Is Boris ready to be massively unpopular?

Only the BBC could contrive to produce a situation so ridiculous. A week before his popular weekly political show (This Week) is canned, the presenter was unleashed on the next Prime Minister and duly demolished Boris.

The Beeb is notoriously bad at handling talent, but as an example of human resources incompetence and management ineptitude this takes the biscuit. As the former Chancellor George Osborne observed, it seems daft that the BBC has Andrew Neil on the books and cannot work out what to do with him or how to build a vehicle, a programme, in peak time around his talents. Earlier on the same day, the BBC director general had given a speech in which he stressed the importance in the era of accusations of fake news of getting to the facts and holding the powerful to account.

On Friday night, Neil, my former boss, did just that, interviewing both candidates for the British premiership in a special one-off evening event. The Hunt interview was fairly uneventful, although I do think Andrew was rather tough on Hunt’s entrepreneurial credentials. Hunt built a successful, medium-sized business, worked hard and made his own money. It doesn’t have to be Microsoft to count.

The Hunt interview was a side show, though. Boris was the main event.

To say it went badly for the frontrunner is like saying the battle of Waterloo concluded in a suboptimal fashion for Napoleon.

Under forensic questioning from a well-prepared interviewer, Boris appeared to melt. It was hide behind the sofa embarrassing, like watching a pupil who has chanced it once too often and failed to do the work be cross-examined by a headmaster who has rumbled his routine. Boris kept trying to get back to soothing generalities and proclamations that all would be fine. Neil kept pushing on the facts. Boris burbled, and then “bang” – the bluster was exposed with one short question.

The key passage on Brexit contained a long build up to the killer question – “Do you know what’s in 5C?” – that is worth reproducing in full:

AN: Only recently you claimed that we could leave on no deal and we just carry on trading with the EU as now, pending a new trade agreement to be done. You now know that’s not true, don’t you?

BJ: Well, it depends what sort of terms you strike with the EU. It might be possible and I accept that this has to be done by mutual agreement but it might be possible, for instance, as we come out to agree under GATT 24 paragraph 5B that both sides agree to a standstill, a protraction of their existing zero tariff, zero quota arrangements until such time as we do a free trade deal. And that will be one way forward. And that would be very attractive and of course it will be up to our friends and partners to decide whether they wanted to go along with that.

AN: So how would you handle – you talk about Article 5B in GATT 24 –

BJ: Paragraph 5B. Article 24. Get the detail right. Get the detail right, Andrew. It’s Article 24 paragraph 5B.

AN: And how would you handle paragraph 5C?

BJ: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B, because that is –

AN: How would you get round what’s in 5C?

BJ: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B which is enough for our purposes.

AN: Do you know what’s in 5C?

BJ: No.

AN: I thought you were a man of detail.

BJ: Well, you didn’t even know whether it was an article or a paragraph, but –

AN: But that’s not the details you told those Tory hustings…

BJ: There’s enough in paragraph 5B to get us the agreement that we want.

AN: No. 5C says you don’t just need the EU’s approval; you need to agree with the EU the shape of a future trade agreement –

BJ: Yes.

AN: And a timetable to getting towards it. Now can I just point out –

BJ: But why should that – can I ask you –

AN: Okay, I’ll tell you why.

BJ: Why, why this defeatism? Why this negativity?

AN: I’ll tell you why – you ask and I’ll tell you and you can respond.

BJ: Why can’t we rely on the common sense and good will of both parties to get this done?

AN: Because you would want the EU to agree to the status quo, for perhaps up to 10 years, but you would have walked away from the May Agreement, you would have withdrawn the 39 billion –

BJ: Why do you say ten years?

AN: You would have – because that’s what Article 5B allows. You may have to read it again.

BJ: You don’t have to go to ten.

AN: But it’s up to ten years. You would have refused the Irish backstop; you would have ended free movement. You would have left the court of the European Court. Why on earth would the EU agree to the status quo in these conditions? It’s fantasy.

BJ: Because it’s manifestly – no, because it’s manifestly in the interests of both sides, Andrew. And after all the EU has a very substantial net balance of trade with us, they – they have a considerable surplus in goods alone of, I think, about 65 billion pounds and they will want to continue to see those goods flowing –

AN: I’m not surprised you’re smiling because you know it’s mission impossible.

Why does Boris not knowing the answer, and walking into an interviewer’s clever trap, and then when caught out continuing to burble away, matter?

Well, in ten days time Boris Johnson will be the Prime Minister embarking on Britain’s most difficult diplomatic mission in decades, to reopen the Withdrawal Agreement that the UK and the EU spent more than two years constructing, to secure major concessions from a sceptical European Union.

Watching the painful exchange, I had a sudden worry about the sober Dutch, to pick a friendly country at random. Traditionally, they are a key ally of the British. Their ambassador or staff will have watched the Boris interview and at some point will report back. What will they make of the next Prime Minister not really knowing his stuff and resting his hopes on a wing and prayer? His strategy for the talks is, it seems, that after the Brits junk the Withdrawal Agreement and presumably don’t pay the £39bn agreed, the EU will then in a friendly fashion walk hand in hand to the WTO with their British friends and agree to keep everything as it is on trade for many years. Think about it. It is obviously fantastical nonsense.

Ultimately, Boris is still relying on that old ultra-Brexiteer standby (I’m guilty of using it myself in the earlier phases of the talks) that they’ll do it because it is in their interests.

This is simply not good enough when the situation is so stark and the difficult decisions so urgent. Surely it is time to stop predicating British strategy on vague hopes about how the other side will behave when there is plenty of evidence that they won’t do what you want.

Bluster is not enough. To get through this, to stand even the slightest chance of success in the renegotiations with Brussels, Boris will need to be completely realistic, a diplomatic genius across every single detail, dodging trap after trap set by parliament and the EU.

If that fails, Boris will need to prove that he has the seriousness – and grasp of detail – to get a nervous country through no deal. I challenge anyone to rewatch that Andrew Neil interview and say, with a straight face, that Boris looked like a man ready for the seriousness of this task.

Such concerns don’t matter, don’t be negative, say his fans. Indeed, some of my favourite people have become Boris fans – more in hope than the expectation of success, I suspect – because they think he is kinetic, he can move things on. Or they think he is potentially explosive and it is time to throw all the pieces up in the air and see where it lands.

I hope it works, is about the best I can say.

If it does not, then Boris could soon be extremely unpopular with the public. Of course, he is already unpopular with people who did not like him in the first place. Some of his critics are suffering from BDS (Boris Derangement Syndrome) on the basis that they think his elevation is the end of Western civilisation, the Westminster equivalent of the decay and disintegration of the Roman Empire.

The voters who matter much more are those who are not fans or enemies. They are floating voters, civilians with other interests, who will judge him on what he can get done and whether or not he performs suitably as Prime Minister. He’ll get a short honeymoon with them of perhaps a month or two. If he stumbles or fails to get anything meaningful done to resolve the Brexit trauma, he faces being massively unpopular, very quickly. He wanted to be Prime Minister; he has to prove himself to the rest of us. If it doesn’t work it will be apparent rapidly. The bumbling routine will be no help to him if opinion turns.

Boris lives to be loved. He’s rather shy in his way, and put out when criticised. He wants to make a success of this and if he can get through the storm he has the quirky personality and faith in British prospects that could – could – reunify the centre-right and exploit a divided centre and centre-left.

As I said, I hope it works, because if it doesn’t the country is staring down the barrel of a far left government or a ramshackle and sanctimonious coalition involving the Lib Dems and the separatist SNP.

To avoid that, and to avoid personal humiliation, on the evidence of Friday night’s evisceration on the BBC, Boris is going to have to try much harder.

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