No. 187 - Panic in No.10?

Dear James,

The government went strangely quiet on Sunday. It was supposed to have been the make or break day and yet the day passed without a decision and ended with both sides saying that they would continue talking. They are still talking. There are at least two possible interpretations. Firstly Boris may seriously be trying to explore every avenue before going for no-deal. But the second option is far more interesting. Perhaps he has, at last, looked into the chasm of no-deal and has been terrified by what he sees. In other words, perhaps Boris has panicked! 

Unlikely, I hear you say, James. Boris doesn’t do panic. Not on the surface, I agree. But deep down in that flabby, Old Etonian gut, this class dinosaur certainly knows the difference between glory and ignominy. And like all narcissists, he is at base, a coward. My guess therefore is that he will eventually take the safe option - a thin, very thin – deal. Just before Christmas. 

The Tory party has always traded on unflappability. Boris allows nothing to shake his in-built certainty. He is in possession of a kind of human ‘ballast’ that sits deep in his privileged belly that makes his ship virtually unsinkable. It is based upon style rather than substance. Substance is made to fit into style no matter how much it hurts the speaker (or the listener!) behind the velvet assurances. 

As Kier Starmer has demonstrated however, over and over again, the Boris ballast is illusory. The EU has proved exactly the same thing. They have confronted Boris with a wall of facts and evidence before which Boris crumbles. Brexit is a purely emotional phenomenon. The EU Commission thinks and bases its positions on facts. When faced with the plethora of negative facts associated with Brexit, the Brexiteers smile scornfully and resort to a weird concoction of distraction and lies. Compared with the calm, reasonable vision of Michel Barnier and Ursula Von Der Leyen, Boris and Lord Frost are like two, brain damaged  bouncers staggering out of a local nightclub. That’s what happens when style replaces substance as the main vehicle of policy.   

The EU are the political expression of Enlightenment ideals. They believe in reason based upon evidence. Boris dreamed about splitting them with his own version of emotional seduction. Last Thursday he attempted to short circuit the process by appealing to Merkel and Macron directly. He was promptly rebuffed. Boris’s bluff had been called. He’s painted himself into a corner consisting of a rock and a hard place. 

The problem is that he has pushed beyond the scope of his party into English Nationalism.  And that English nationalism with all its nostalgic yearning has blinded his new party to the pragmatism of old. The terrible incompetence and downright inefficiency of his government is testimony to that.

Responsibility is the final burden of government. Boris has suddenly woken up to what he has avoided for so long: facts. His hard Brexit will mean for the car industry (10% tariffs on exports), the farming industry (35% on the dairy industry and lamb to Europe), The average is about 2.8% for non-agricultural products, and that would put some industries under massive pressure. It would mean job losses and the departure of some manufacturers to the EU. There is only one place that the blame will be put. And that is on Boris’s shoulders. This is what has made him shrink from the chasm. 

To disguise his failure Boris has already begun his retreat by preparing to announce victory. When announcing the continuation of the talks, he said that a WTO no-deal is still the ‘most likely’ outcome. Behind the scenes though, I suspect that there are a lot of headless chickens running around in No 10 Downing Street. Or if they aren’t yet headless, they soon will be when they realise that the EU will not give way. They were always supposed to crack under the onslaught of Boris’s charm offensive. Unfortunately the Boris charm loses its power as soon as it crosses the English Channel. ‘Jolly good show…’, ‘Golly, gosh old chap…’ do not translate well into French or German. There will be a deal by January 1st but it will, like everything else from this government, reflect panic rather than careful thought. Boris has met his match.

Kind regards,

BH – Your Concerned Constituent