What the Covid Inquiry tells us about Brexit

The Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic still has a long way to go, but the evidence it is taking is already revealing an extraordinary picture of the British government at the time and, in the process, much about Brexit. It is tempting to say that it is not revealing much that many of us did not guess, but, apart from the fact that there’s much in the detail that is fresh, there is an important difference between ‘guessing’ and seeing hard evidence laid out in documents or given by witnesses under oath. And, actually, what is emerging is even more dire than could have been guessed.

What we could guess

Of course, it is not an inquiry into the handling of Brexit but it has long been clear that there were multiple intersections and interactions between that and the handling of Covid. I discussed many of them during the pandemic period, including in what is still the most-read post on the blog, from April 2020, which also gives links to some of the other places they are discussed by me and others. 

Some of those posts contain details which are now irrelevant, but the overall picture that is emerging confirms what is perhaps the central point made in that April 2020 post:

“What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in [i.e. Dominic Raab], and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.

They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.”  

What ‘the people in the room’ are telling us

I’ve quoted that at length not to say ‘I told you so’ (and, in any case, I was hardly the only person saying similar things at the time), but because it serves as a fair summary of what we have been hearing recently at the Hallett Inquiry. As Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer, wrote in his column last Sunday, “the testimony from the people in the room” has shown that Johnson was “comprehensively incapable of doing the job”. But, Rawnsley continues, it wasn’t just Johnson who failed, it was the cabinet and senior civil servants, and the blame for that lies in part with Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave team.

Cummings’ own self-serving and obscenity-strewn testimony to the Inquiry, in both its written and, especially, its oral form, showed his utter contempt for ministers and civil servants, whilst in itself giving a glimpse of the bullying and misogynistic culture which, as confirmed by Helen MacNamara’s evidence, permeated the inner workings of the administration. MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant at the time, makes it clear that this culture was not just morally grotesque, but substantively and substantially impaired the quality of decision-making.

Moreover, although it may appear unconnected, or at least less malign, I think the “unbelievably bullish approach that everything is going to be great”, which MacNamara says characterised the early days of the Covid crisis, is inseparable from the vicious machismo she describes. The blokey boosterism, which is also instantly recognizable as being identical to Johnson’s approach to Brexit as well, is the affable face that quickly contorts to hate-filled thuggishness, at least behind closed doors, when it encounters any challenge. Unsurprisingly, this culture was not just misogynistic but semi-racist, “laughing at the Italians” and in doing so being not just laddishly unpleasant but, again, substantively damaging the Covid response by jeering at what could have been useful lessons.

It must be beyond question that Johnson and Cummings were jointly responsible for this culture and all that came with it, though no doubt others played a part, and they had presumably transferred it over from the Vote Leave campaign operation. More generally, for all their well-attested differences, Johnson and Cummings were conjoined, enablers of each other and enabled by each other. Cummings is quite explicit about this in his evidence, as well as showing a shameless contempt for democracy, declaring that “we” (by which he seems to mean the Vote Leave cabal) had the right to pick and choose who would be Prime Minister, and that “we” installed Johnson despite knowing how unfit for office he was. [1]

Meanwhile, it was, of course, Johnson who appointed Cummings as his Chief Adviser and gave him such latitude of powers, a latitude which amongst other things, led to the resignation of the then Chancellor Sajid Javid, just as the pandemic was starting. And it was Johnson who expended so much political capital to keep him in post after the ‘Barnard Castle’ scandal. They were two cheeks - one flabby and purpled, the other scrawny and pockmarked - of the same backside, and what lay between them, connecting them, defining them, was Brexit.

Brexit, too, explains the uselessness of the Cabinet which, as Rawnsley says, the Inquiry is showing to have “failed to act as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional Prime Minister”. How could it have been otherwise given that, as Martin Kettle wrote when Johnson appointed his first Cabinet, it consisted of “mostly second-rate ideologues, many of them with negligible records of ministerial achievement and several of them with very dubious political ethics. All the positions of power are held by Brexit extremists. The rest are political hostages to the hard Brexiters.”  

The undermining of the civil service

As for the role of the civil service, part of what is at stake here was, as MacNamara’s evidence disclosed, changes that Brexit had wrought on the processes and machinery of government. But there is certainly more to it than that. Rawnsley points out that the Hallett Inquiry shows Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to cut an “abject figure”, but his appointment to that role, in the middle of the Covid crisis, was partly because his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, was seen by Johnson as “too much of a Europhile” (£) whilst Case was described as a “Boris Johnson ally”. It has also been reported that he had originally been brought into Number 10 as Permanent Secretary at Cummings’ behest. [2]

The wasn’t just a matter of a Prime Minster smoothly, if ruthlessly, appointing a more congenial or compliant Cabinet Secretary. On the one hand, Cummings’ written testimony (p.59, para. 276) reveals the utterly chaotic manner in which Sedwill’s ejection began. On the other hand, other evidence to the Inquiry shows that, Johnson ‘ally’ or not, Case, prior to taking over that role, had confided to Sedwill that he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, referring, apparently, to Johnson and his special advisers. [3]

Crucially, this particular episode was itself part of a wider picture in which many senior civil servants had already left, or were leaving or being sidelined, because of a perceived lack of commitment to Brexit. Indeed, in my post of 28 February 2020 – the date is important as it is just as the Covid pandemic was developing, and shortly before the first lockdown – I recorded in detail how the civil service was under attack for supposedly being anti-Brexit, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants the government wanted to expunge. It was not long afterwards, in June, that Cummings made his threat of a “hard rain coming” for the civil service (£). That was, of course, only the latest instalment in a process which had been going on since the referendum, and, in Cummings’ case, stretching back to his days as a special adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, when ‘the Blob’ first emerged as a term of abuse in British politics. The title of my February post is also worth noting – ‘Brexit is going feral’ – given that evidence to Hallett this week shows that, just four months later, ‘feral’ was exactly the term applied to Johnson’s government by Case, and apparently endorsed by Sedwill.

It's vital to recall this vitriolic attack on the civil service from Johnson and Cummings, and Brexiters generally, because it is quite as important as, if not more important than, the related issue, which is getting far more attention, of how Hallett is showing that Brexit was prioritized over tackling Covid. It wasn’t just that Brexit overloaded the bandwidth of the civil service, Brexiters also undermined the civil service as an institution. Even now, Cummings presumably includes the civil service amongst the “insiders” who “refus[ed] to accept the referendum result” who he blames for the lockdown having been necessary at all. For, on Cummings account, it was this alleged “refusal” that meant that Brexit created the “constitutional and political crisis that consumed a vast amount of the focus of the core of the state 2016-2019”.  Unsurprisingly, as Anthony Robinson observes, this account conveniently ignores the role of the Vote Leave campaign in creating this crisis.

Frost (as always) muddies the waters

In a similar way, like Billy Bunter to Cummings’ Flashman, David Frost responded to MacNamara’s evidence that the government focused on Brexit to the exclusion of everything else from July 2019 with the justificatory bleat that “we were in the biggest constitutional crisis for a hundred years”. He also asserted that the claim that ‘no-deal Brexit’ planning got in the way of pandemic planning does not accord with the facts because the Brexit deal was completed in October 2019 (i.e. before Covid), and the Transition Period meant that “there was no economic shock and no new arrangements to prepare for during the height of the Covid crisis”.

As so often with Brexiters’ claims it is complicated to unpick them, and Frost is particularly prone to tendentiousness. The only constitutional crisis between 2016 and 2019, and certainly between July and October 2019, was the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament, for which Johnson and Cummings were entirely responsible. Frost makes it sound as if this crisis was something the government heroically struggled against when, in fact, it was something the government created. It’s true that there had been a rolling political crisis since at least the 2017 election but, stripped of all its great complexity, that was not a constitutional crisis but a simple reflection of there being no parliamentary majority for any particular form of Brexit, just as was the case in the country. [4]

It’s also true that this political crisis still existed until the December 2019 election, and the Inquiry has already heard evidence that the work streams implementing provisions from the 2016 Exercise Cygnus on pandemic planning had been largely halted by no-deal Brexit planning. However, it is not true the completion of the Brexit deal, in the sense of the agreement with the EU of the text of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) in October 2019, ended no-deal planning. Firstly, that WA was not agreed by parliament until after the election. Secondly, even when it had been agreed, it initiated a new phase of no-deal planning – this time concerned with the possibility of there being no future terms, or trade, agreement.

This also means that it is either completely dishonest or totally ignorant for Frost to say that there were “no new arrangements” to prepare for during the Covid crisis of 2020. There were. Whether or not there was to be a trade deal, it would mean completely different trading (and other) arrangements compared with being in the single market, customs union, and other EU entities, once the Transition Period was over. Which of these two outcomes would prevail was not known until Christmas Eve of 2020 and so, throughout the year, there was the prospect of at least major change, and possibly of major disruption, to be prepared for. That was as true for businesses and other organizations affected as it was for the government.

The (non-) extension of the Transition Period

Moreover, Frost fails to mention that, until July 2020, the UK had the possibility of seeking to extend the Transition Period, something which the EU would almost certainly have agreed. Doing so would have helped the UK to deal with Covid, by taking away the urgency of the negotiations and the imminency of the changes that the end of the transition would bring. It would also have helped the UK to deal with Brexit, by deferring completion of the trade deal until the exigencies of the Covid emergency were over. For although the focus of attention arising from the Hallett hearings is how Brexit got in the way of dealing with Covid, it is equally the case that Covid got in the way of dealing with Brexit. For Frost to use the Transition Period as a defence against there having been such mutual impacts whilst ignoring his government’s refusal to extend the period, which would have reduced or contained them, is absurd.

As I wrote in June 2020, the decision on whether to extend the Transition Period wasn’t the last gasp of the battle over whether Brexit would happen, it was the Brexiters’ first challenge to show that they could govern Britain after leaving the EU, rather than just campaign for Britain to leave the EU. It is a challenge they comprehensively failed, because they were (as they still are) locked into the idea of defending Brexit against ‘betrayal’. Never mind that, by that time, Britain had actually left the EU, and that could no longer be prevented: they just ploughed on.

In doing so, they not only pulled time and attention away from dealing with Covid, they also ensured that Covid-battered businesses had no time to prepare for the end of the Transition Period. Even if Brexit were not intrinsically a huge folly, they ensured that it came into effect in the most unpropitious of circumstances, and they did so with absolutely no justification beyond the stiff-necked false pride that the period could not be extended even in the extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic.

The Covid government was also the Brexit government

The Hallett Inquiry is beginning to uncover the deep dysfunctions in the way that the government handled the pandemic and, almost as a side-issue, showing some things about Brexit. But the real significance of the Inquiry for Brexit is that the government it is exposing to view is exactly the same government that before, during, and after the pandemic was handling Brexit. So, although it is not an Inquiry into the handling of Brexit, it is surely inconceivable that the way it handled Covid does not also apply to Brexit to some degree.

For, self-evidently, these dysfunctions did not arrive with the pandemic but pre-dated it, at least as far back as Johnson and Cummings coming to power (though, as noted, some features, especially the denigration of the civil service, go back further). It is inconceivable that the factionalism and infighting, the misogyny and the vapid boosterism, were not all occurring in the period when, after Johnson came to office, the Withdrawal Agreement and, especially, the Northern Ireland Protocol, were still being negotiated. It is certainly true, by definition, that the government dealing with the Covid crisis in 2020 was the same as that which was undertaking the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations during 2020. And, although Cummings departed in November 2020, it was still the Johnson government, with all the flaws Hallett is revealing, which, throughout 2021 and until he resigned in June 2022, was embroiled in the ongoing row with the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There are already plenty of reports that show how little Johnson understood about the practicalities of Brexit. To take just one example, he reportedly “slumped in his chair” when “the penny dropped”, during a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker in September 2019, that his ideas about the Irish border were totally unworkable. But we now know that this same Johnson, during Covid, seriously suggested being injected with the virus on live TV to show its harmlessness, and seriously asked whether the virus could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nostrils, actually circulating a You Tube video of someone demonstrating this ‘cure’. Patently someone so dull-witted, or, more accurately, so lazy-minded, as to do these things would be equally incapable of grasping even quite basic things about Brexit, let alone its more complex details.

Similarly, the Inquiry is revealing how during Covid Johnson was flip-flopping daily, or even hourly, on both the overall strategy and the detailed measures for dealing with the pandemic. So it is surely reasonable to assume that he behaved in the same way on detailed issues in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and also on the big questions about them, most especially whether to allow there to be one or both versions of no-deal Brexit.

It is also surely reasonable to assume that he flip-flopped in the same way during the long period when it was rumoured that he would, or would not, invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol and, subsequently, whether he would pass and make use of the Northern Ireland Bill to pull out of the Protocol in its entirety. Relatedly, we already knew that during the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations at least one senior Tory thought that “the Irish really should know their place”. So, learning now about how the Johnson administration jeered at the Italian response to the pandemic, it hardly strains credulity to suppose that it was similarly contemptuous of the Irish position on Brexit and the Protocol. 

Whilst Johnson is the most obvious culprit here, the same applies to his entire administration, including his feeble and mediocre Cabinet and his team of arrogant and bumptious Vote Leave Special Advisors, both during and after the Cummings’ period. If, as the Hallett evidence so far suggests, the entirety of this administration suffered from multiple deficiencies in handling Covid, then it is inconceivable that it became super-competent when dealing with Brexit. And whilst it might be said that the pandemic was a wholly unusual and complex problem, the same is true of Brexit. If they differ, it is not in that but in the fact that Covid was a crisis imposed on the UK, as it was on other countries, whereas Brexit was imposed by, indeed created by, the Brexiters, many of whom were by this time running the country. So they were incapable of dealing with either, but with Brexit they had the added culpability of having caused it.

We may never have a Public Inquiry into Brexit, and if we do it will have to encompass different issues and cover a longer period than Hallett. Yet, even without that, Hallett is providing a glimpse of just how rotten the Johnson period of Brexit was – the period, don’t forget that ‘got Brexit done’. If, as Covid data expert Professor Christina Pagel argues, Hallett has already “laid bare the government’s dereliction of duty” we can hardly imagine that the very same government at the very same time was the epitome of care and competence in its handling of Brexit. But the cases are different. We didn’t have this government because of Covid, but because of Brexit. In this sense, Brexit was the ‘original sin’ for which we paid twice-over. Once by having an utterly useless government when Covid hit, twice by having an utterly useless government to deliver Brexit. And that is before even considering the price inherent in Brexit itself. [5]

 
Notes

[1] This is not to say that Johnson could not have become Prime Minister without Brexit (and Cummings). Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog this week has an interesting discussion of this.

[2] Because for the purposes of this post I am splicing together different parts of testimony to Hallett it may be confusing as to what jobs Simon Case was doing at different times. In May 2020 he was appointed as Downing Street Permanent Secretary, a role that had been unfilled since being vacated by Sir Jeremy Heywood in 2012 (it had in any case only been created in 2010), who became Cabinet Secretary until his retirement in 2018, when he was succeeded by Mark Sedwill. Then, in September 2020, Case was appointed Cabinet Secretary, replacing Sedwill.

[3] The Cummings’ evidence referred to in this paragraph is confusing in that it suggests that Sedwill was initially sacked in May 2020, and subsequently refers to Case as having been Cabinet Secretary in July. This doesn’t square with the public record of posts held, but it seems to be that the outcome of the botched sacking was Sedwill’s resignation and that, by July, it had been decided that Case would be his successor even though he wasn’t formally in post. There is much more detail on all this in Beckie Smith’s report in Civil Service World. Another confusing issue is why, if Case was indeed a Johnson ‘ally’ and Cummings had supported his appointment in May 2020, did he speak about them in the disparaging terms quoted here? A possible answer is that it is because that quote comes from July 2020, by which time he had come to witness the chaotic nature of the administration.

[4] Frost, especially, has been vociferous in insisting that this political crisis was also a constitutional crisis, because it enabled, on occasion and most notably with the 'Benn Act' of October 2019, the House of Commons to take control of its business from the Executive. But this was absolutely consistent with the Constitution: Parliament is sovereign, and the Executive only has power to the extent that it commands a parliamentary majority. As regards ‘no-deal Brexit’ in the sense of no WA (the subject of the Benn Act), it did not.

[5] Part of that price is the damage to trade, and another Brexit story this week is the publication of a woeful IEA report denying that damage. Fortunately, Professor Gerhard Schnyder has done an excellent, painstaking job in exposing its numerous and profound flaws. I know from experience that undertaking that kind of detailed debunk is a hard, time-consuming business, because such reports contain nested layers of falsity or misunderstanding. But it really matters, not least because such reports gain so much traction including, in this case, endorsement by Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

Partygate, populism and Brexit

As briefly suggested in last week’s post, there are numerous, if indirect, connections between the still unfolding ‘partygate’ scandals and Brexit. At the most basic level, the very existence of the present government is down to Brexit, its central manifesto message was ‘getting Brexit done’, its composition is based on the central test of Brexit loyalty, and its advisers, from Dominic Cummings downwards, initially came from the old Vote Leave campaign team.

That team, including Cummings, has of course now been mainly expunged from Downing Street, but one aspect of the scandals now engulfing Boris Johnson is that they derive from that rift. Indeed Katy Balls, Deputy Political Editor of the Spectator – and therefore presumably well-connected to the players – suggests that the “pivotal moment” for these scandals was Johnson’s decision in November 2020 to cut ties with his Vote Leave advisers.

This led Cummings to embark on a “revenge mission” which Balls suggests included a series of damaging leaks. Certainly Cummings’ public statements have significantly contributed to the mess that Johnson is now in. So for all that there’s a certain piquancy in seeing Johnson tormented by this “extraordinary vendetta”, as Jacob Rees-Mogg squeakily calls it, it is a highly unedifying spectacle since it seems motivated by egotism and bitterness rather than principle or the public good.

Thus the present crisis can be read as part of the unwinding of the ramshackle coalition that fought for, and obtained, Brexit, with another example being the now widely expressed dissatisfaction of Thatcherite Tories with Johnson’s Brexit. However, its deeper roots lie in the incoherence of the populist politics that delivered Brexit, and the way the subsequent Covid pandemic has exposed that incoherence far more clearly than Brexit itself.

The paradox of populism

At the core of this is the central paradox of populism. Brexit was presented as the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the elite’; the “victory … for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won”, as Nigel Farage put it the day after the referendum. In the years since then all the conflicts it has given rise to have been explicitly cast in those terms (hence, ‘will of the people’, ‘enemies of the people’, and the equation of remainers with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’). It’s also implicit whenever there are reports of Brexit causing prices of imported foods to rise or foreign travel to be more difficult, which are always met with sneers implying that ‘ordinary, decent people’ have no experience of such fripperies.  

Yet this was always a precarious construct, given that the country was and is more or less evenly split – making ‘the people’ an unconvincingly small proportion and ‘the elite’ a preposterously large one – and the self-evidently elite nature of its leaders. For the idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxford educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Johnson, Gove, Farage, Cummings, Carswell, Lawson, Rees-Mogg, Hannan, Redwood and many more – are anything other than a privileged elite is plainly ludicrous. It is a fiction which is constantly vulnerable to obvious inconsistencies, but although they are often pointed out (Rees-Mogg’s investment fund company, Lawson’s French Chateau, Redwood’s advice to investors etc.) this has no 'cut through' with their supporters.

Why? I’m sure it is not that those supporters fail to spot the elite privilege of their leaders. It is that this isn’t the kind of privilege to which they object. Such figures – Johnson most obviously, Farage certainly, even Rees-Mogg surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ and, perhaps more important, as ‘authentic’. More than anything, they may be privileged but they are not what their supporters mean by ‘the elite’ which, instead, is associated with the supposedly finger-wagging, won’t let us say what really think, prissy, moralistic, do-gooders. The Human Rights Brigade. The PC Brigade. The girly swots. The experts. The bleeding-heart liberals. More recently, the Woke police.

It’s a shadowy and amorphous group which, together, constitutes a ‘them’ to which the ‘us’ – ordinary people and our perhaps not ordinary in the ordinary sense but still authentic leaders – are opposed. For years we suffered as the ‘silent majority’, but with Brexit we found our voice. Within this is another, and crucial, dividing line. As brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Coe’s ‘Brexit novel’, Middle England, the elite in this meaning are ‘constantly telling us what to do and say’. They are interfering. They are authoritarian. They force us to be other than ourselves, and so to be humiliatingly inauthentic. They make us follow their rules, whereas Johnson, Farage and Rees-Mogg are themselves and let us be ourselves.

Taking back control

In this cultural universe, ‘taking back control’ was a doubly potent slogan. It was about freedom from EU control, but also freedom from the control of them – who, not coincidentally, were opposed to Brexit – freedom to ‘talk about immigration’, freedom to celebrate Christmas not ‘Winterval’, freedom to fly the St George Flag and the Union Jack without being sneered at. In this last way it was, of course, partly about nationalism – about ‘us’ as a nation – but also about internal divisions – about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, those who for so long had ruled over us but were now exposed as traitors and saboteurs, as anti-British Elite Remainers (£).

So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link all sorts of disparate ideologies and resentments, the spines of which were ‘freedom from the rules’. Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-referendum period were framed by this. These ranged from the Miller case on Parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 to the row over Bercow’s “bombshell” ruling that Parliament couldn’t vote twice on the same motion (Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement), through to the court cases over prorogation. They were all battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether ‘the will of the people’ trumped such niceties.

It also informed the government’s brazenly announced intention to break international law over the Internal Market Bill and the decision arguably to actually do so by unilaterally flouting the Northern Ireland Protocol. It lay behind Johnson’s refusal to accept that Priti Patel had breached the Ministerial Code. And it explains the attempt to rip up the rules governing MPs’ conduct in order to get arch-Brexiter Owen Paterson off the hook, the failure of which now looks increasingly like the watershed moment in Johnson’s premiership.

Anti-ruleism

At least until the Paterson scandal, Johnson was an ideal front man for all this because of his own disdain for rules in any form. This doesn’t derive from any coherent philosophy, but seems simply to be a mix of psychological disposition and sociological entitlement. On the one hand, he is lazy, irresponsible, and financially and morally incontinent. On the other, he grew up in and inhabits a privileged milieu where ‘rules are for the little people’. So, for example, this week it was reported that during a period of isolation due to exposure to Covid, despite being a grown adult:

“We had to create a ‘cat run’ for him to get from the flat to his office so that he wouldn’t come into contact with people. The idea was we could talk to him through the open door. But he kept on coming out so we put two chairs across the door like some kind of puppy gate. There was a pattern throughout. He just simply didn’t think about following the rules. They were not for him.”

This almost instinctive disdain for rules is very different to, but for a while gelled with, the ‘anti-ruleism’ of Cummings (which is also very different to the libertarianism of some Brexiters). Despite some of the more breathless commentary, such as David Runciman’s recent portrait of him, Cummings’ views of politics and policy are not especially unusual (though the tenacity with which he pursues them may well be).

Ironically, given his, often accurate, criticism of business schools, they closely resemble those of big-league MBA students in the 1990s and 2000s. Both share the ‘work round the clock, win at all costs, smartest guys in the room’ machismo. They’re also similar in the mix of adulation for this or that business leader, Silicon Valley ‘disruptor’ schtick, and geek-macho enthrallment to science and data, the confluence of which then informs various ideas about the management and organization of big projects, often discussed on Cummings’ blog.

Whilst having some interesting insights in them, these discussions are like jelly in being a sprawling mish-mash of ideas without much in the way of disciplined thinking. At all events, the key point here is that, to the extent they have an over-arching theme, they sit within a well-worn groove of anti-bureaucratic analysis of organizations. Since the core of bureaucracy is rational-legal authority, these ideas are associated with a specific hostility to the Civil Service and to what Cummings and others call ‘the Blob’ (£), and often slide into impatience with, even disdain for, the rule of law.

In this way, the supposedly anti-establishment project of Brexit morphed into one directed at the machinery of government when Johnson and Cummings got to Downing Street. Yet, just as the idea of Brexit as anti-establishment became an absurdity once Brexiters won and became the Establishment, so too was it an in-built paradox to rule based upon an approach to politics defined by rule-breaking.

Enter coronavirus

That paradox became glaring when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and Johnson was suddenly confronted by a situation which required the imposition of draconian rules and restrictions on everyday life that were unprecedented in peacetime. Small wonder that he did so belatedly, reluctantly, and with a nod and a wink that the rules were there to be broken.

But here the populism that had delivered Brexit took an unexpected turn. Because what was revealed were two diametrically different responses to the Covid rules from Brexit supporters. Some of the most high-profile of them became, as discussed in another post on this blog – lockdown sceptics, insisting that no free-born Englishman could submit to the yoke of Whitehall tyranny, with ERG membership closely overlapping the new ‘Covid Recovery Group’. Few could doubt that, had he not been in power, Johnson would have been amongst them. Yet amongst plenty of rank-and-file leave voters an entirely different version of cultural identity held sway, and one they shared with plenty of remainers.

This was the traditional image of the British – and for once it was the British, not just the English - as a ‘naturally’ law-abiding people of orderly queues, fair play, pulling together for the common good, and ‘all in it together’. A people who, in fact, did not disdain but played by the rules. Indeed Johnson himself, with his constant invocations of Second World War unity, mobilised exactly this cultural theme, and it proved to be remarkably powerful. Most people have followed the rules, despite the hardship, and in some cases tragedy, that entailed.

This disjuncture first emerged with force in May 2020 when Cummings was exposed as a lockdown rule-breaker in the ‘Barnard Castle’ episode*, yet defended by – oh how the wheel turns – Johnson. Finally, the incipient distinction between ‘the people’ and their anti-elitist yet self-evidently elite leadership was exposed in a way which had ‘cut through’ whereas, for example, the funding of the Downing Street flat refurbishment didn’t. The ‘freedom from rules’ umbrella of Brexit was blown inside-out by the wind of coronavirus.

Crucially, with the Cummings scandal came what Fintan O’Toole called “the unpardonable snigger of elite condescension”. It was that same sniggering which, come partygate, caused Allegra Stratton’s downfall as she rehearsed precisely the defence line of a party having been ‘a meeting’ which Johnson was subsequently to use in his ‘apology’ to parliament. And it was the same sniggering as Johnson’s when asked by a reporter about the most controversial of the parties. Suddenly, breaking the rules ceased to be funny, and ceased to be part of a popular insurrection against the Establishment, and became a potent symbol of elitist hypocrisy and contempt for ‘ordinary people’.

Rules have their uses

Whereas the scandals over PPE procurement were defended on the grounds that ‘in an emergency’ the niceties of bureaucratic rules governing the award of contracts had to be abandoned, those over lockdown rule-breaking had a very different character. Attempts to run a somewhat similar defence – that the parties were an understandable response to pressure of work – founder on the fact (£) that the same could have been said of NHS or other key workers.

So Johnson, like Cummings before him, has sought to save himself by an ironic invocation of rules and procedures. In Cummings’ case, he invoked some supposed exemptions in the detail of the regulations. In Johnson’s, he has tried to argue that the party he attended fell “technically” within the guidance, and that he “implicitly believed” he was following all the rules. Yet this cuts little ice considering the many cases where even unwitting rule breakers had been prosecuted and fined.

In another irony, as it is very much in keeping with the traditional response of the political Establishment to scandals, he has also deployed the ruse of ‘initiating a full inquiry’, hiding desperately behind the much-despised Civil Service Blob in the shape of Sue Gray. Suddenly bureaucrats are not just back in fashion but the fount of wisdom and justice, for whose words we are constantly told we must wait before passing judgment; there are rules and processes that must be followed after all!

Indeed in all the many scandals that have afflicted his short premiership it is notable that Johnson has invariably invoked procedural solutions or established customs to defend his rule-breaking, hence the seemingly endless inquiries of various types (equally notable is how often their findings have been anodyne or ignored). Even the prorogation of parliament was passed off as just a standard ritual until the Supreme Court put paid to that, something which still rankles with Brexiters and is believed to have led Johnson to want to seek revenge by ‘reforming’ its role (£).

Partygate and Brexit

However, unlike the prorogation and many other post-referendum cases of rule-breaking, reaction to the partygate scandal doesn’t follow the Brexit fault line. As was also attempted in relation to Cummings, some, such as doltish MP Michael Fabricant, have tried to pass it off as the anger of the “London Remain classes” but it’s very plain that it transcends that divide (£). That matters, because it is perhaps the only time since 2016 that this has happened. It shows that both remainers and leavers can and do share some very significant common values. In fact it is closer to the public outcry in 2009 over politicians' expenses, except for being aimed entirely at the Conservative Party (attempts to widen it to include Keir Starmer having so far failed).

It’s also of note that Operation Red Meat – the deployment of populist policy announcements to try to rebuild that coalition of support for Johnson – does not seek to work the Brexit divide, for example by making new threats to invoke Article 16. As I argued last week, that would not be likely to work as a distraction from his difficulties but would add to them. That’s because another part of Johnson’s defence is the endless claim that, whatever his partygate sins, he ‘got Brexit done’, something hard to reconcile with a fresh crisis over the attempt to re-write the Northern Ireland Protocol (of that, the only concrete news is that intense talks are continuing prior to Truss and Sefcovic meeting on Monday, but the respected commentator Mujtaba Rahman detects signs of progress, even if there are doubts of an early resolution).

Partygate obviously doesn’t mean that we’ve seen the end of the populist politics that underpinned and flowed from Brexit, still less of Brexit itself. It may not even mean the end of Johnson, whose fate remains precariously in the balance. If he does go, it will make a difference to the Brexit debate from then on, though. That is partly because so much of the leaving process remains ongoing, and his successor will affect how that is approached – albeit within a limited palette of options, some of which are even worse than Johnson’s and none of them hugely better.

Instead, partygate matters because it exposes the risks and fragilities of populism. A politics that mobilises ‘the people’ against ‘the Establishment’, and which posits rules as elitist meddling, can be an effective weapon for campaigning but is a double-edged one for governing. There is an implication in that for Brexit. As the damage charted by, for example, Yorkshire Bylines' now 500 item-long Davis Downside Dossier, mounts, ‘the people’ may recall that it’s nothing like what they were promised in 2016. They may even conclude that so fraudulent a deception was not ‘playing by the rules’ to a far greater extent than Johnson’s Brexit Establishment lockdown parties, and react with a correspondingly greater wrath.

 


*Long-term readers of this blog may have noticed that this post is in parts based on the one I wrote about the Cummings scandal at the time, reflecting the way that it was a precursor to partygate.

The moral turpitude of Brexit brinksmanship

As has been expected for some months, the autumn crisis over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) began in earnest this week. Its outcome is difficult to predict, but has the potential be pivotal for UK-EU post-Brexit relations. There is some time to run before we get to that point, though. Indeed it is perfectly possible that the current phase will still be going on in time for the second anniversary of Boris Johnson’s election victory, won – it should not be forgotten - on the then dishonest and now discredited slogan that he would “get Brexit done”.

It has long been obvious, and Dominic Cummings confirmed this week, that, even whilst proclaiming that slogan, the government never regarded the NIP as a settled or legitimate arrangement. Indeed, from the outset, its fundamental provision of creating an Irish Sea border has been denied by numerous ministers, up to and including the Prime Minister, and ever since they have been chipping away at it. And within just two weeks of the NIP becoming operative Johnson was already threatening to invoke Article 16.

The critique that it is an agreement negotiated and signed by the government, whilst wholly justified, cuts no ice with Frost, Johnson or Brexiters in general. For those interested in why this is so, I’ve prepared a separate page on this blog, so as to avoid having to keep repeating it. For now, the point is that this latest crisis grows directly from the dishonesty and incompetence of what Johnson’s government did before, during and immediately after the 2019 election. It is a crisis of some complexity, hence this long and rather dense post.

The NIP row resumes

The summer holiday hiatus was set to be broken when the EU made its formal response to the UK’s July Command Paper* on Wednesday of this week. Its contents, which had been widely trailed in the preceding days, offer substantial compromises to the UK in terms of reducing border checks and customs formalities. There may be questions of whether they are as significant as is being claimed and reported, and an Institute for Government summary shows there are many gaps between the UK and EU positions. Still,  they go a long way to meeting previous UK demands, and would seem to deliver pretty much everything that businesses in Northern Ireland have been asking for. Notably, the proposals were very much framed by the EU as a response to these practical problems on the ground, rather than to the UK’s demands as such.

Although the government has said it will consider and negotiate with the EU on these proposals, before they had even been formally revealed David Frost had already effectively (though not quite in terms) indicated, both in a Tweet last weekend and then in a speech in Lisbon on Tuesday, that they were not acceptable. As so often before, Frost threatened to ‘invoke Article 16’ but, as ever, gave no hint of understanding what would come afterwards, or why he imagines that it would do anything to resolve matters. Porcine and graceless in delivery, and littered with patronizing and insulting asides, it was exactly the anti-diplomacy that Frost, whether through ambition or genuine conversion to Brexitism, has made his specialty.

The speech isn’t worth detailed discussion – Frost’s crude and self-serving narrative about why the agreement he negotiated only two years ago is a crock hasn’t evolved beyond that which I’ve analysed at length in the past. It was full of all the familiar Brexiter canards (listed in the new page mentioned earlier), and replete with the mixture of aggression, passive aggression and aggrieved victimhood that has characterised Brexit throughout. As Rafael Behr stingingly put it, it “was a whinge disguised as a hymn to national self-determination”. Its intellectual anchoring, if so it can be called, as with his Brussels lecture last year, is Edmund Burke’s outmoded eighteenth-century understanding of sovereignty, notable if only for being even more superannuated than Brexiters’ nineteenth-century understanding of trade.

What was important in the speech is, first, that, unlike the Command Paper, which was light on detail, it was accompanied by a full legal text of what amounts to an entirely new agreement.  This has been sent to the European Commission, and although it hasn’t been published it clearly isn’t a finesse of the existing NIP but a complete replacement. And, second, Frost put a new and strong emphasis on completely removing the role of the ECJ from the NIP.

There is some sophistry, as usual, about whether this is a new demand. Frost points out that it was mentioned in the Command Paper, and that is true, but it was only in passing. It certainly hasn’t been emphasised as a problem until now. The more important point is that not only was the ECJ’s role written into the NIP, it was part of the government’s own 2019 proposals for what became the NIP**, which also included explicit recognition of the need for regulatory checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and which envisaged regulatory alignment “over a potentially prolonged period of time”.

In other words, almost all that Frost now objects to, including the ECJ’s role, was at one time not just agreed to but proposed by the UK. This also means that the suggestion that the government’s own preferences were thwarted by the remainer parliament is false.

And even if there’s a case to trigger Article 16 on the (anticipated) grounds of the diversion of trade which is occurring (which is questionable, since it’s arguably not “anything beyond what could have been reasonably anticipated”) it cannot be argued this is so as regards the role of the ECJ. For that has not created a single practical problem and is highly unlikely to do so. It is only now coming to the fore as a purely ideological demand for theoretical ‘sovereignty’. Perhaps more significantly, it is a demand that the government must know the EU won’t accede to (at least in substance: a fudge is conceivable).

Why ‘hardball’ diplomacy is the problem not the solution

It is entirely unsurprising that, if not this, then something like it would happen. As I’ve outlined numerous times on this blog, the Johnson-Frost approach is not that of ‘normal diplomacy’, seeking concessions and offering reciprocal concessions, but one of ever-hardening demands, with each concession given seen as a sign of EU weakness and a demonstration that the ‘madman approach’ is working. The ultimate aim of this approach – more usually applied to nuclear warfare - is to secure all your negotiating demands under threat of being ‘mad’ enough to ‘press the nuclear button’ if the other side does not agree to them, regardless of any damage you, yourself, suffer as a result. It very much resembles the way the ERG came to dominate the Tory Party.

To say it isn’t normal diplomacy would not, of course, be regarded by Frost and Johnson as criticism but as praise. That’s because what is missing from their understanding is that their approach really doesn’t work very well. It’s true that the ERG got their Brexit, but ever since they have complained that it isn’t real Brexit. It’s true that the government got its trade deal, but it was defined not by what the EU had conceded but by what the UK had excluded itself from. And it’s true that Johnson got Theresa May’s “hated backstop” removed from the NIP, but only by replacing it with something he now professes also to hate.

The other side of the coin is that not only the Johnson-Frost approach but that of May and David Davis before it has entailed enormous costs to trust and goodwill with the EU, and it is actually this which has created so many of the problems which the UK government now complains of. The very fact that the EU was determined that an arrangement for Northern Ireland be agreed in advance of any trade deal and as part of the legally binding Withdrawal Agreement was partly because, from the outset, the Brexiters downplayed or denied the Irish border issue. And when in December 2017 the phase 1 agreement on what that arrangement would be was reached, David Davis immediately disowned it as not being legally binding, making it all the more important for the EU to create a watertight agreement that the UK would not wriggle out of. What else to do, when the UK had demonstrated that it could not be trusted on its word alone?

Subsequently, the ‘hardball’ tactics of threatening to illegally break the NIP with the Internal Market Bill reduced trust even further and threatened (rather than, as the Brexiters imagine, facilitated) the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Now, the EU’s insistence on a role for the ECJ in Northern Ireland arises at least in part because it does not trust the UK with a more flexible, and therefore high-trust, arrangement.

In another tweeted comment this week, Cummings sneered at those bemoaning his admission of the UK’s lack of good faith in negotiating the NIP, saying “cheating foreigners is a core part of the job”. That may sound hard-headed in his geek-macho universe, but in reality it just makes it impossible to be trusted in a world where trust is typically needed to get you all of what you want. So the problem with the hardball approach isn’t that it is ‘nasty’ or ‘unconventional’, but that it is counter-productive in terms of producing the outcomes the government claims to seek. Far from being worldly-wise, it’s worldly-dumb.

Against all this, Frost and the Brexiters undoubtedly believe that the very fact that the EU is now tabling proposals to revise the NIP is proof that their approach works, and indeed such claims are currently being widely made. To a certain extent that’s true by definition, because if the UK hadn’t sought to change the terms then they would probably have stayed unchanged. But it misses what I think is a fundamental point, one which is as problematic for the UK as for the EU but is complex to unpack.

The perils of ‘madman theory’

Despite the breakdown of trust, and despite the UK’s abandonment of established rules of international relations, the EU has so far continued to treat the UK as if it is in the domain of normal conduct. To use the metaphor of a previous post, it is acting as if calm and reasonable discussion with an anti-social ‘neighbour from hell’ can still work.

In that sense, the EU isn’t actually responding to the UK’s ‘madman’ approach but to an imagination that its approach is still something more-or-less conventional, and not particularly different in kind to that of other third countries on its borders. No doubt that is in part because, viewed from the outside, it’s difficult to see how far and how quickly British political culture has moved from its long-established norms. In other words, the EU isn’t treating the UK as being ‘mad’, whereas the UK ascribes its ‘success’ to the EU seeing it that way - and so continues with that approach.

This sets up a dangerous little knot. In classic ‘madman theory’, A is really sane but B thinks he is, or may be, mad, and so concedes rather than face annihilation. In the present case, what if B (the EU) thinks A (the UK) is sane – but in fact A really is mad, or at least thinks that B believes he is mad, so no concession to him is enough to avoid annihilation? If that is the situation, then It’s obvious that what is in prospect is the near-inevitability of a really serious crisis, and it will come if and when the EU reaches the conclusion that it can make no more concessions to the UK and calls time.

There are signs that this point is approaching, and if it is then ‘madman theory’ will face its final test: if the UK is simply ‘playing madman’ as a strategy then, at the very last minute, it will back down and accept the EU proposals, or something like them. If, under the toxic influence of Brexiter ideology, the UK really has become ‘mad’, then the practical outcome is annihilation.

Of course in the present context we are not talking about literal ‘annihilation’ or anything like it, and for that matter we are not talking about a single, final event. The most likely outcome if there is no agreement on the EU proposals is that the UK then carries out the threat to trigger Article 16 and there would be some reciprocal measures from the EU in terms of heightened ‘market surveillance’ as well as the resumption of legal action against the UK. In other words, despite much talk to the contrary, there almost certainly wouldn’t be an immediate trade war, although that, in some more or less extensive form, could very well follow early next year.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that if Article 16 is triggered it would mark a dramatic and serious deterioration in UK-EU relations, as well as having repercussions for UK-US relations and possible security implications in Northern Ireland. Moreover, this would be happening in the context of the UK being already battered by the worsening Brexit-related supply and labour crisis and the energy crisis, and on top of the still smouldering pandemic. More fundamentally, any eventual trade war would be highly asymmetric in favour of the EU.

What are the politics of this?

So the government now has a choice. It could – and may – accept the new EU proposals, or something close to them, claiming it as a huge victory and gaining domestic kudos for the British Lion having humiliated the EU. But Frost’s pre-emptive strike seems to suggest that he has no intention of accepting them. If that is not the case then it was a remarkably unskilled intervention, making it harder for the government to do so.

For one danger of the Frost-Johnson approach, if it is designed to extract maximum concessions by making impossible demands and then backing-off from those demands when the concessions have been made, is that it excites such high expectations from the most hard-line Brexiters that the final backing-off becomes politically impossible. There are already signs that this is exactly how Brexit Tory MPs like David Davis (£) and John Redwood are responding to the EU concessions, as of course are the DUP. In the wider, and wilder, ‘Brexitosphere’, some are actively welcoming a trade war. In this way, the ‘madman’s’ pretence at being mad can become a terrible trap in which he is forced by his supporters into delivering the ‘annihilation’ he had threatened, even if he hadn’t originally intended to do so.

If – whether as a result of this pressure or because it was his intention anyway – Johnson does reject the proposals and does trigger Article 16, then of course the government will spin it as EU aggression and perhaps gain support as a result. In a sense, that has always been the ‘hedge’ bet of the madman strategy – if it fails then the government gets rewarded for being ‘plucky Britain’ standing up to the EU.

In other words, it is possible that from a domestic political point of view, even if the outcome is economically and diplomatically damaging, it might actually boost the government’s popularity. This might be especially so if it came at the same time as significant French action over Jersey fishing licences, such as the threatened cut to electricity supplies. For the reasons discussed in last week’s post, it is all too easy to imagine Johnson prioritising an immediate surge in popularity over any amount of damage to the country whose interests he is supposed to protect.

All this can be turned round and looked at from the point of view of erstwhile remainers. Some might hope that the EU taking a tough line with the UK might finally bring the country to its senses and dispel many Brexiter delusions. That’s possible, but for the reasons just given might rebound and entrench those delusions even more deeply. Conversely, some erstwhile remainers might fear that if the EU does now get tough it might be at just the wrong moment, giving the Brexit project a fresh injection of jingoism exactly as the supply and labour crisis begins to discredit it. That too is possible, but it might be that a new crisis over Brexit would damage Johnson and the Brexiters by exposing their false claim to have ‘got Brexit done’.

So these are both equally plausible (or implausible) scenarios, but the key point to make is that whatever the EU does or does not do it will almost certainly not be informed by the effect on UK politics – though how it affects Northern Ireland will be a consideration, not least because Ireland is a member state - and still less on what it does or does not do for erstwhile remainers’ ability to discredit Brexit. Those days, to the extent they ever existed, are long gone.

The moral turpitude of Brexit

Needless to say, none of these half-baked game theory constructs has the remotest relevance to those of us who simply wish to have a harmonious and prosperous relationship with our friends and neighbours. Nowhere is that more true than in Northern Ireland, where inevitably in the background there is always the memory and possibility of sectarian violence. Watching the second part of the BBC’s Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution this week served as a reminder of the horrors of that past, and also of the extraordinarily complex and intricate mechanisms that created the Good Friday Agreement - into which Brexit has thrown such an enormous rock.

Brexit is an ill-conceived project for all kinds of reasons, none greater than its treatment of Northern Ireland. From the casual dismissal before the referendum of the implications for the border, through the cavalier signing of the NIP, through to the current use of the Protocol as a plaything to demonstrate a bizarre theology of sovereignty at all costs, this treatment shows the moral turpitude that lies at the heart of Brexit.

 

*A small aside. I sometimes see people saying that Frost’s use of the term ‘Command Paper’ is yet another example of Brexiter, or just British, arrogance, implying that it is issuing ‘commands’ to the EU. There are many sticks with which to beat Frost, but this really isn’t one of them. A Command Paper is just a paper presented to Parliament “by Command of Her Majesty” – archaic, maybe, but nothing to do with Brexit.

**The link is to a Twitter thread by Professor David Phinnemore of Queen’s University Belfast, a leading expert on the NIP, and contains key extracts from the relevant documents as well as further links to the documents themselves.

Articles of faith

In the years before the Referendum – long before this blog started, so I haven’t kept links – I quite often came across pro-leave people explaining, usually in rather lofty tones, that leaving the EU would be very simple because everything was all set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Prior to that, there had been no formally defined exit mechanism. Its creation had been partly as a reassurance for the countries that joined in 2004, but it had the support of what were then called Eurosceptics in the UK in the hope that, one day, it would be their portal to ‘freedom’.

Invoking Article 50

If we have learned nothing else since 2016, it is surely that Article 50 offered only the broadest of frameworks for withdrawal, and “invoking” it was only the beginning of a complex process. So having so enthusiastically lauded Article 50 as the answer to their prayers, the most committed Brexiters actually approached it in a variety of quite contradictory ways.

One, espoused by the Vote Leave campaign documents (slide 11), was to say that “we will negotiate the terms of a new deal before we start any legal process to leave”, meaning prior to invoking Article 50. This was impossible (and rejected by the EU before the Referendum votes had even been counted) and was rarely mentioned again after the Referendum result. The second, espoused from time to time by UKIP, was simply to leave without invoking Article 50 at all. This would have been perverse, since it wouldn’t have made any of the issues involved in leaving disappear, though, quite astonishingly, it seems to be what Dominic Cummings still thinks could have happened, and he also believes the EU would have entered negotiations prior to triggering Article 50.

The third, soon dominant, idea was that Article 50 should be invoked as soon as possible, and that any delay represented backsliding and was the province of the “enemies of the people”, so immediate invocation became a test of Brexit fidelity. A final idea, which for many months Theresa May’s government, including at the time Boris Johnson, appeared to believe, was that both exit and future terms could be agreed within the Article 50 period. This was simply false.

The underlying mind-set

All this is old history now, but worth recalling because it reveals a mind-set which has not gone away and which is coming to the fore again. It was evident on the many occasions in 2018 and 2019 that Brexiters – including Rees-Mogg, Farage and Johnson – talked of ‘invoking GATT Article XXIV’ as a way of, supposedly, securing a temporary trade deal even if no exit (let alone trade deal) had been done. It was nonsense and, notably, although Johnson referred to it during his campaign to be Tory leader during an excruciatingly embarrassing interview with Andrew Neil, he never mentioned it after that. But the same mind-set is on display now in the numerous calls and threats to ‘invoke Article 16’ of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP).

What is the mind-set? I think it has three, related, aspects. One lies in the image it conveys of the UK having unilateral control – it ‘invokes’ things and, as such, appears to be the active party without having to have regard for other players, notably the EU. The second is that, for all their supposed disdain for expertise, Brexiters are adept at using what to the general public sounds like ‘expert jargon’ which, when delivered in dismissive or authoritative terms, gives the impression of great mastery of technical detail when, in fact, none exists. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it suggests that there is a quick and easy short-cut to solve complex and intractable problems.

As regards the NIP, it is now abundantly obvious that Johnson’s government also saw that as a short-cut to ‘solving’ Brexit, without understanding or caring what it meant. The same goes for the Brexiter MPs and MEPs who voted for it in the British and European parliaments, although some of them seem to have persuaded themselves, or been persuaded by others, that it would lapse once a trade agreement was reached. Hence, even now, dullards like Iain Duncan Smith say (£) that the NIP was “always seen by both sides as a temporary solution”. This is a flat-out falsehood. Unlike May’s ‘backstop’, this was a ‘frontstop’ agreement that existed permanently and independently of any trade agreement or of there being no trade agreement at all. The two were connected only to the extent that had the trade agreement been a ‘deeper’ one, then the nature of the Irish Sea border would have been correspondingly ‘thinner’ (e.g. in terms of the extensiveness of checks).

Invoking Article 16: and then what?

Whether it was always intended or only later decided that the NIP would be reneged upon, the idea that ‘invoking Article 16’ offered a way out of what had been agreed first surfaced as early as January 13 2021, when Johnson spoke of doing so in the House of Commons. That date is of note for two reasons. Firstly, because it was less than two weeks into the actual operation of the NIP, showing how early it was being threatened (and, of course, Johnson and others had denied from the outset that the NIP meant there would be an Irish Sea border). And secondly because it predates by two weeks the EU’s own short-lived and abandoned threat to invoke Article 16 over vaccine supplies, of which Brexiters and the government now make so much.

As I wrote at the time, that was a major blunder by the EU, with no justification. Even so, and apart from the fact it never happened, what it would have meant has been heavily misrepresented. It would not have meant creating an Ireland-Northern Ireland border, as some Brexiters now claim, but only that vaccines destined for Northern Ireland would never have left the factory in Belgium. Moreover, it would have been a specific measure to deal with a particular and unforeseen emergency. In this, even as a possibility, it was entirely different to the way that the Brexiters, and the government, are now talking about how the UK might try to use Article 16.

What that talk seems to suggest is that Article 16 would allow the UK unilaterally to suspend the entirety of the NIP or even unilaterally to disapply the NIP. As Professors Katy Hayward and Dave Phinnemore of Queen’s University Belfast explain, neither of these is the case. The UK would need to identify ‘serious’ problems which were ‘unexpected’ and ‘likely to persist’, and the proposed solutions, for consideration and discussion by the Joint Committee. Diversion of trade is one possible problem which might be identified – and Frost’s recent statements seem to imply it is the one upon which the UK might base an Article 16 invocation - but it can’t just be that which was to be expected because it is inherent in the agreement. It certainly isn’t the case, as, again, Iain Duncan Smith recently claimed (£), that diversion is “forbidden” by the NIP. And most certainly Article 16 isn’t a way of just saying ‘we don’t like this agreement’: its terms would continue to exist, and many of them would continue to operate.

So, rather as with invoking Article 50, it would be the beginning of a process (though not one leading to ‘exiting’ the NIP). Thus whenever invoking Article 16 is proposed, the crucial question that should be asked is: and then what? The answer, inescapably, is further negotiation with the EU, but if that has failed to give the UK the outcome it wants without using Article 16 then it is no more likely (probably less likely) having done so. So what then? Rip up the NIP entirely, with all that will mean for possible trade sanctions from the EU, and, at the very least, diplomatic rows with the US? And, still, what then?

Article 16 can’t solve the deeper problem

For the deeper problem in all this is the same one that has existed since, at least, the UK government decided in January 2017 that Brexit meant hard Brexit. If the UK is to be outside the regulatory regime of the EU single market and the tariff regime of the customs union then the UK itself needs a border just as the EU does. So where’s the border? That question has no easier answer now than it had in all the years since 2017 during which endless models were proposed. The NIP is the least-worst answer that anyone could come up with which both sides would agree to.

The recent spate of self-serving tweets from Dominic Cummings on this subject is again instructive. Although he affects disdain for the ERG, his account is precisely that which most of them have been peddling for years, namely that the Irish border issue was a minor or even non-existent one, and only achieved prominence because of the weakness and incompetence of May’s government and its acceptance of what Cummings calls the “babbling” about the Good Friday Agreement. Had what he calls “we” (apparently meaning the Vote Leave team) been in charge, the UK would just have refused to erect borders and if the EU did then so be it: the integrity of the single market was the EU’s problem, not the UK’s (he still doesn’t seem to realise that the UK needed a border as well). By the time Johnson and Cummings came to power, it was too late and what they both childishly call the ‘Surrender Act’ (meaning the Benn Act) prevented resurrecting a hardball approach, hence the NIP with its associated Irish Sea border. This, of course, rests on the preposterous idea that a no-deal Brexit, which would have damaged the UK far more than the EU, constituted negotiating leverage had the Benn Act not prevented it.

As I say, none of this is new and I’ve catalogued it as the boilerplate position of the Brexit Ultras endlessly on this blog, as well as explaining why it was unrealistic. Apart from anything else it ignores the fact that David Davis thought pretty much exactly the same things, but found that they were unworkable, including the fantasy of an Article 50 pre-negotiation, the denial of the reality of the Irish border issue, and the delusion that Ireland was only a minor player. In short, most of Cummings’s ‘hypotheticals’ are already discredited. More generally, what developed into May’s deal wasn’t a result of the Ultras’ approach not having been tried, but of it having been tried and failed. So it is only of passing interest, and no surprise, that Cummings himself has confirmed that he shares their analysis of the Brexit process and clings – in a way reminiscent of those who used to defend the USSR as not being ‘real’ Communism – to the idea that ‘it just wasn’t tried properly’.

Frost’s flawed logic

Cummings is irrelevant now, hence he has the time to re-litigate the events of the last few years in his barrage of tweets and blogs. But what remains highly relevant is that his analysis is shared by David Frost who, of course, was one of the Cummings’ group when the NIP was negotiated. Frost may not have brewed the Kool-Aid (his skills, to the extent they are discernible, appear to be emulative rather than innovative), but he certainly drank deeply from the cup. So Cummings’s statements underscore the fact that Frost, like all the Brexit Ultras, doesn’t accept the need for the NIP or the validity of the process that led to it. Moreover, it underscores his commitment to the fanciful idea that playing ‘hardball’ pays dividends – the belief, for example, that the illegal clauses in the Internal Markets Bill paved the way to a trade deal being struck (in fact, they nearly scuppered it). The corollary of that belief is a refusal to accept that the UK losing the trust of the EU – and more widely - matters, or is even a relevant concept.

The reason this is so crucial is that it confirms something which, as I’ve argued before, I think many pundits misunderstand about Frost’s approach to the NIP. It is not ‘playing to the domestic gallery’ and it is not intended to be, though of course may end up being, a prelude to a climbdown with the EU. Like every bull market sucker, he genuinely believes that ‘this time’ it will be different. If I am right, then Frost is not making the current hard pitch as a route to a subsequent compromise giving him much but not all of what he demands, but believes he can have those demands met pretty much in full.

This seems to be confirmed this week by the government’s immediate rejection of the EU’s proposals for some flexibilities in the application of the NIP as inadequate. It also explains why Frost isn’t doing anything to build trust with the EU in the way suggested in a wise analysis of the situation by Maddy Thimont Jack of the Institute for Government this week. For, wise as it is, trust plays no part on the Frost-Cummings-Game Theory 101 approach to negotiations. It does, however, matter in the real world, and lack of trust in both the UK in general and Johnson in particular is the central stumbling block to Frost’s recent proposals being accepted when viewed from an EU perspective.

Moreover, the antagonistic atmosphere Frost has created arguably partly explains the European Commission’s refusal to recommend that the UK be allowed to rejoin the Lugano Convention (as readers of this blog will be aware). It certainly won’t have helped. Nor is it likely to help in the re-emerging disagreements over Gibraltar. More generally, Frost either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that it is in the nature of Brexit that the UK will, permanently, be in negotiations with the EU about something or other. Eviscerating goodwill in such circumstances is extremely foolish.

So what now?

Coming back to the NIP, in her characteristically excellent assessment of the present situation, Professor Katy Hayward suggests that Frost’s strategy “simply deepens the hole that the UK has dug for itself”. She argues that the EU has three possible responses. One would be simply to accept all or most of the UK’s demands, but she is surely right to think this highly unlikely. The second would be to take some form of retaliatory action (introduction of some tariffs, exclusion of UK from some programmes). The third is to continue to try to negotiate within the framework of the NIP, as so far continues to be the case.

That might also go alongside a more minimal acceptance of Frost’s demands to the extent of further extensions of the various grace periods. This seemed likely to happen anyway, and even more so now that the EU have announced that it will, as Frost requested, pause the legal action over those grace periods the UK unilaterally extended last March. As I flagged in my previous post, last week it was being reported that the action would proceed to the next stage by the end of this month.

The logic of Frost’s position (assuming, again, that I have read it correctly) would be to respond aggressively to any retaliations, and to bank concessions on the grace periods, regard them as proof that his ‘tough’ approach works, say they don’t go far enough, and invoke Article 16. As noted above, the latter wouldn’t solve anything but it would escalate the political crisis – which is the only direction that the Frost logic points to. In that view of the world, as soon as you back down, or even compromise, you’ve lost. That is what – as Cummings’ statements show – the Ultras think happened repeatedly post-2016 and they won’t do it again. But there is ‘a but’.

Which way will ‘shopping trolley’ Johnson veer?

The analysis that all would have been fine if only the politics of the 2016-2019 period hadn’t prevented the Brexit Ultras’ strategy working is inadequate for many reasons, including its failure to understand basic realities about the EU and the single market. But it also contains its own contradiction in imagining that the Brexit process could ever proceed separately from ‘politics’ or, as Cummings puts it, ‘SW1’ (meaning, I suppose, the entirety of the politico-governmental system). So if Frost’s logic escalates the present tensions with the EU into a huge crisis, politics may well intervene decisively in the form of Johnson.

I’m sure that, in his way, Johnson buys in to the simplism that runs through the Cummings-Frost thinking, just as he once believed that both exit and trade deals could be done as part of the Article 50 process, and that GATT Article XXIV was a get out of jail free card. However, it’s hardly a startling insight that Johnson believes deeply in very little, but cares greatly about his own position and advantage and that on policy, as Cummings puts it, he veers about like a wonky shopping trolley.

So the ‘but’ for Frost’s approach is whether, when it comes to it, he will get Johnson’s support or whether he will join the long list of those Johnson has betrayed. In answering this question, clearly any issues of principle or loyalty can be discounted. Far more shamefully, it seems unlikely that any concern for peace and security in Northern Ireland will figure highly in Johnson’s priorities. On the other hand, if there were intensified pressure from the Biden administration that could matter.

What might be most relevant, though, is the sharp recent decline in the Conservative’s opinion poll ratings and Johnson’s own approval scores.  If this is still continuing come an autumn crisis the calculation may be whether a major confrontation with the EU will be popular with the electorate or not. It would certainly appeal to his voter base, and to many of his MPs. It might bring back some of his public support. But it might alienate a larger number of voters, not least since Johnson was elected on the promise that he would ‘get Brexit done’ and yet here he is, still negotiating the terms of the deal formerly known as oven-ready. In particular, it might alienate the type of Tory voters who deserted Johnson in the recent Chesham and Amersham by-election, and alarm his already “jittery” backbenchers (£). If also facing the kind of Labour post-Brexit strategy I discussed in last week’s post, which seems increasingly in prospect (£), Johnson might well conclude that, as regards the NIP, discretion is the better part of valour.

How such calculations play out obviously remains to be seen, but since so much of Brexit has been more about domestic politics than Britain’s relationship with the EU it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if it were to be so again. So it’s not impossible that Frost may soon be joining Cummings in having many spare hours in which to tweet about how Brexit would have been a huge success if only he had been allowed to do it properly.