Boris got it done. Or did he?

He got it done!

Boris showing the way forward. And the subtle approach he took

Boris got Brexit done. 31 January, 2020, Brexit Day, is a date to remember. It’s the day that Boris Johnson ended Britain’s 47-year membership of the EU.

Well, ‘done’ is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. It’s one thing for the husband to leave the house, suitcase in hand. It’s quite another to finalise the divorce arrangements, divide the property and start paying the alimony.

What makes it worse is that the lovely young thing from accounting for whom the husband precipitated the split may not turn out to be quite so accommodating as at first he convinced himself. She may, indeed, to be at least as demanding as the wife he left. Not perhaps a problem if you’re Rupert Murdoch, with the resources to meet pretty much any demand from a string of wives. Not so hot if you’re a middle-ranking executive whose income will have trouble stretching to cover both alimony and the mortgage on a luxury new apartment.

That’s when the new-found freedom starts to look a little expensively purchased.

Britain’s in that position. It’s walked out, head held high, nose in the air, daring the deserted spouse to do its worst. But far from being done, the really difficult part of Brexit starts now. The lawyers, in this case negotiators, are getting in on the act, and sharpening the knives.

Brexiters have always claimed that Britain would, somehow, be in the driving seat. It would dictate terms to the remaining 27 EU members, who would fall over themselves in their eagerness to sign a trade deal, on terms favourable to Britain, at the earliest opportunity.

Equally, the rest of the world would be beating a path to Britain’s door to do the same. In the lead would be the US, with Trump enthusiastic, anxious even, to provide his friend Boris with an agreement which might go so far as to sacrifice some US interests, such is his determination to see Boris right.

Meanwhile, the Faragists of the Left, or Lexiters as they call themselves (left-wing Brexiters), claim that leaving the EU is going to free up the country to look after its workers and its poor the way they’d like. Once away from the devious, conspiratorial capitalist club that is the EU, Britain will be free to usher its people into a sunlit, socialist upland.

Maybe all that will happen. If so, I will hold up my hand and admit I got things wrong. My fear is that Brexiters have been deluding themselves that the country is in the position of Rupert Murdoch when, in reality, it’s like the middle-ranking executive. And the US isn’t the demure assistant from accounting, anxious to do her new man’s bidding, she’s the former actress and model used to having all the best in life brought to her and thrown at her feet by admirers who are all but worshippers.

The EU 27 have already warned Britain that they see themselves calling the shots. A hugely favourable deal is on offer, but only on certain conditions: the UK must accept that it will be on a level playing field with the rest of Europe. That means maintaining the same standards concerning quality, state aid and workers’ rights. In other words, it means behaving as an EU member, with no say over the regulations it has to follow.

As for the US, it too is going to have its demands. Great deal, on condition that Britain accepts US food standards, drug prices and commerce regulations generally. Brexiters promised that Britain would be taking back control. It seems to me that, in reality, it will be a rule taker.

As for the socialist uplands, the results of the December general election show that this is at best a remote dream. The Conservatives are firmly in power now, and with a majority that may well see them through the next election too. Paradoxically, the Faragists of the Left blame Brexit for this, though it leaves them as keen as ever on Brexit itself.

I could, as I said, be wrong about all of this. That would be a huge relief. But I think that’s the task on Brexiters now: their job is to prove that they can deliver on their promises. And Lexiters have to show how they plan to guarantee better rights and living standards for the underprivileged they claim to represent.

The night of 31 January will be a time of celebration for them. They have the weekend to recover. Then the real work starts.

Let’s hope the hangover won’t be too awful. Because, sadly, it won’t just be Brexiters who suffer it. Sadly, I fear the rest of us will be paying the price of their self-indulgence too.

Boris Coup: Day 59 (yawn)

He came in with a roar, and is going out with a whimper.

Benito: an autocrat who kept Parliament and judges under control
But, in the end, it didn’t work out for him either

Boris Johnson, in his autocratic ambition, wanted to dominate British politics like Mussolini dominated the politics of Italy. He gaily suspended parliament, and only discovered afterwards that he didn’t have the judges on his side (Benito was much more careful in ensuring he could count on the judiciary), so his bold and splendid Trumpian act was ruled illegal by the courts.

No sooner had the suspension been overturned than it became clear how necessary it had been to him. He has yet to win a substantive vote in the Commons. Every time he pushes for something, the MPs push right back…

This has enabled him to present himself as the people’s representative blocked at every time by those pesky MPs trying to flout the people’s will. A latter-day David taking on the Goliath of the Establishment.

This is amusing. What can be more British establishment than a man who was educated at Eton and Oxford and has lived the life of an entitled grandee ever since?

There are, however, people sad enough to fall for this tale. But then there are people out there sad enough to believe that Britain will be better off outside the EU than in. Basically, there are a lot of sad people.

They’re also misled. By blocking Boris, MPs are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re holding government to account. Those who feel they should let Boris do just what he wants are endangering the very basis of our democracy. I hope we never see governments that can do what they want whether our representatives like it or not.

Now Boris has come up with a new Brexit arrangement rather worse than the one Theresa May agreed. He tried to force it through in just a few days (coup habits die hard) and was told by Parliament that they weren’t having that. So now he’s proposing a deal to MPs themselves: if they’ll let him have a General Election on 12 December, he’ll give them more time to scrutinise his bill.

This is a curious and interesting approach to compromise.

MPs are taking the extra time anyway, whether or not he concedes it to them. So it’s hard to see how Boris is offering them anything they couldn’t take for themselves. In return, he wants them to do him a favour. Poor Boris. He needs to take a few more classes on the art of the deal, which usually involves both sides offering the other something they couldn’t get any other way.

He should certainly take those classes from someone other than Donald Trump, who, like Boris, seems much better at claiming he’s made deals than actually concluding them. As he’s shown with North Korea.

Why does Boris want a general election? Well, he’s tired of being defeated in the Commons. He thinks an election would give him a majority. With a ten-point lead in the polls, that makes sense. Unfortunately, plenty of people even in his own party aren’t so sure. Boris has always liked to play the buffoon, but unfortunately a lot of voters now seem him as a buffoon. That lead might vanish in the campaign.

To get an election, Boris needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament. For that, he needs Labour MPs to agree. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been demanding an election, long, loud and frequently, pretty much since the last one. Why? He thinks voters love him and he can win. A ten-point poll deficit? He reckons he can turn that around.

His supporters agree, because last time he came from even further behind and came a far better second than anyone had expected. They seem to forget that coming second is of no value. There are no silver medals in parliamentary elections. Come second, and you’ve lost.

A lot of Labour MPs are beginning to wonder whether a general election right now’s such a good idea. After all, Corbyn did better than expected when he was barely known to the electorate. He was also up against a dismal campaigner, in Theresa May. This time, voters have had plenty of chance to see how he dodges the difficult questions, how he dithers in reaching a decision – why he’s even dithering now, over an election – and he’s up against a far better campaigner in Boris.

The net result of all this? We have no idea of how things will turn out. Will Boris get his deal through Parliament? Will he get his election? Will he win or will he lose?

Looks like we have further exciting times ahead. Rather like the last three and a half years since the referendum. Yawn.

Brexit started as a spectacular catastrophe. It’s morphing into a boring disaster. Alas, poor Britons.

Boris Coup: Day 28

Isn’t it great? 

Today, on day 28 of his coup, we have official confirmation, from the highest court in the land, that Boris Johnson broke the law. Which means trying to avoid scrutiny by proroguing parliament wasn’t just a naked power grab, it was illegal.

The UK Supreme Court on its way to the ruling that
outlaws Boris and his coup

To those who’ve claimed that my use of the word ‘coup’ is over the top for what Boris has done, let me just say that an illegal power grab seems to be the textbook definition of a coup. No tanks on the streets, sure, but a coup all the same.

For the moment, the UK remains, however, a state ruled by law. This decision ought therefore to be obeyed. Johnson says he will respect it, but who knows? He broke the law with the prorogation itself, so no one can say with any certainty that he won’t try to break it again. One can only hope, but watch him carefully.

If Parliament holds its nerve, it can even bring him down now. If enough Tories, or more to the point ex-Tories kicked out by Boris, join with enough Opposition MPs, they can pass a no-confidence vote.

Then things would get really interesting. There would be an opportunity to form what many are calling for, a government of national unity. That’s when we’d come up against another hitch. Jeremy Corbyn, leader in name of the Labour Party, has said he would not support anyone other than himself to lead such a government. Few MPs – indeed few voters – would have any more confidence in him than in BoJo.

After all, why should they? Who led the fight back against BoJo’s coup, the one that led to today’s Supreme Court Decision against him? The Scottish and Welsh governments, and a series of individuals, most notably Gina Miller who has now won two major decisions against the government (the other one was to force a parliamentary vote on Brexit at all).

But where was Corbyn?

Why, he was plotting against his Deputy Tom Watson. He confirmed as much to Andrew Marr on BBC TV on Sunday, when he said that, while he knew there were conversations “about the role of deputy leader”, he “did not know that that particular motion was going to be put at that time.”

A non-denial denial. In other words, he knew about the plot. And to all those who say that Owen Smith mounted a coup against Corbyn when he ran for leader, I would reply that it was a legitimate political action, respecting the Labour Party Constitution, open, transparent, followed by debate, and with a result accepted by the loser.

What happened in the move against Watson was that a motion to abolish his position was brought in, without notice, at the end of a meeting, to try to nod it through with minimal debate. Now that’s a coup attempt.

So Corbyn played a minimal role in the fight against the Boris coup. And he showed himself capable of being as nasty and underhand as any machine politician. Indeed, rather like Boris himself.

So why would anyone want him to take over?

If a unity government is to be formed, therefore, there will be a lot of obstacles to overcome. We’d need both Labour and Tory MPs to rebel. In short, we’d need MPs to stand up to the deplorable leaders both main parties have inflicted on themselves.

Of course, we shouldn’t write off BoJo yet. There’s a chance he may just brave his opponents, even in defiance of the law. Or then again he may play on Corbyn’s obsessive ambition to get to Downing Street: Jeremy may not be able to resist the temptation of an election, even though he’s fifteen points behind in the polls.

Then Boris might get back with a Parliamentary majority. Which would mean he could exercise personal rule even within the law. Giving us hard Brexit, subservience to the US and an assault on basic rights.

Then we’ll really know what “taking back control” means.

Boris Coup: Day 15

Day 15 of the coup and, it has to be said, it still isn’t all going Boris’s way.

At least, he’s finally got his prorogation of Parliament in place. On Monday evening. Just as soon as he possibly could. On the way, in the small hours of Tuesday morning, he did have to lose one more vote – maintaining his 100% record of six votes lost out of six votes held – when the House of Commons failed to agree his second demand for a snap general election.

But at any he’s got those irritating parliamentarians out of his hair for the next few weeks. Just like Charles I did when he got fed up with them. Though, to be fair, that didn’t work out all that well for Charles, the only king literally to have lost his head.

In any case, day 15 saw the announcement that the highest court in Scotland decided that the prorogation was illegal and declared it null and void. They didn’t actually order that Parliament be recalled, leaving it to the Supreme Court in London to confirm or deny its judgement and decide whether to issue the order.

Still, however the Supreme Court decides, it was good to see one set of judges saying that it was unconstitutional to suspend Parliament, just because it was annoying the Prime Minister. Most of us would feel the same. Well, most of us who think that Parliamentary Democracy isn’t just an empty phrase.

Tom Watson: only Deputy Leader of Labour
But showing a lot more leadership than his nominal boss

Meanwhile, on the other side of the now-suspended House of Commons, Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is due to speak out for a clear decision by the Party that it demands a new referendum even before an election – Watson reckons that an election can’t decide the Brexit issue – and that it explicitly backs remaining in the EU in that referendum.

An excellent plan. We’ve had three years of trying to find a Brexit formula that will please a majority of the people, and have been unable to come up with one. Doesn’t rather suggest that the problem isn’t about one deal rather than another, but about Brexit itself? There simply is no Brexit deal that will leave us better off.

So why not oppose Brexit altogether?

And Labour, committed as it is to protecting the interests of the many, should surely be opposing a measure that would leave the many less well of than today.

It’s good to see leadership from the Labour Party. Though disheartening that it has, once more, to come from someone other than the nominal leader.

That leader, Jeremy Corbyn himself, is sticking firmly on the fence on Brexit, and keeps insisting that he wants to see a general election soon. Though not quite as soon as he was demanding a while back. It must suit him to have the excuse of wanting to get a no-deal Brexit firmly off the table first, since he must have worked out that with the polls as bad for Labour as they now are, he would be unlikely to win a majority just now.

The interesting thing is that the Tories, too, are doing badly. Theresa May must be getting some consolation for having been driven out of office by the ghastly BoJo when she sees what a mess he’s in. She must be splitting her sides.

In fact, one of the eye-openers of the first 15 days of the coup is what it has revealed about Boris. Yes, he’s just as unpleasant, narcissistic and authoritarian as most of us imagined. But, and this has certainly come as a surprise to me, he’s proved himself a far less effective politician than I thought.

My fear has been that all his car crashes of the last few days might just make his supporters stronger in their backing, seeing him as the victim of the vile tricks of those wicked Parliamentarians. But the last two polls have his lead down in the low single figures, from the low double figures. Still a lead – no good news for Corbyn there – but far less than before the coup.

So it looks like he may be a significantly less redoubtable figure than I had feared.

For that relief, at least, let’s be profoundly grateful…

Boris Coup: Day 13

The face of day 13: John Bercow.
One of the great Commons speakers. We shall learn to miss him.

After several days of having Parliament inflict defeat after defeat on him, day 13 is when Boris’s coup at last enters into full effect (not enough happened on day 12, which is why I had a break and didn’t dignify it with its own post). The hated Parliamentarians who have been tormenting him are to be suspended. 

I mean, not suspended as individuals, though I wouldn’t put it past him to wish he could. For now, he’s merely suspending the whole institution. That’s the measure known as prorogation.

Attentive followers of this series of posts will remember that this is was the coup act his junta first thought of. Now they’re moving into implementation. Parliament will have no voice for the next five weeks at least.

Executive authority with no scrutiny. Power without responsibility. As another Tory Prime Minister put it, the prerogative of the harlot down the ages.

Above all, it’s the autocrat’s dream.

And, boy, does he need it. I mean, look what’s been happening to him. He’s living proof of the falsehood of the old saying that the truth never hurts. Only the truth hurts, and MPs, from the Opposition but even from his own party (though he then kicks them out, so I suppose they’re the new Opposition) have been exposing the truth about BoJo.

Look at the high-profile defections. It’s pretty desperate when even your own brother finds the atmosphere you’ve created so toxic he can’t work with you. But his resignation was followed by an even more damaging one: that of Amber Rudd, the most senior of the handful of old-style, one-nation Tories (relatively moderate pragmatists as opposed to hard-right ideologues) that had managed to hang on in his government in increasing despair at his antics.

Among other reasons she cited for leaving, was “I no longer believe leaving with a deal is the government's main objective”.

Curiously, this runs counter to BoJo’s own repeated claims that he’s making progress with his negotiations. To which, it has to be said, the people on the other side of the table, the EU’s negotiators, all reply that he has made no progress whatever. You’d have to concede, wouldn’t you, that one side or the other must be lying.

So you choose. Given what we all know about Boris, which side do you think is more likely to be playing fast and loose with the truth?

And once you’ve answered that question, you can also ask yourself, is it really the case that the truth never hurts? Just look at BoJo’s face.

BoJo in disarray. As well he should be

Meanwhile, just before going into its state of suspension, the House of Commons passed one more measure, demanding publication of government documents concerning no-deal preparations, and messages from its advisers (by which I think it means principally the backroom manipulator in Number 10, Dominic Cummings).

The cheek of it! Parliament thinks the public should know what the government really believes. If that happens, how can ministers be duplicitous enough to sustain the self-delusion of Brexiters?

And then came the final sad announcement of this difficult day. John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, announced that he would be resigning, either at the next election or on 31 October, whichever came first.

Many dislike him. I think historians will see him, once the dust has settled, as one of the great speakers. And, above all, as exactly what he said of himself: a man who sought to increase the power of Parliament, a backbenchers’ speaker, indeed, turning to his advantage an expression from the Brexit debate as he did himself, the backbenchers’ backstop.

As Parliament enters its period of suspension, it’s sad to see it lose such a man, such a champion of its rights against an overweening executive.

An executive which, for the next five weeks at least, will feel itself free to run amok. Truly the Boris coup. Unless a new way can be found to stop him.

Boris Coup: Day 10

Day 10. And Boris keeps giving the lie to Karl Marx, who talked about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. With Boris, it happens only once, is a farce throughout but is perfectly likely to end as tragedy.

A tragedy for him perhaps. At least, we should hope so. Otherwise it could be one for the rest of us.

BoJo: not so happy these days

Let’s see what he’s been up to.

Well, he’s had to contend with more resistance to his high-handed behaviour, in particular his expelling of Conservative MPs for voting against him. The worst resistance came from his brother Jo, who will stand down as an MP as well as a minister, because of the “unresolvable tension” between loyalty to his family (i.e. his brother) and the national interest. How tough it must be to have your own brother declare your actions not in the national interest...

Boris laughed at Ed Miliband’s victory over his brother David for the Labour leadership back in 2013:

...only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother

It seems that fraternal shafting isn’t restricted only to the left after all.

What else has Boris been doing? 

He attended a police training academy in Wakefield, in the North of England. The understanding was that it would be a celebration of his decision to recruit another 20,000 police officers, without a word of politics being breathed. But Boris treated that as a firm commitment, so he broke it.

First he kept the police officers and trainees waiting an hour, standing around in the sun. A fine illustration of how deeply he cares about ordinary people. Then he made a wholly political speech, part of his campaign for an election which, much to his frustration, he hasn’t yet been able to call.

In true Trump style, he took advantage of having police as a backdrop to make the speech. Something the police themselves resented, since they value their reputation, or at least the appearance, of being politically neutral. But Boris doesn’t pay much attention to protocol and procedure. If the regulations get in his way, he simply ignores them.

It was the same when he was an undergraduate in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University: if he felt like trashing a restaurant, he just did it. Mere conventions suggesting that kind of behaviour was unacceptable were never going to deter him then. They don’t deter him now.

It’s interesting that he’s campaigning for an election, given that one of the votes he lost in Parliament, as I mentioned yesterday, was a motion to call a poll. The latest news is that the Opposition parties don’t intend to give him that election until after the Brexit date.

That’s more bad news for poor Boris. A new poll by ICM for Represent Us, a group campaigning for a second referendum, suggests that the Brexit Party’s vote would double from 9 to 18% if an election were held after 31 October and Britain still hadn’t left the EU. That would leave Corbyn and Johnson level pegging on 28%, whereas in an earlier election BoJo would be ahead by 37 to 30% (according to the Financial Times, which has a paywall).

No wonder the Opposition parties want the vote in November.

Especially as the Lords have now ratified the bill requiring BoJo to delay Brexit if he hasn’t negotiated a new deal by Halloween. “I’d rather be dead in a ditch,” he told the Guardian when asked whether he’d request a delay in Brexit.

He keeps claiming he’s making good progress towards a deal, but since the EU says there’s been no progress at all, like the boy who cried wolf, Boris finds few who believe him.

So he could be heading for 31 October with no deal. Then his choice would be to ask the EU for a delay to Brexit, and comply with the new law. Or he could break the law, which would be a serious extension to his coup and might have some difficult consequences. Or of course he could die in a ditch.

By happy chance, it seems that Parliament may well be digging one for him.

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.

Boris coup: Day 6

Confidence is surging in the Downing Street junta on Day 6 of the Boris coup.

Indeed, Boris Johnson is so sure of himself that he’s decided he can simply break off any further discussion with members of his own party who oppose a no-deal Brexit. Indeed he, or more likely Dominic Cummings, Lord High Executioner in this particular Junta, has decided that any Tory MP who votes against the government will have the whip withdrawn.

That means expulsion from the party and would prevent them standing in an election as Conservative candidates. Since expelling them would wipe out BoJo’s majority – currently one, with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland – that election could happen pretty soon after so drastic a step.

BoJo (l) and Philip Hammond
Once Cabinet colleagues, now friends no more

Two of the MPs targeted by this threat were until recently cabinet ministers: Philip Hammond, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and David Gauke, former Justice Minister. That makes the threat still more remarkable. Unprecedented, even. But BoJo has shown that he’s not going to be tied by dull old traditions like consultation or fair play, at least not if they seem to be roadblocks to his unbridled ambition for his own advancement.

Indeed, it’s hard to talk about BoJo as a conservative any more. The way he systematically trashes anything like convention or protocol means he’s conserving little. A true radical, indeed, happy to change anything that irritates him, as long as it’s from a right-wing perspective.

Hard right wing, at that. Today an independent MP, Nick Boles left the Conservative Party precisely over BoJo wing’s relentless drive for a hard Brexit. He told the BBC ‘Today’ programme this morning:

The hard right has taken over the Conservative party. The Conservative party has fallen prey to an almost religious obsession with the hardest form of Brexit.

Where does BoJo draw his confidence from? Well, that’s not difficult to discover. He’s decided, as many pollsters and commentators have realised, that there are enough voters out there simple enough to confuse authoritarianism with authority. What most of us identify in BoJo and Cummings as obsession and blinkered focus on their own desires, many voters take as strength and firmness. And they like them.

That’s what BoJo’s gambling on. That there are enough of these simple souls to see them through to victory. A bold stance, but then nobody can question this coup leader’s boldness, whatever other qualities he may lack.

And it may pay off.

The Boris coup: day 3

Boris has announced that he’s now going flat out to get a deal with the EU.

Why now particularly?

Because now he’s doing away with the interference of those pesky members of parliament. Of whom he happens to be one. And by no means the least pesky (ask Theresa May).

If anyone was in any doubt of the plans of the Downing Street junta, a source from inside the bunker cleared them up on Thursday, as Heather Stewart tells us in the Guardian:

We’ve been very clear before that we will deliver Brexit by any means necessary and that remains the case.

Any means that they deem necessary. If that means trampling mere constitutional niceties, say by removing the only means of democratic oversight of government that Britain has, well, you can’t make brain soup without breaking heads.

Citizens out in the streets to resist the coup
And where was the Leader of the Opposition? Nowhere to be seen

Boris Johnson, we have come to learn down the years, may not always be entirely truthful in his public pronouncements. Few can have been naïve enough to believe him when he announced he was proroguing parliament to give himself time to refine his domestic agenda. If they were that innocent, there was a lovely hot-mike moment, also on Thursday, when, as Heather Stewart also points out, the defence secretary Ben Wallace was caught saying:

”Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want. It has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality. So eventually any leader has to, you know, try.”

He continued: “Our system is a winner-takes-all system. If you win a parliamentary majority, you control everything, you control the timetable. There’s no written separation, so … you pretty much are in command of the whole thing. And we’ve suddenly found ourselves with no majority and a coalition and that’s not easy for our system.”

Ah, yes. He belongs to the lazy right that believes things should be easy. 

In a democracy, when parliament can’t decide what it wants, you wait until at last a majority emerges for one solution or another. A system where one man decides he can do without a majority, and does away with parliament to impose the decision himself, is called an autocracy.

But Boris can dress up what he’s doing as democratic because there is widespread voter support for him. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone either: whenever an autocrat takes power, he does so with a large minority, or even a majority, backing him among the people. Right now, the Tories enjoy a lead over Labour in the low double figures, small but enough to encourage him down the road he’s taken. Indeed, add in the Brexit Party vote, which he would get if Farage’s party chose not to stand candidates against Tories, and he’d be sitting on 45%, a dream level of support for an autocrat.

Also enough to win him a sizeable majority in parliament if he decided to go back to ruling through it. Which, as Ben Wallace indicated, he would probably do if he had the majority that gave him the control he wants.

His strong position isn’t only down to Boris. It equally depends on the sad weakness of the official opposition to him. It’s interesting watching all these developments from abroad, in Spain. One of the better Spanish papers, El País, had this to say about developments in Britain:

A triple offensive, with appeals to the courts to overturn the prorogation, calls to citizens to block the streets and a final attempt in Parliament to prohibit by law a disorderly exit from the EU, are laying the groundwork for a decisive week in the history of the country.

Well, the appeals to the courts have started badly, with a Scottish judge refusing an interim order reversing the prorogation. Still, the efforts proceed, under the leadership among others of the doughty, impressive Gina Miller.

Citizens have been taking to the streets to try to block BoJo’s coup. Now here’s where one might expect a radical left-winger to prove his credentials. A man from that political tendency would, one might imagine, be a strong proponent of direct extra-parliamentary action by the population, to reinforce any action in parliament.

In other words, the protest action called ‘stop the coup’ gave Jeremy Corbyn, the official Leader of the Opposition, the opportunity to prove his worth. Sadly, it has proved exactly that. His is a business-as-usual approach, and instead of joining the protestors, he preferred to go campaigning in a Scottish constituency.

Most of us already knew this about him, but his failure to pick up the baton offered him by ‘stop the coup’ proves it: he’s a Leader of the Opposition who can’t lead, and who doesn’t even oppose much.

No wonder BoJo is opening up a commanding lead in the polls.

That leaves Corbyn with only the legislative route open. To push a bill – or help push someone else’s bill, since there are real leaders in the House of Commons – through Parliament, in the brief time it’s allowed to meet before it’s prorogued.

Then hope for the best against the odds, since BoJo has already shown his readiness to ignore Parliament.

Oh, well. As El País says, it’s a historic moment for Britain. And, given the quality of the leadership on display, a pretty dire one.

Men of destiny, don’t you just love them?

A man of destiny, bearing the divine summons, to lead us to the uplands
And, lucky Brits, we can choose either Jezza or BoJo

Right now in Britain, the big question is what to do with the clear majority in parliament against a hard Brexit, almost certainly reflecting a similar majority in the country at large.

I say ‘almost certainly’ since no one knows for sure. That’s because there’s such resistance to the notion of asking the electorate again whether, after three years of this chaos, they really still want to go ahead with Brexit at all.

Funnily enough, the people most against asking that question are the Brexiters. It’s almost as though they feared they might get an answer they didn’t like. It has to be said that they’re the ones always saying we should respect the will of the people, so it’s a little curious that they don’t want to check what that will is.

For those of us who think it was a mistake to set out down this road in the first place, our last chance to do something about it is to stop our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, taking us directly to the no-deal Brexit he’s threatening. One of the imaginative ways to achieve that is to bring down the government – it has a majority of one in the House of Commons, so it could be done – and replace it with a government of national unity.

The problem is that the political opposition in Britain is split between a tiny minority that believes that the only person who could lead such a government is the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the vast majority who think that he’d be hopeless. Especially hopeless at stopping Brexit because most of us suspect that at heart he remains a Brexiter himself.

Unfortunately, the tiny minority that supports him currently runs the Labour Party, which is the major party of Opposition. That doesn’t do much for the prospects of building a unity government.

Corbyn won’t stand aside. He claims this is because he’s a genuine socialist, while everyone else is just a lackey of capitalism, so what Britain truly needs right now is a government led by him. Unfortunately, some of us, perhaps rather cynically, believe that what really motivates him is that after 32 years spent on the backbenches of parliament, with never any prospect of his holding anything like power, he’s suddenly seen that he might be able to take the highest office in the land. Before, the only future he could see was a few more years as a protest politician no one very much had heard of and then retirement with a few million pounds and a generous pension, but now he can see Downing Street. The bug has bitten him. He feels it’s his right, now. He feels entitled.

In that respect, he strongly resembles his opposite number, Johnson. Of course, Johnson has much more experience of feeling entitled, having attended England’s most prestigious private school, Eton, before going to Oxford where he was a leading light in the Bullingdon Club. That was a group of super-wealthy students that made a habit of trashing restaurants or other students’ rooms, safe in the knowledge that one or other of the ‘daddies’ would be around the next day to pay for the damage.

With a background like that, what else could he imagine than that he was entitled to the greatest consideration the country could give him, and had only to wait for it to fall into his lap? Since the premiership now has, he must feel entirely vindicated in that belief.

Corbyn has less reason than Johnson to feel such things are his birthright. I imagine that he feels he’s earned it. That only means that Johnson believes he has a right to Downing Street despite having been a less than impressive Mayor of London and a downright catastrophic Foreign Secretary, whereas Corbyn, who’s never been anything very much, thinks he’s earned the same right by dint of doing nothing of great significance for a very long time (he’s 70).

Talking to his supporters, it’s clear that they, and Corbyn himself, think that he’s a man of destiny. Were they not mostly atheists, they’d probably see him as a man chosen by God to lead the British – his (God’s) chosen people – to the sunlit uplands. Since these are people whose roots are in the forties, seen as the golden age of the Labour Party, the uplands are presumably those of that time, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in George Orwell’s novels.

It has to be said that Boris thinks exactly the same of himself. He too is the man of destiny who will lead the British to their sunlit uplands, although in his case, his nostalgia is for the days of Empire, back in Victorian times, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Both men of destiny. Both ready to lead us to those fabled uplands. Guided by an inspiration nothing short of divine.

Just not from the same God.

When good people do too little...

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Though often attributed to Edmund Burke, we don’t really know whose the saying is. But it’s an important idea. And it’s particularly apt today.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s outbursts against four Democratic Congresswomen were deeply racist: when you tell Americans of colour, living in the US, to go back where they came from, you’re saying that the country is no home for them.

The Congresswomen Trump told to go back where they came from
They are all American. Only one was even born abroad.

Of course, as Hillary Clinton pointed out, in telling the Congresswomen the government in their home country was lousy, Trump was exactly right. Their home country is, after all, the US, and Trump heads its catastrophically bad government.

However, what’s worrying isn’t so much that Trump made his comments, but that a lot of people sympathise with him. They may not want to voice such opinions publicly, since racism for the moment still carries a stigma. But in private, or to themselves, they share his view. As he countered, when charged with racism, “many people agree with me”. As long as many people agree, it can’t be racism. The reality is that the fact that many agree doesn’t alter the racist nature of his views, it only makes them more dangerous, making it more likely that a racist might be re-elected to the White House.

What makes the quotation attributed to Burke so apposite is that there are many who dislike racism but still plan to vote for Trump. They may not be bad people, but they haven’t grasped that no good person can give racism a pass. Good people not acting will allow the evil of racism to triumph.

In Britain, too, the situation is dire. The government is in the hands of a party in which Islamophobia is rampant. But 70,000 or 80,000 members of that party are about to inflict on the whole country a Prime Minister who has expressed Islamophobic views himself in the past, and certainly has no intention of combating them today.

In particular, he refuses to denounce the toxic bilge coming out of the White House as the racist slander it is. Boris Johnson claims to speak for British independence, in his support for Brexit, but he’s so anxious to dance to Trump’s tune that he can’t bring himself to condemn his most poisonous pronouncements.

Opposite him stands a Leader of the Opposition who has just been rightly told by some of his party members in the House of Lords that he had failed the leadership test. And why? Because instead of addressing the problem of antisemitism in his own Party when whistle blowers warn him of it, he’d prefer to deny the truth of the message and then denounce the messengers.

You have failed the test of leadership

This isn’t his first offence. Ever since the Brexit referendum, he has refused to endorse a pro-EU stance, for fear of alienating those xenophobic voters who backed the Leave camp. Here was a chance to denounce racist thinking and back an internationalist position, and he refused to endorse it.

Another failure of leadership.

Ever since I first saw it, I’ve loved Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. At one point the protagonist, an artilleryman who’d commanded a machine gun battery under attack from cavalry at a recent battle, describes how they’d laughed when they first saw unprotected horsemen attacking their powerful weapons:

… but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldnt fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life…

[Those aren’t typos, by the way: Shaw didn’t like apostrophes…]

Unloaded guns won’t defeat an enemy. Labour has at the top a man who has failed the leadership test. He’s a gun that can’t fire. And with this we are to confront a racist and puppet of a racist, in the most powerful office in the land.

Corbyn may well not be an antisemite. But he’s soft on antisemites. Why? Sadly, because many of them are keen supporters of his anti-Israeli stance. And to retain their support, he’s prepared to backpedal in his fight against racism. Just as he was prepared to accommodate xenophobic leave voters to keep them on side (an approach which, as it happens, has failed).

So in both main parties in Britain, as in the United States, some of the most evil ideas to have poisoned human life down the ages, culminating in the terrible racist atrocities of the twentieth century, are allowed to grow from strength to strength. Merely because good people won’t stand up against them. “Corbyn’s a man of principle,” they say, “he has some great ideas on the economy or foreign affairs. Let’s pretend there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party.”

And the corrosive effect spreads further. Evil moves towards its triumph. Because the good do too little to stop it.

BoJo: do or die, as long as someone else does the dying

… his ancestors had always been amongst the first to get to grips in any conflict. In every siege, every ambush, every stricken dash against fortified emplacements, some de Worde had galloped towards death or glory and sometimes both.

I mentioned only recently how much I liked Terry Pratchett, a novelist whose stature I feel is still not recognised as it deserves. One of his novels I particularly enjoyed re-reading was The Truth. Its central character is William de Worde who, though descended from a long line of aristocrats, is determined to separate himself from his lineage, insisting, for instance, on being called ‘Mr de Worde’. All the more because there are figures in his background who would always brainlessly rush to the front of any desperate charge for death or glory (or, as Pratchett points out, both) in battle.

Charge of the light brigade:
De Worde style death or glory... and mostly death

The trouble with such glorious figures is that as well as dying themselves, they often take a lot of others down with them.

That all came to mind this morning when I read the words of that fine fellow Boris Johnson, soon to be leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (less united than once it was, but still held more or less together by legal bonds that are hard to break). He declared that the said Kingdom would leave the European Union on 31 October, “do or die”.

In other words, Brexit would happen, with or without a deal agreed with the EU.

There are diehard Brexiters who, it seems, firmly believe that Britain can leave the world’s biggest trading bloc without any agreement, and suffer no ill consequences. Few with any trace of economic or political sense share that belief. Leaving such a bloc must inevitably have harmful effects on Britain.

BoJo, as many of us like to call him, whether or not we like him, is not quite as clever as he often suggests he is. His tenure as Foreign Secretary, for instance, was littered with gaffes which a brighter statesman could easily have avoided. Certainly, a more sensible one. Even so, he’s got to be smart enough to know that a no-deal Brexit will do the country untold damage.

But he probably doesn’t care. Because unlike the death or glory de Wordes, BoJo’s “do or die” embodies a strict division of labour. He sees himself handling the doing, while others see to the dying. He, and indeed his friends, will be just fine. He shares the background of entitled privilege of the de Wordes, and that will protect him against the consequences of his recklessness.

“Death or Glory”. His glory. Others’ death.

That’s not pure metaphor. Far fewer will die, of course, than will struggle through, surviving rather than living. But some will die. We’ve seen it already. The Institute for Public Policy Research has calculated that had trends from the first decade of the century continued, something like 130,000 deaths could have been avoided in Britain between 2012 and 2017. The IPPR told the fullfact website that, while all these extra deaths couldn’t simply be attributed to austerity, a combination of that sad endeavour and other poor policy choices are likely to have contributed to these preventable deaths.

That’s what nine years of Tory government have done. And BoJo is promising is something harder still.

Boris ‘Do or Die’ Johnson

He would love the opportunity of doing. But he’ll certainly leave the dying to others.

At least the de Wordes put themselves on the line alongside their followers.

Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.