’s negotiating tactic is to talk as
tough as possible, act as hard as possible and spend as much money as is needed to induce the EU to
capitulate and agree to the UK’s illogical cake-and-eat-it terms. Hence all the inspired leaks about
ministerial briefings and the “war cabinet” and emergency measures and the public propaganda campaign.
The putative notion of a “people vs politicians” election is credible. It is also quite possible that Mr
Cummings is working his magic on Facebook. They look like they mean business – Brexit will happen on 31
October “do or die”, “whatever the circumstances”, “come what may”.
It’s a plausible enough story – except for one vital problem: everyone knows it is a gigantic, elaborate,
expensive bluff. Mr Johnson himself once slipped and called no deal a “million to one chance”. Everyone
knows that parliament can and will stop a no-deal Brexit. There is a majority against it in parliament and,
sooner or later, that judgement will be given legal effect, including by Conservative MPs who feel they have
nothing else to lose.
It is true that the last Commons vote held to stop no deal failed to do so – but that was in the middle of the
Tory leadership campaign. It would have been very bad manners for Tories to spoil their own fun.