So you do a bit of gaming on the possible ways out of this situation. Then you come up with the following options:
- Try and prevent Parliament from meeting. Send it on holiday for as long as possible. Then when it comes back find an excuse to send it home again before it has a chance to do anything of significance.
- Try and ignore any vote it holds by using every procedural device you can find to prevent any new laws getting through both houses and receiving Royal Assent before you’ve acted in direct contradiction with the wishes of MPs.
- Try and bully as many of your own MPs as you can by threatening not just their jobs but their party membership
- Call another General Election asking the public to vote for the same dreams that they backed during the referendum
- Hold a give away budget and pour millions of public money into a “public information” campaign of propaganda
- Run a campaign promising sunny uplands and jam for everyone tomorrow and threaten chaos, confusion and disaster if the opposition wins.
There are, however, some pretty major flaws with the strategy. The one that matters most is the attitude of the British public. You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Johnson has two choices on an election. One is to call it fast and try and blame the opposition for further delaying Brexit until it has been held. That would enable him to campaign promising that everything would be marvellous once he’d got us out and all these frustrating delays from pesky “Parliamentarians” could be swept away by voting for him. Yet we in the opposition parties would also have the chance to ask the British people whether they were enjoying all this chaos and whether they really do want to put the entire economy at risk on the basis of promises from a man who has been sacked twice for lying. Importantly we’d also be able to point out Johnson’s character failings and ask whether people really do want to vote for a man who cheats on his second wife whilst she is undergoing treatment for cancer and then dumps her for a younger model. We’d be able to ask questions about whether it is better to look backwards to the days of empire or forward to a Green New Deal. Above all we’d be able to ask Johnson questions and challenge his lies and he is surprisingly bad at dealing with hostile audiences.
Elections are gloriously unpredictable things. Corbyn is still popular in a lot of traditional working class communities. A lot of Conservative seats are vulnerable in Remain areas. Many new younger voters are a lot more determined to vote than ever before and are heavily against Johnson and Brexit. It is hard to see where the Conservatives win new seats. It is not hard to see where they lose them. Scottish Tories are, for instance, now really vulnerable. It is entirely possible that Johnson could lose a snap election and go down as the shortest most incompetent Prime Minister for a couple of hundred years. We could be waking up a few Thursday’s from now to a Coalition Government uniting around a programme that borrows heavily from Green New Deal thinking.
The second strategy Johnson could opt for is to call an election after we have left the EU. If you think that doing this would instantly produce huge benefits that the public would quickly see then this makes sense. If you think there would be a degree of chaos as every trade deal the UK has is ripped up overnight without an obvious strategy then it looks a lot more risky. Why would anyone call an election in the middle of a food and medicine shortages if they were directly responsible for those shortages? “Vote for me – I took most of the fruit and vegetable out of your supermarket, created massive queues at petrol pumps and left your granny without her pills”! Surely even Johnson knows he couldn’t win an election amidst the chaos of a No Deal Brexit. Equally surely even Johnson must know that the EU aren’t going to cave in and discover that the Northern Ireland border really can be left to the tender smuggling gangs of the IRA and the UVF because we live in such modern times and every border resident neatly fills in computerised paperwork so very honestly.
To my mind the chances of Johnson securing a Brexit deal are desperately thin. That leaves him facing a post No Deal Brexit election. His chances of winning that are much weaker than those of him winning one before the reality hits home. Yet the damage of facing that is so great that for once I think we should give Johnson what he wants. Let him have his pre-Brexit election. And let’s wipe that arrogant smile off his face and see how he likes it when the British public have a chance to express their view at the ballot box on the prospect of abolishing all significant Parliamentary controls and sending Tsar Boris off to Washington to ask that nice Mr Trump to give us a generous trade deal.
For the first time in months there are signs of hope. A Progressive Alliance can win this election. Bring it on.
Late extra: It is important to clarify. I favour an early election. I don't favour trusting Johnson to choose the date. It is right to insist that no deal is taken off the table before one is called.