officials described it as a “swimming
pool” of rules, in which Britain would
be partially submerged and Northern
Ireland would be in the deep end. For
Remainers, the arrangement captured
the pointlessness of Brexit. The coun-
try would continue to obey E.U. laws,
but without having a say in their for-
mulation. For Brexiteers, May’s back-
stop seemed to reveal the real intentions
of European officials and the British
deep state: to never let the country leave
at all. “That deal was so bad,” Baker,
the chairman of the E.R.G., told me.
“It was like exiting into a prison from
which you can glimpse your freedom
but never taste it.”
Johnson came to power promising
to scrap the backstop. On August 21st,
Angela Merkel, the German Chancel-
lor, offered him thirty days to solve the
conundrum. Johnson described it as a
“blistering timetable” and then seemed
to ignore it.
During the hiatus, it wasn’t clear
that the British government wanted a
deal at all. In early September, Cum-
mings was quoted in the British media
describing the negotiations as a “com-
plete sham,” designed to run down
time. (Cummings denied saying this.)
Two weeks later, Johnson’s Brexit Sec-
retary, Stephen Barclay, flew to Ma-
drid and gave a speech warning darkly
about how British imports of Spanish
sherry and Manchego cheese might
be affected. “We risk being trapped in
a zero-sum game, which will lead to
zero outcomes,” he said. In the talks,
British negotiators announced that, in
any future trade deal, they no longer
wanted to keep the U.K.’s social and
environmental rules in step with the
E.U.’s—indicating a more radical de-
parture than May’s government ever
envisaged. E.U. officials bristled. “The
U.K. is not Singapore,” one senior offi-
cial told me. “This vision will rapidly
hit reality.”
The atmosphere was bad. But ev-
erybody knew that Johnson was a flex-
ible character, who might be willing
to do anything to get out of a jam.
“There is that paradox,” the senior offi-
cial said. “The problem is that nobody
really knows the motive of the strat-
egy of Johnson.”
The Prime Minister made his pitch
to replace the backstop on the last day
of the Conservative Party conference.
Extra seats had been set up in the au-
ditorium. Party members waved Union
Jacks. The lights dimmed and the words
“Get Brexit Done” were projected ontofive screens. The crowd chanted, “Boris!
Boris!” Johnson entered to the open-
ing chords of “Baba O’Riley,” by the
Who. He is thickset. His hair, an as-
tral blond, is swept forward in a short
bowl and maintained in a permanent
state of semi-mussedness. He cannot
resist a buzzy phrase. Onstage, he de-
scribed Brexit Britain as “a world-class
athlete with a pebble in our shoe.” He
said, “If Parliament were a laptop, then
the screen would be showing, I’m afraid,
the pizza wheel of doom.”
Johnson stretched and swung his
arms to get himself going. He pumped
his knees under the lectern. He wrig-
gled his fingers to enliven some talk
about high-speed Internet cables,
which he described as “super-infor-
mative vermicelli.” He muttered, “It’s
true, it’s true,” when people laughed
or clapped. He said only a few lines
about his new plan for Northern Ire-
land. “This is a compromise by the
U.K.,” he said. “And I hope very much
that our friends understand that and
compromise in their turn.” Then he
asked the Party faithful about a no-
deal exit: “Are we ready for it?” The
hall cheered. “Yes, we are,” Johnson
affirmed.
The details of his proposal were
published a few hours later. It was a
dizzying scheme—even by the tech-
nical standards of the Brexit talks—
with ad-hoc customs checks away from
the border and other checks on goods
crossing the Irish Sea. Instead of a
hard border, there would be two “half
borders.” The whole instrument would
rely on the support of the Northern Ire-
land Assembly, the territory’s fractious
parliament, which had not sat for almost
three years, owing to a scandal caused
by subsidies for wood-pellet-burning
boilers. E.U. officials whom I spoke to
were politely nonplussed. “What we
have on the table is a kind of mixtum,
a composite of various elements,” the
European ambassador said. “That is
maybe the particular challenge of this
proposal.” Given Johnson’s rhetoric,
no one was sure that the idea was even
serious. “Are we being gaslighted by
the British government?” an E.U. dip-
lomat asked me.
For almost a week, the offer hung
in the air. Writing in the Belfast Tele-
“There! Now all you need is some sympathetic lighting.” graph, Jonathan Powell, who was Tony