Deal or no deal, the UK will leave the EU by 31 October, says the PM. But does he mean it?

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Boris Johnson became Britain’s new prime minister and immediately promised to negotiate a better departure agreement with the EU – while ramping up preparations for a no deal and delivering Brexit come what may on 31 October.

Johnson packed his cabinet with loyal leavers and rightwing free marketeers headed by Sajid Javid at the Treasury and Priti Patel and Dominic Raab at the Home and Foreign Offices, and made Vote Leave mastermind Dominic Cummings a key adviser.

In the Commons, the new prime minister pledged again to ditch the “undemocratic” Irish backstop and guarantee the rights of EU nationals in the UK, promising that post-Brexit the UK would have “the greatest and most prosperous economy in Europe” by 2050.

The EU was quick to reject the UK’s new conditions: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, said UK proposals must be compatible with the withdrawal agreement, while the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, described Johnson’s demand to remove the backstop as unacceptable.

France and Ireland expressed alarm. Amélie de Montchalin, France’s European affairs secretary, repeated that the current withdrawal agreement was the the only way for the UK to leave the EU “in an orderly fashion”, and Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, said Johnson was setting the UK “on a collision course with the EU”.

But the prime minister doubled down, insisting no face-to-face talks with the EU were planned and there would be none until leaders agreed to drop the backstop, which he described in a phone call on Friday with Angela Merkel as “the only solution”.

Michael Gove made clear the government was now “operating on an assumption” of no deal and several other ministers said Johnson was “turbo-charging” preparations to leave the EU without a deal if the EU refuses to drop the backstop.

Dominic Raab said it would be the fault of a “stubborn” EU if the UK were to crash out without a deal and suggested – contrary to the view of most experts – that Britain would actually be better placed to negotiate a “good deal” afterwards.

It won’t be plain sailing. The Institute for Government warned that the mammoth scale of the economic and bureaucratic emergency that would follow a no-deal Brexit would crush Johnson’s ambitious domestic agenda.

And Johnson may not even get that far: the former Tory chancellor, Philip Hammond, confirmed he had held private talks with Labour’s Brexit spokesman, Sir Keir Starmer, to plot cross-party moves aimed at blocking a no-deal Brexit.

What next

The burning Brexit question is now this: government ministers may be talking tough, but do they really mean it – or is it all a lot of noise aimed at shoring up Conservative support for an imminent general election?

Many observers think Johnson’s plan is to go to the country after demanding first what he knows Brussels cannot give (a backstop-free withdrawal agreement) and, second, what he knows parliament will not countenance (a no-deal Brexit).

The prime minister, this theory runs, will then be able to portray himself, faced with the intransigence of a bullying EU and the cowardice of a remainer parliament, as the only true deliverer of Brexit and champion of “the will of the people”.

We have no means of knowing, obviously, whether this is the case. But political scientist Rob Ford has an good piece here on the risks and opportunities for Johnson of trying to change the arithmetic in the Commons by means of an early election.

Of course, Johnson could actually be serious about being willing, as Raab said, to “give the country some finality” by taking it out of the EU without a deal – with the dramatic consequences almost all experts believe that would entail.

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In the Guardian, Matthew d’Ancona says the Vote Leave gang now running Britain do not want to govern but to win:

Vote Leave was a campaign, not a party. Its business was direct democracy, not the representative variety. No wonder that some senior ministers are so excited to discover that – technically, at least – the UK could still leave the EU on 31 October, even if the country were then in the thick of an election campaign forced by a vote of no confidence. This is where a country ends up when it is governed by a caucus with a single, overriding objective. Johnson’s strategy, for all its initial brio and swagger, leads nowhere other than a zone of anger, division and dangerous disillusionment. To which his allies would doubtless say: so what? You heard the man – by any means necessary.

And John Harris says Johnson is channelling a punk ethos to force through Brexit, and it could work:

Punk spirit, cavalier style and wilful provocation will all inform the manner in which Johnson and his allies frame their greatest challenge of all: how on earth to deal with the very real crisis of Brexit and honour the Halloween deadline. And they look set to play a crucial role in gaining consent from those who have most to lose from crashing out of the EU. Faced with a set of impossible challenges, Johnson will present himself as the flamboyant, verbose, rule-breaking Englishman versus the washed-out logicians of the EU machine. Whether this approach could survive the sudden appearance of expensive food, empty shelves and queues of lorries is an interesting question. But in the midst of all that talk about a quickfire election and given deep-rooted English cultural traits and the strange, hallucinatory times in which we live, I would not underestimate his appeal.

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