Boris coup: Day 7

Day 7 of the Boris coup already. Time flies when you’re dismantling democracy.

Boris keeps using democratic language to mask his authoritarian intentions. He keeps piling it on. First, he threatened any fellow Conservative who opposed him in parliament with expulsion, meaning they wouldn’t be able to stand as Conservative candidates in any future election, ensuring their careers end ignominiously.

Now, he’s followed up on that threat by warning MPs that if Parliament votes to block a no-deal Brexit, he’ll call an election for 14 October. That would make the end of their careers much more imminent than they imagined. He feels it would focus their minds more clearly on the need to bow to his will.

You see? There’s nothing more democratic than an election. But in his hands, it becomes a blackmail threat to cow anyone with the guts to stand up to him.

Johson (l) and Corbyn may soon face off in an election
They both think they’re election winners but only one’s a truly redoubtable campaigner

It’s not entirely up to BoJo to call an election. He needs a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons. But the Labour leader Corbyn has been calling for an election for so long that he could hardly have his party vote against one now. He should, though: no opposition party has won an election from as low a poll standing as Labour currently enjoys (if ‘enjoy’ is the right word).

Corbynists try to comfort themselves with the thought that their man performed so much better than expected last time, in 2017. They forget that then he was up against Theresa May, who surprised most of us by turning out to be not just a mediocre campaigner but an absolutely lamentable one. Wooden, uncharismatic, constantly repeating the same phrase, “strong and stable”, long after voters had lost all enthusiasm for it.

As the coup experience has shown, Boris Johnson is a campaigner in a different league. He’s building a solid base in the electorate. It seems a near-certainty that he would win an election held in the next few weeks.

In fact, his greatest threat was from his right, from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. But Farage has said he would stand down candidates if Johnson sticks firmly to pursuing a no-deal Brexit. And Johnson certainly will.

Not that he says as much. He still claims that he’s pursuing a new deal. But he has repeatedly made clear that such a deal would have to drop the so-called backstop to keep the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic open. However, even the people he’s commissioned to find alternative solutions have told him they can’t.

As always with BoJo, most of what he says is simply smoke screen. Get through the smoke and you find more smoke. If you get right through all the layers, what you’ll find at the end is the one solid goal he has: Britain will leave the EU on 31 October, and will do so without a deal.

It’s his ability to deploy duplicity so effectively and capture support, even among people who know he’s lying, that makes him so redoubtable an adversary. I think some in Corbynist ranks are beginning to realise that. But, sadly, too few. 

And far too late.