Boris Johnson

Has Boris blinked?

Published: 27 August 2019
Author: Richard Parry

The tour round UK capitals, the visits to the police and hospitals, the attempt to shift the agenda away from Brexit, the release of money for popular causes, the appeal for a united patriotic front – some aspects of Boris Johnson’s early weeks were reminiscent of Theresa May’s, not surprising as the Prime Ministerial office has its own playbook and the institution takes over behaviour. Where things had been different is the Brexit strategy – no visits to EU leaders to be told that their side was solid, optimism not pessimism about leaving even without a deal, intensive no-deal planning with a political will not seen before, no leaks of dire no-deal warnings, a solid front that it is the EU27 that would have to change its position or take the blame for bad outcomes. 

And then on 18 August the Sunday Times published ‘Operation Yellowhammer’ appraisals of no-deal risks apparently dating from August and so within the Johnson era (perhaps an initial briefing to the new PM but hard to dismiss as an obsolete document from the May era). Visits were made to Angela Merkel on 21 August and Emmanuel Macron the following day, with a meeting with Donald Tusk at Biarritz on 25 August. An hour-long phone call with Leo Varadkar on 19 August replaced what Irish sources has suggested would be a visit to Dublin. Assertions that the EU had to blink first were replaced by May-style visits  - probably going better on the personal level, but still fatally flawed in their search for changes in EU27 positions to make it easier to sell Brexit as a positive process.

Johnson’s letter to Donald Tusk on 19 August played one of his stronger cards on Ireland of offering to accept a legally binding commitment not ‘to put in place infrastructure, checks, or controls at the border’ and hoping that the EU would do likewise. And if alternative arrangements are not in place before the end of the transition period (thankfully, ‘implementation period’ has been binned) there is tiny opening to a new kind of backstop: ‘we are ready to look constructively and flexibly at what commitments might help, consistent of course with the principles set out in this letter’.

Stating as a given that the Irish border must remain invisible, and requiring customs arrangements to work around that, is a typical Boris ploy. He is not a details man, but international trade is a field where it is difficult to use rhetoric to replace technical command. The Commission is more realistic and legalistic: that is where the concept of the ‘integrity of the single market’ comes from. Observing that even mature and well-flowing borders like France-Switzerland and Norway-Sweden have required some physical demarcation, they do not buy into leaps of faith as a part of a withdrawal agreement.   But that does expose the tension between the Commission as the ultimate rule-maker and the Irish government as potentially standing alongside the UK in its assertion of Irish exceptionalism on concepts of what a trade border means.

Far from the EU being required to drop the backstop, the Berlin and Paris visits tended to throw the responsibility back on the UK to devise new alternative arrangements. The UK did a lot of work on this early on, set out Northern Ireland and Ireland: Position Paper (16 August 2017), which is where Boris’s ‘trusted trader’ mumblings originate. Johnson’s Biarritz interviews showed an awareness that he might have been set up by the EU and attempted to revert to his original line. His ‘touch and go’ appraisal of the chances of a deal showed how easily breezy optimism can evaporate.

The difficulty now is fitting pragmatic ways forward into the legislative structuring of the issue. If, as Johnson’s letter to Tusk asserted, ‘the backstop cannot form part of an agreed Withdrawal Agreement’, the latter is repudiated by the UK and there is no time to negotiate another.  Given stated positions, it is hard to see anything much beyond a reworking of EU concessions to Theresa May at Strasbourg in March, where ever-more convoluted iterations of why the backstop will not happen still fell short of legal certainty. Boris might try to sell it as a breakthrough allowing him to recommend the withdrawal agreement/political declarations package to the Commons. He would surely feel compelled to offer no-deal as the consequence of rejecting anything he might propose, again seeking Labour support to compensate for Conservative hard-liners. He is threatened with May’s fate of stumbling into extensions – unless he really will commit to carrying through in practice as well as rhetoric, day after day from 31 October, no deal and all its risks to the UK and Ireland.  

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