Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have made a strategic error – they’ve united the Remainers This isn’t four-dimensional chess – No 10 just panicked and pulled their trump card too early. It may backfire

On receiving news of the death of the famously shrewd British Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, the Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich is reported to have remarked: “But what did he mean by that?”

Remainers appear to have invested Boris Johnson’s strategic adviser, Dominic Cummings, with similar mystique; to such an extent that anything issuing forth from 10 Downing Street is seen as a masterstroke, or a trap, or a “dead cat” or somehow part of some elaborate four-dimensional chess game.

And so it was with the announcement that Johnson would prorogue Parliament to squeeze the time Remain rebels have to cause mischief. Yet everything about yesterday’s development smacks of panic: the rushed nature of the move, the lack of media preparation, the abandoning of the narrative to their opponents. Everything about it was defensively reflexive, rather than calmly proactive.

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While there is little doubt that, somewhere in the Johnson-Cummings bunker, Remainer moves will have been extensively war-gamed and countermeasures feverishly prepared, the evidence points to this latest move having been a forced one. Having a plan and being compelled to activate it are not the same thing.

Focusing minds

It seems to me at least possible, if not likely, that the relative speed and harmony with which the Remain Alliance came together on Tuesday caught Downing Street off guard. Perhaps a little complacency had crept in. Whatever the reason, Johnson has been made to play his biggest trump card rather early in the game. It may have been a gross strategic miscalculation.

The Remain Alliance is loosely stitched together, with plenty of scope for internal conflict. It needed help to gel and weather the hardship of the Parliamentary battles to come; to ossify into something more solid that might withstand the rigours of a general election. It needed external pressure.

Johnson’s announcement does nothing to pick at the cracks of his opponents’ coalition. Instead it pushes it together, focuses minds on a solution, raises the stakes. It weakens, instead, the cohesion of his own loosely assembled forces. It was a strategic miscalculation. By overreaching, he has galvanised Remain more than anyone on our side ever could.

More than that, it throws added obstacles into Johnson’s path. It has given credible cover to any Tory backbenchers itching to rebel – they can now do so on constitutional grounds. It has cast Johnson as illiberal and imperious, weakening fatally his claim of acting to preserve democracy. It has proved he is not really interested in a deal – why would he curtail his own timetable for getting the necessary legislation through? – making it harder to blame EU intransigence.

We have the numbers

Johnson has just gone “all in”. Although he has marginally reduced the time for his opposition – both domestic and European – to act, they both have pretty much their entire stacks intact. He can do little to top this grand gesture. He has conceded the initiative in the hope his adversaries fold.

It is that Game of Thrones episode, before the big battle. We always knew this showdown was coming. It is natural to be jittery. But let us draw breath and steel ourselves. “You just have to cling to objective reality,” said political commentator Ian Dunt in a recent Remainiacs podcast.

The objective reality is that we are still in this fight, six months after Brexit was meant to have happened. The objective reality is that Parliament has killed the possibility of a disorderly exit before. The objective reality is that the parliamentary arithmetic has not got better for Johnson, but worse. Defections, suspensions and by-elections has reduced his cobbled-together majority to one. The back benches are now packed with mostly Remain-leaning former government ministers, who are no longer bound by collective responsibility.

The only path to defeat for Remainers is if they buy the artificial hype and believe all is lost. The only way a damaging hard brexit wins out, is if enough MPs and activists stop resisting it. This is the sole purpose of yesterday’s announcement. It is a display intended to demoralise. A parody Brexit haka. Let them bulge their eyes and beat their chest. We have the numbers. That is the objective reality.