24 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
backstop had become a “frontstop.” On
the morning of October 17th, Dodds
and Arlene Foster, the D.U.P. leader,
accused Johnson of caving in to the
E.U. In simultaneous tweets with Jean-
Claude Juncker, the president of the
European Commission, Johnson an-
nounced the deal anyway. He boarded
a Royal Air Force jet in East London
and flew to a European Council meet-
ing in Brussels. Leaders arriving at the
meeting allowed themselves a moment
of elation. “It’s still the early after-
noon—I’m an optimist,” Arturs Kriš-
jānis Kariņš, the Prime Minister of
Latvia, said. Emmanuel Macron, of
France, said that Europe could now
move to a “nouvelle phase.”
In the adrenaline of making a deal,
it was easy to look past the effects that
a more radical, Johnson-led Brexit was
likely to have. Economic assessments
of the most recent proposals suggested
that the U.K.’s per-capita G.D.P. could
be as much as seven per cent lower, in
a decade, than if the country stayed
in the E.U. Companies in Britain’s
aerospace, automotive, chemical, food,
and pharmaceutical sectors warned of
the damage of straying too far from
the bloc’s rules. That evening, in the
belly of the monumental Justus Lip-
sius building, the E.U. leaders gave a
press conference that felt like a wake.
“It’s a little bit like an old friend that’s
going on a journey or an adventure,”
Varadkar, the Taoiseach, said. “We re-
ally hope it works out for them.” In
London, the Brexiteers celebrated. “It
is a really good, exciting deal,” Rees-
Mogg said. He compared Johnson’s
agreement to Tournedos Rossini—a
dish of filet mignon, foie gras, truffles,
and gravy.
B
rexit is an uncanny political pro-
cess because it is an inversion of
the way that things were supposed to
go. The world was becoming only more
connected; money and people flowed.
Europe was leading the experiment.
And then a population said no. In 2016,
Remainers tended to make economic
arguments for staying in the E.U., while
Leavers spoke about sovereignty and
the health of the nation. In truth, it
was a matter of instinct for both sides:
were you prepared to go on sharing
your agency with international forces
of unimaginable scale, or did you be-
lieve that an old country could some-
how reassert itself and claw out its own
domain? The question was more phil-
osophical than real. Being a member
of the E.U. cost less than two per cent
of Britain’s national budget. Most of
us did not care. But, once the ques-
tion was asked, it became fundamental,
and the prelude to every future ques-
tion. Choosing Brexit meant that we
would diverge. We would diverge from
Europe, and we would diverge from
one another.
Two days after Johnson made his
deal, he brought it to Parliament for
a yes-or-no vote. The House of Com-
mons sat on a Saturday for the first
time since the outbreak of the Falk-
lands War. Johnson rose to his feet
just after 9:30 a.m. His hands were
still. He found a sober tone that often
eludes him. “If we have been half-
hearted Europeans, it follows logically
that with part of our hearts—with half
our hearts—we feel something else,”
he said. “A sense of love and respect
for European culture and civilization,
of which we are a part.” His deal, he
continued, represented a chance to
“unite the warring instincts in us all.”
It was probably Johnson’s finest
speech as Prime Minister. It didn’t count
for much. In the afternoon, opposition
M.P.s, along with many of the Con-
servatives purged from the Party the
previous month, refused to approve
Johnson’s deal until the underlying leg-
islation necessary for Brexit had passed.
That night, the Prime Minister was
forced to send a letter to Donald Tusk,
the president of the European Coun-
cil, requesting another extension. He
didn’t want to be dead in a ditch, after
all. In a cover note, Johnson blamed
M.P.s for failing to “inject momentum”
into the process and said that he still
believed it was possible for Britain to
leave on October 31st.
With nine days to go, he tried a
final time. The government attempted
to force through the entire Withdrawal
Agreement Bill, now required for Brit-
ain to leave the E.U.—a hundred and
ten pages of legal text, and more than
three hundred pages of explanatory
notes and memorandums—in thir-
ty-six hours of debate. The law is a
monster: a latticework of E.U. rules
and U.K. legislation, along with pro-
visions governing Britain’s exit fees of
thirty-three billion pounds; the rights
of the three and a half million E.U.
citizens who live in the U.K.; and the
new, contentious arrangements for
Northern Ireland. I went to the House
of Commons to watch. For six hours,
opposition M.P.s expressed their fears
about workers’ rights and environmen-
tal standards. They pointed out that
Parliament had been given more time
to debate a bill on the use of wild an-
imals in circuses. Ministers were shaky
on the details. Nobody pretended that
the population would be better off.
D.U.P. members were furious. “What
I don’t take is a Prime Minister who
thinks I can’t read,” Sammy Wilson,
the Party’s Brexit spokesperson, told
the chamber. The debate ended in a
Pyrrhic victory for Johnson. At 7 P.M.,
M.P.s voted for the law to move for-
ward—the first time that Parliament
had indicated its support for any form
of Brexit—fifty-two to forty-eight per
cent, the same ratio by which the coun-
try split in 2016. Fifteen minutes later,
they voted against the government’s
plan to legislate at such speed.
Johnson sat on the front benches,
in the middle of it all. He crossed his
arms and hugged himself. He nodded
his head up and down and side to side.
He raised his legs and banged his heels
against the carpet. “How welcome it
is—even joyful—that, for the first time
in this long saga, this House has ac-
cepted its responsibilities, come to-
gether, and embraced a deal,” he said.
But the way ahead was still blocked.
“We will pause this legislation,” John-
son said. He would wait for Europe’s
leaders to agree to a further delay. He
would ask for a general election, and
he would probably win.
In the space of a few weeks this
fall—in “the compression,” as Baker,
of the E.R.G., called it—Johnson made
startling political progress. The glue
loosened. People diverged. Britain’s
constitutional fabric suffered, too, in
ways it is too early to understand. But,
in the process, Johnson clarified to a
great extent what Brexit is going to
look like and feel like. The shape of
the future is now visible. The uncer-
tainty has receded. The worst is most
likely yet to come.
