If Boris pursues the ‘soft Brexit’ mirage the Tories are dead

So, the first concrete effect of the “Boris bounce” has been to bounce the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats onto the green benches at Westminster. It seems the message “We could remain in the customs union and single market for a further two years” – helpfully announced three days before polling in Brecon and Radnorshire – did not hold great appeal to Leave voters.

The by-election is peripheral to the main concern – Brexit and Boris Johnson – but it is also instructive. Why did it take place at all? Nobody died and nobody voluntarily resigned. The contest was a consequence of the Conservative MP Chris Davies’ conviction for lodging an incorrect expenses claim triggering a successful recall petition. Apologists have insisted there was no intention to defraud. Very well: let us accept that interpretation. But the election slogan “Vote Conservative: we’re not dishonest, just incompetent” somehow lacks the killer resonance of a Bernard Ingham/Alastair Campbell soundbite.

The Conservative Party, blinded by entitlement, is now comprehensively dysfunctional. The Tory leadership enjoys nothing better than sneering at the Brexit Party. Any suggestion of an electoral pact with Nigel Farage’s people is contemptuously dismissed. This is the one area in which Remainer media untypically flatter the Conservatives, to anaesthetize them from reality and encourage their delusions, from terror of a Leave coalition.

According to the startlingly kindly media narrative, the Tories did well at Brecon and Radnorshire, they held the Lib Dems to a narrow majority, the Boris “bounce” worked. In fact, in the first days of a new leader who is supposed to have galvanized Conservative voters and Brexiteers, the Tories’ share of the vote slumped by 9.6 per cent, a Conservative majority of 8,000 was converted into a Lib Dem majority of 1,425 and the seat was lost.

If that is the new, turbocharged Tories’ idea of success, Jo Swinson will be happy to live with it. Her party successfully built a Remain coalition, persuading Plaid Cymru and the Greens not to stand. If those abstainers’ combined vote at the previous election had been deducted from the Liberal Democrats’ tally they would have lost.

More significantly for the Conservatives, the 1,425 votes by which they lost was less than half the 3,331 votes gained by the Brexit Party. Had the Tories done a deal with Farage they would have held the seat but, of course, to the entitled Sir Buftons in the Westminster bubble such horse-trading is unthinkable. This was the Brexit Party at its lowest ebb, with a Conservative government pumping out No Deal rhetoric that makes Nigel Farage look like Theresa May, under an energetic new prime minister with considerable popular appeal.

Yet still the Brexit Party held onto a 10.5 per cent share of the vote – in its most challenging hour. All it has to do is replicate that modest achievement at a general election and schoolchildren thereafter will have to look up “Conservative Party” in the history books.

The message from Brecon and from everywhere else is: Brexiteers do not trust the Conservatives and still less do they trust Boris Johnson. He has done a clever job of flattering Brexiteer hopes, but what is the reality? What is Boris really up to? Look, for an answer, to the small print in his first speech as Prime Minister, in Downing Street: “… we will need to get ready at some point in the near future to come out of the EU Customs Union and out of regulatory control…” Note the timescale: “at some point in the near future” – not 31 October.

The Prime Minister echoed that language on 29 July: “Some of the (No Deal) changes that are going to be necessary in the run-up to October 31 will be crucial anyway if we are going to come out of the Customs Union and Single Market, as we must, in the course of the next couple of years.”

The next couple of years? It seems the totemic deadline of 31 October is as elastic for Boris Johnson as the previous deadline of 29 March was for Theresa May. This watering down of commitments was discreetly echoed by several ministers in subsequent remarks. That prompts the obvious question: what is Boris’s new Brexit negotiator David Frost actually discussing with Michel Barnier and his team?

There are rumours that Boris is trying to float some kind of Canada Plus deal with the EU. Although his dispatches from Brussels in his early journalistic career were Eurosceptic, that was the obvious path for a subversive young writer like Johnson to take, if he wanted to make a name for himself. He has never disguised his preference for some kind of accommodation with the EU.

If he had become prime minister instead of Theresa May (thanks a bundle, Michael Gove), then would have been a propitious time for such an approach. Today the reality is different. All the aspirations of the Brussels hoods to keep Britain hogtied inside EU institutions are bound up in the toxic package that is the Withdrawal Treaty accepted by Theresa May. As has been written here before, there is an awful lot more wrong with that treaty than just the Irish backstop.

By focusing on the backstop Boris is inviting the EU to re-christen it as an “alternative arrangement” after squaring Leo Varadkar. Angela Merkel’s cunning plan is that, while the backstop cannot be taken out of the withdrawal treaty, it can be “overwritten” and that overwrite inserted into the Political Declaration. Unfortunately, as the European Court would no doubt confirm at the first legal challenge, the Withdrawal Treaty is legally binding while the Political Declaration has no legal standing at all.

As for the Customs Union, our former top trade negotiator Crawford Falconer confirmed a long time ago (and for his outspokenness was left at home) that UK trade deals would be impossible under any kind of customs union. Does Boris think Donald Trump is going to wait at the altar for a further two years before their mutual love-in is consummated? Ditto Scott Morrison in Australia.

Boris Johnson and much of his parliamentary party remain marinated in the delusions of “soft Brexit” that still prevail in the Home Counties bubble. There might have been a time when an amicable departure from the EU was possible, though the bad faith and open contempt with which Brussels has treated Britain from the start make that implausible.

Today the reality is that only a clean break via WTO rules is a practical means of obtaining Brexit. If Boris Johnson perpetrates some cosmetic version of the May treaty, if Britain is still in the Customs Union and Single Market as a vassal state of Brussels five years after voting to leave, our economy will be destroyed and a future Remainer government or parliament will use our hybrid status to reintegrate us fully into the Brussels empire.

For Boris and the Conservatives there would be consequences. A ComRes poll conducted between 26 and 28 July, during peak Boris bounce, showed that if Brexit is delayed beyond 31 October Labour would win the subsequent general election, with the Brexit Party in second place ahead of the Tories. If an election were held before Brexit and before 31 October the Conservative vote would be just 1 per cent ahead of Labour, with the Brexit Party on 19 per cent.

Most significantly, considering the uncertainty regarding Johnson’s intentions, if the Tories left the EU with a withdrawal agreement in any way resembling Theresa May’s, Labour would win the general election and the Brexit Party would take 18 per cent of the vote. The only guaranteed route for the Tories, if they want to survive, is a WTO Brexit. The question is: do Boris and the Entitled Ones have sufficient instinct for survival? There are bigger challenges ahead than Brecon and Radnorshire.