As Boris Johnson faces another scandal, how will the Prime Minister survive another tough week?

The Tories are in Manchester for their conference but the real action is in Westminster
Paul Dallimore
Julian Glover @julian_glover30 September 2019
WEST END FINAL

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The horror! The horror!” cries Captain Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now. And, while Manchester isn’t the Cambodian jungle, this week there’s a threatening group roaming the city, threatening to destroy everything in its path.

A Conservative Party conference like no other is taking place and it’s a sign of just how crazy things are that it might be one of the less important political events this week.

At the other end of the two-hour, Virgin Trains journey to London, the House of Commons will be sitting, as it wouldn’t have been if Boris Johnson hadn’t tried to play tricks with the Queen and the constitution.

He’s planning to ignore that and give his conference speech on Wednesday instead of going to Prime Minister’s Questions — “not a great idea,” mutters one minister.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Jeremy Selwyn

Lots of MPs won’t mind having an excuse to skip the hotel bills of conference week. But everyone who has made it to Manchester will be wondering whether, as used to happen in banana republics, a revolution might break out in the capital while the country’s leader is away.

Could this be the week MPs vote the Government out of office and try to assemble a different one? That’s just one of a lot of questions beginning “could...” which are flying around at the moment, and the answer to most of them will turn out to be no. But not all of them.

We are, after all, in a situation where Philip Hammond, the dry-as-dust former Conservative chancellor (and at the moment he is as much a former Conservative as he is an ex-chancellor) writes an article suggesting that the Prime Minister’s extreme policy on Brexit is being rigged by his financial backers — the sort of conspiracy theory Marxists used to mutter at irrelevant meetings in the upstairs rooms of north London pubs. Now it’s the new reality.

So what’s going to happen? “I haven’t got a clue,” one of the ministers who ran Johnson’s election campaign says cheerfully, and means it. The only thing anyone is sure about is that there is going to be an election soon, although how and when and what the result will be are all up for grabs.

Actually there is one other certainty, and that’s lots of Conservatives are cheering Johnson, and loudly. They haven’t — yet — been put off by reports of his under-the-table roaming hands (reports Downing Street perhaps foolishly denied last night) or by the won’t-go-away details of his fondness for technology adviser Jennifer Arcuri (less clarity to the official denials).

Boris Johnson's friendship with Jennifer Arcuri has come under scrutiny

Cleansed of free-thinking dissidents such as John Major, Ken Clarke and Winston Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames, the new Revolutionary Conservative Party is becoming more pro-Brexit by the hour.

Where that leaves the 42 per cent of Tories who voted Remain in 2016 — including most Tory MPs at the time — no one knows.

Polls suggest a narrow majority of the country is opposed to Brexit. And they also show a chunk of Tory support which doesn’t want to leave without a deal. If you love Brexit, you’ll love Johnson this week. But if you don’t, his party’s not doing much apart from a lot of public spending to win your vote.

Is that sensible long-term strategy? Come the election, a lot of Tory MPs might lose seats soon in places which like Remain and — Johnson hopes — a lot of candidates in other places might win them to make up for it. Or maybe not. Because again, no one knows.

It could depend on whether the Conservatives find themselves facing Brexit Party candidates. They don’t even know now if Brexit will have happened when the election comes or what, if the Tories do win, they would actually do about Brexit backed by a majority if they win one.

That’s the big hole in the people-against-Parliament confrontation the PM’s crude language about surrender is stoking up for polling day — it doesn’t do anything to solve the Government’s real problem, which is to find a plan for Brexit.

It might bring about a no-deal exit but it doesn’t do anything to determine the future relationship. As winter comes, jobs go and trucks queue across Kent, that could soon look like new problem, not a cunning route to success.

Anyway, Johnson has to get through the next few days first. For all the moaning from ministers about judges and Johnson’s promise just to get on with it, there isn’t a legally sound way for the Prime Minister to get around the law which requires him to ask for a delay to Brexit if he hasn’t got a deal by October 19.

So if he is going to get Brexit by October 31, do or die, as he promised, and not end up dead in a ditch, as he said, he might have to put Theresa May’s deal, backstop and all, to the House of Commons soon — while loudly ripping up the longer-term political agreement about what happens after a two-year transition, in the hope that a show of fake defiance keeps his government together.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Commons
AFP/Getty Images

At least one person who knows him very well thinks he might try it. But having insulted his opponents and allowed his Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, to claim that a Commons elected after Brexit has “no moral right” to sit, he’s set himself up to lose a vote like that. So faced with defeat, he probably won’t try to hold it.

What’s his best alternative? That would be raging against a Brexit extension, allowing one to happen on the shortest and worst of terms (if he gets around the Benn Act or finds an EU leader to veto an extension for him) and then goading Labour into backing an election immediately after.

But that strategy depends on Labour helping him destroy the opposition by triggering an election in which they might get slaughtered — and Jeremy Corbyn might not be that stupid.

So far, the main outcome of his strategy has been to glue his very fractured opponents together in favour of upholding the law and against no-deal and an immediate election.

Could it bind them so firmly that they form an alternative and temporary government in the Commons — maybe even this week? That would make Johnson the first Tory leader since Harold Macmillan in 1963 to start his party conference as Prime Minister and end it out of office — and Macmillan left only because he was ill.

It’s just possible a vote of no confidence could pass — it requires a simple majority in the Commons. But the numbers to back a stable alternative government don’t really stack up.

Add together the 247 Labour MPs, 39 Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, one Green and 18 Lib Dems and you only get to 305 — well short of a majority.

Even if whipless Tory rebels and a few independents joined in it doesn’t feel like a basis for a new government. And of course while all of them are against a no-deal exit, quite a lot back a Brexit deal of some sort while others — led by the Lib Dems — want no Brexit altogether.

The moment for an alternative emergency government isn’t this week but next month, if Johnson really does press on with his promise to bust through the barriers and make Brexit happen on October 31 without a deal.

By then there might have been a Queen’s speech, and a vote on that when the Commons returns could show there is no confidence in the Government.

That would leave Parliament with a choice of seeing Johnson continue in office with a risk of trying no deal, or replacing him with a temporary stand-in to get an extension.

And after that? An election — or perhaps a second referendum. Something, surely. “Everyone can’t keep saying no to everything,” says one of Johnson’s ministers. But at the moment they are — and he’s stuck.

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