Boris Johnson is the playground bully of British politics. He acts as if he is prime minister with a majority in parliament when in fact he has no majority. Because he cannot govern in that way with parliament, he has tried instead to govern against parliament. The delusion that he can do as he pleases led him to try to prorogue parliament this autumn – a bluff that was called by the supreme court. It then led him to concoct a fantasy legislative agenda by commissioning a Queen’s speech, though none of its measures will ever become law. Now he is trying to make his Brexit withdrawal bill conditional on the Commons agreeing to a general election in December. This proposal, like all the others before it, is merely another bluff, and parliament should duly call it.
Mr Johnson summoned the media on Thursday afternoon to announce two things. The first was that he would, after all, allow more time for discussion of his EU withdrawal agreement bill. The second, which would be the precondition for the first, was that parliament must vote for a general election to be held on 12 December. The two came as a package deal. What this announcement omitted was that Mr Johnson was thereby accepting that the United Kingdom would not, after all, be leaving the European Union by 31 October.
In one sense it is hardly surprising that Mr Johnson did not advertise this humiliating fact. He has built his entire case for leadership of the Conservative party and the whole of his brief prime ministership on precisely this pledge. The end-of-October deadline has been the fetish that has defined his short period in Downing Street. He was, he claimed, the prime minister who would “get Brexit done”. He would rather, he once said, “be dead in a ditch” than agree to a delay in Britain’s Brexit withdrawal deadline. It was just bravado. He has not got Brexit done and he is not dead in a ditch.
Mr Johnson is trying to coerce MPs into doing something that they do not have to do and which they should not do. One might think that he is trying to bully parliament because parliament is refusing to pass the withdrawal agreement bill. Not a bit of it. In fact parliament has already given a second reading to the bill, by a healthy majority of 30. Parliament voted on Tuesday in favour of more time to debate the bill in committee. In a sensible and well-ordered parliamentary system like Britain’s, that should have been an entirely reasonable proposition. But Mr Johnson, rather than try to get Brexit done, has wriggled before finally accepting the inevitable.
In his letter to Jeremy Corbyn and in his interviews on Thursday, Mr Johnson accused Labour of repeatedly causing delays to Brexit. This is a travesty of the facts. The reason why Brexit has taken so long is because the Conservative party consistently ignored the nearly half of the country that voted to remain, and instead demanded the hardest Brexit terms. When Theresa May finally returned with a hard Brexit deal, Mr Johnson was one of many Tories who voted against it. Culpability for the Brexit delays lie squarely at the Tory party’s door.
Mr Johnson’s Thursday gambit should not be accepted. There is no pressing need for a general election until parliament has resolved its position on Brexit, if necessary by amending the withdrawal agreement bill. That may be only a few sitting days away. But Mr Johnson has absolutely no right to hold a gun to parliament’s head in the meantime. It is for parliament, as a whole, to make a decision about a general election once the core business of this parliament, Brexit, is completed. That time is not now. MPs should insist on doing first things first.
