Is Brexit giving him back his mojo?

 

‘Tis another Monday morning and it looks already as if we’re in for another week of heightened Post-Covid Madness. ‘Our MSM’ still can’t let go of their CV-19 fear and hysteria, surely a worrying sign of irrationality caused by ‘WFH’ (Work From Home) amongst their correspondents and authors. And if it’s not Covid, it’s the exploits of ‘Extinction Rebellion. And then there’s ’Brexit’, rearing its head, thanks to a PR release of a Johnson speech he will make today. That speech and its influence on the two rounds of negotiations this month, one starting tomorrow, is the subject of today’s column.

Given that the weekend MSM were full of Brussels ‘sources’ telling their various tame Remain Brussels correspondents that Ms vdLeyen ‘will make a key speech’ next week, on Brexit and on proposals to sideline Barnier by handing the negotiations to ‘EU leaders’, it looks to me as if that Johnson speech is a clever way to preempt this EU manoeuvre. According to the title pages of ‘Our MSM’, Johnson will tell Brussels that if they won’t budge, we’ll slam the door on October 15th. Remember though that this date is actually the final EU date by which they hope to have had us cave in:

“Mr Johnson will say that agreement is still possible but that he “will not compromise on the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country to get it”, with demands that Britain sign up to EU rules and standards the key stumbling block to a deal, along with fishing rights. […] He will say today: “There needs to be an agreement with our European friends by the time of the European Council on October 15 if it’s going to be in force by the end of the year. So there is no sense in thinking about timelines that go beyond that point. If we can’t agree by then, then I do not see that there will be a free-trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on.” (link, paywalled)

So far – so clear. It remains to be seen however how this hard line translates into actual negotiation results. Would it be cynical of me to think such hard talk might have been for home consumption, for Johnson trying to look decisive, to regain some of his popularity lost during his less-than decisive policies since Lockdown? Or perhaps ’tis overly pessimistic … after all, our experiences of the past years aren’t precisely encouraging, given the ‘flexibility’, or rather: ‘sell-out’ by Ms May and her Whitehall negotiators.  Perhaps what Lord Frost said yesterday is more encouraging:

“In his interview with the Mail on Sunday, Lord Frost insisted that the UK would not agree to being a “client state” to the EU and accused Mrs May’s administration of caving in. He said: “We came in after a Government and negotiating team that had blinked and had its bluff called at critical moments and the EU had learned not to take our word seriously. So a lot of what we are trying to do this year is to get them to realise that we mean what we say and they should take our position seriously.” (paywalled link)

And what about the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab who has also made reassuring Brexit-noises? Is that perhaps encouraging? See this:

“As a Government we are preparing, at our borders and at our ports, to be ready for it. We will have full control over our laws, our rules, and our fishing waters. […] We will be ready to find sensible accommodations on practical issues such as flights, lorry transport, or scientific cooperation, if the EU wants to do that. […] Even at this late stage, if the EU are ready to rethink their current positions and agree this I will be delighted. However, we cannot and will not compromise on the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country to get [the trade agreement].” (paywalled link)

The text of those speeches must have been in the hands of the DT’s Brussels correspondent who collected statements from his EU ‘sources’, published to give voice to ‘the other side’. ‘Tis odd, but Brussels looks as if they don’t mind us leaving without that deal:

“Brussels reacted coolly to Mr Johnson’s intervention, with one EU diplomat recalling previously optimistic remarks from the PM about how to get a Brexit deal. The EU official said: “[…] Message spinning and posturing is all fine, but it doesn’t really bring us an inch closer to a solution. There has been absolutely no movement from the British side in the talks yet. If this approach doesn’t change quickly, we will be on a road to no deal with all its negative economic consequences.” An EU Commission official added: “We are working hard to reach a deal with the UK. We will do everything in our power to reach a deal, as Michel Barnier said last week.” (paywalled link)

It’s as if Brussels is pre-emptively blaming us for the failure of these negotiations, for not caving in to Barnier’s proposal. One might even think that Brussels is preparing, en coulisse, for that No Deal outcome when we read that:

“The Telegraph understands that Brussels will call an emergency no-deal Brexit summit in November if a trade agreement is not finalised by the end of October.” (paywalled link)

Johnson’s ‘October 15th is positively the last date’, the date actually set by Brussels, makes sense now. Also, he and his advisers were presumably aware of that Brussels move. The unmissable Sir John Redwood writes in his Diary today that  “It is crucial to success that the government adheres to this sensible position.” (link). However, he doesn’t seem to be overly optimistic, given that he has a warning for both the EU and our negotiating team – a warning which shows that he is aware of a still possible, last-minute cave-in:

“Instead of continued posturing and refusal to discuss this issue the EU should take advantage whilst the offer is still there. The UK government this time does have to get on with No deal if the EU does not want to talk about proposals that are mutually beneficial.” (link)

There is another tiny straw in the Brexit wind, giving the impression that ‘this time we really mean it’. According to the DT, 

“The Government is also planning to publish the Internal Market Bill this week to formalise trading rules within the British isles after the end of the transition period so the UK can sign trade deals. Sections of the bill will override key elements of the withdrawal agreement, eliminating the legal force of certain aspects of the agreement such as state aid and Northern Ireland customs, it was claimed on Sunday night. The move would undermine the Northern Ireland protocol which was signed last October to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, according to The Financial Times.” (paywalled link)

Might this Bill be due to the influence of the new Cabinet secretary, Mr Case, who was after all involved in the NI protocol when at DexEU, before he was booted out by Oily Robbins? He’s been working at No 10 for the last four months, after all. We’ll see if and how this materialises.

In that context, it’s interesting that suddenly MPs demand in a letter to the DT that Parliament must be seen to ‘go back to work’. This intervention is of course related to the fact that we’re still having a ‘dead parrot-parliament’, as Lord Lawson reportedly said, but  there are wider consequences for getting Bills onto the statute book:

“Senior Conservative MPs, peers, and former Cabinet ministers […] have all signed the letter decrying the “absurd situation where ministers, speaking in near-empty debating chambers, are telling people it is safe to go back to work”. […] The group of 46 MPs and peers says that all “necessary steps must be taken” to ensure that a regular service can commence in both the Commons and the Lords.” (paywalled link)

I think that David Davis nailed it – his observations are in regard to Lockdown, but apply to the proposed Internal Market Bill as well:

“Mr Davis […] said that the performance of the Government – which has been criticised for repeated about-turns – would be improved with a better-attended Commons. He said: “The simple truth is that Parliament is not working at the moment. Many of the mistakes that the Government made that led to the infamous U-turns would probably have been caught if the Government had to report to Parliament more effectively than it does now. All the details of the various instructions in lockdown would have been challenged.” (paywalled link)

Meanwhile, the daily Covid ‘scare numbers’ published in ‘Our MSM’ – see for example this headline in The Times: “Coronavirus: Fear that Britain is losing control as daily cases rise to 3,000” (link, paywalled), with no question asked in the article about numbers of hospitalised patients, never mind CV-19 deaths – makes me wonder why ‘Our MSM’ are still flogging this dead horse. What is their agenda? Do they still hope to get rid of not just Johnson but the whole Tory government, replaced by ‘forensic Starmer’? Perhaps they simply have lost the plot completely as Post-Covid Madness has them in its grip.

 

KBO!

 

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