Conspiracy or Cock-up?

It's looking unlikely that the government will be able to agree a revised withdrawal agreement with the EU27, largely due to the impossibility of reconciling an open border in Ireland with the UK quitting the EU Customs Union. This isn't a surprise: it has been obvious for at least two years. Theresa May's ploy of extending the backstop to cover the whole of the UK was a fudge that might have worked if there was a consensus among the Conservative Party to secure close alignment on trade and standards in the future, but as became all too clear during the tortuous progress of the Withdrawal Bill, the emerging consensus was for divergence, which made the backstop toxic for the leave ultras. Boris Johnson has been able to reconcile the different factions within the boundaries of the Conservative party's consensus, and also get the DUP onside, but this has only been possible at the cost of presenting a proposal that cannot be accepted by the EU.

It is against this backdrop that we should interpret the government's confirmation that it will obey the Benn Act, and the Scottish court's subsequent  acceptance of its sincerity. For all the imaginative talk of loopholes and Dominic Cummings' cunning, Occam's Razor suggests that Johnson intends to comply with the Act because he has no alternative. He may instruct a civil servant to sign the letter, and he will certainly publicly decry it, but an extension is now likely. As someone with a long track record of reneging on promises and shrugging off culpability, I doubt he will feel honour-bound to resign either. He will blame the opposition, and the 21 Tory rebels, for tying his hands; the EU, and in particular the Republic of Ireland, for being intransigent; and the institutions of Parliament and the Supreme Court for foiling the will of the people. This will simply be preparation for a general election.

Similarly, the impasse among the opposition over a possible caretaker government should be seen for what it is: manoeuvring ahead of that election. The claim by the Liberal Democrats that Jeremy Corbyn lacks support within the Commons is not merely a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is an attempt to discredit him with the electorate but without the need to actually critique his (popular) policies. Likewise, the SNP's willingness to countenance a Corbyn administration is part of their strategy to discredit the Liberal Democrats as a serious political party in Scotland. Labour's position, that Corbyn should head a government as the leader of the largest party after the Conservatives, is both reasonable and conventional, but it is also intended to highlight that the Liberal Democrats are more willing to tolerate a Tory government steering towards no-deal than enable a Labour one committed to a second referendum.

In reality, the Benn Act killed off the possibility of a caretaker government even as it made it more salient in commentary. Despite the wild talk of a coup by Johnson to frustrate the Act's intent, the central belief among his opponents has been that he will be obliged to comply. The Supreme Court's judgement against the government over its attempted prorogation of Parliament has also encouraged a perhaps complacent belief that the judiciary can prevent any chicanery that would lead to the UK crashing out with no-deal at the end of this month. The risk still remains, but inadvertantly encouraging the electorate to see Corbyn as non-threatening and constitutionally respectable now appears to be the greater danger in the minds of many. Should no-deal occur, it will be this centrist caution and blackballing of the Labour leader that will be most to blame.

The even more unlikely scenario of a "government of national unity", headed by a remainer and committed to a second referendum before an election, would be an oxymoron. Even if we assume that sentiment has shifted since 2016 - the polls suggest it has but only marginally - then the kind of centrist administration proposed by commentators would be objectionable to at least half the country - i.e. most leavers and many leftwing remainers. This is the very opposite of "unity". By definition, a GNU would only be worthy of the name if it were headed by someone prepared to countenance both leave and remain and if it committed to a policy that didn't discriminate between the two. The nearest thing to that would be a Labour government headed by Corbyn, both because of the party's even-handed policy and his supposed sympathies, so it looks like the GNU is a beast whose sole purpose is to avoid admitting that a Corbyn caretaker government is the only option if Johnson has to be unseated.

A remainer GNU is even more unlikely, not least because there isn't any consensus among remainers on what the referendum option pitted against remain would be. Would it be May's deal, no-deal, or an alternative soft Brexit? It's also likely that such a referendum would be boycotted by leavers as illegitimate regardless of the options. A remain victory on the back of a boycott wouldn't settle Brexit, instead it would embolden the Tories to commit to re-invoking Article 50 at the earliest opportunity. The most optimistic scenario would be a Labour election win on a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum where the options would be a renegotiated soft Brexit and remain, but the Tories might well still boycott this as presenting an inadequate choice. A Tory-endorsed third option could only be either May's deal or no-deal, but Labour would be unlikely to agree to the latter while the Tories could not unite around the former. The Brexit Party would naturally demand no-deal, so a boycott of the referendum would still be likely unless Labour were prepared to take the risk of adding no-deal to a three-way choice.

Once the extension is agreed to by the EU27 (which is almost certain - there is surely no Hungarian gambit and Macron isn't going to do more than grumble), there will probably be either a vote of no confidence in the government or the government itself will submit a short bill to call a general election on a simple majority ("Notwithstanding the Fixed Term Parliaments Act …" etc). In theory the Conservatives could attempt to hang on as a minority administration, reliant on the DUP and the support of the 21 ex-Tory MPs, but this would mean attempting to revive Johnson's moribund deal or admitting that a managed no-deal was now the preferred outcome, both of which would lead to the Benn Act part 2. Assuming the extension is only to the end of January, there seems little point in repeating the whole process over the next three months, not least because the "do or die" rhetoric will have lost its potency.

Johnson's strategy appears to be to go to the country on a people versus Parliament platform before the end of the year and hope that he can marginalise the Brexit Party among leave voters while the Liberal Democrats obligingly damage Labour among remain voters. The only way he can reliably do this is by committing to no-deal. The expulsion of the 21 rebels and the insincerity of the current phase of negotiations with the EU27 suggest that he mentally burnt his boats on this some weeks if not months ago. Though the conventional wisdom is that signing the letter mandated by the Benn Act will damage his credibility in the eyes of leavers, I suspect that he thinks he can brazen it out and even turn the issue to account by loudly complaining that his government was stabbed in the back by remainers. The forthcoming general election may well turn on whether leave voters see this latest delay as the product of an establishment plot or another chapter in the Conservative Party's history of executive incompetence.