Boris Johnson's Make-Believe Brexit Negotiations - Foreign Policy - 0 views
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Johnson has long promised that a more vigorous negotiating position than that of his predecessor, Theresa May, would push the EU into offering last-minute concessions on the terms of Britain’s scheduled exit from the union. But according to a senior official source in the U.K. Foreign Office, under Johnson’s administration the U.K.’s Brexit negotiating team has in reality been “completely hollowed out” with “key people reassigned.” Despite Johnson’s promises of new proposals to solve the nearly intractable problem of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in the run-up to a crunch EU summit on Oct. 17, the Johnson team has “nothing remotely new on the table,” the official told Foreign Policy.
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While negotiations on May’s withdrawal agreement were going at full tilt in late 2018, the Foreign Office negotiating team numbered over 90 people. With the replacement of May’s top negotiator, Olly Robbins, with David Frost in June, that team has been largely disbanded, with most negotiators transferred to other departments. Frost still holds twice-weekly meetings in Brussels—but “our team is basically being sent [to Brussels] to pretend to negotiate, run down the clock,” says the Foreign Office official. “It’s pretty embarrassing. These are serious people being asked to [participate in] a charade.”
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May’s withdrawal agreement—which was humiliatingly rejected by historic majorities in Parliament last winter—took nearly three years to thrash out. Johnson’s timetable would have required the details of a new deal to be drafted and for Parliament to pass it between the summit on Oct. 17 and the scheduled Brexit deadline of Oct. 31.
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Johnson’s entire gambit has been to provoke his opponents in Parliament into forcing him to delay a no-deal Brexit—allowing him to claim that his attempt to implement the 2016 Brexit referendum has been thwarted by an undemocratic, pro-EU Parliament. More, he wants to blame his opponents for forcing him to call the general election that he actually wants. And in that sense, Johnson has succeeded on both counts.
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Even the usually pro-Conservative Times newspaper expressed dismay at Johnson’s ruthless bluffing. “Nothing is as it seems. Boris Johnson wanted and intended to lose his historic vote,” wrote Jenni Russell. “Johnson and his chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, deliberately planned and engineered last night’s defeat, goading the Commons into opposing him; he was lying to his party, parliament and the country when he claimed that he was being pushed into calling an election.”
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The Brexit endgame, then, has become a tug of war over what election date will be maximally damaging for the Conservatives and least damaging for Labour
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Labour would love to delay the public vote until after Johnson is humiliatingly forced to ask for a Brexit deal—which would be a boost for the Brexit Party and scupper Conservative chances of power.
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with a mandatory delay of Brexit fast making its way into law, the only way for Britain to leave the EU now will be for Johnson to persuade a majority of voters to back his radical, no-deal version of Brexit in a general election. And the polls have been showing that public opinion is going in the opposite direction.