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Both the Lords and the Commons gave Boris Johnson, who has pledged to negotiate wholesale changes to the withdrawal agreement or leave the EU “deal or no deal” by 31 October (and refused to rule out proroguing parliament to do so), a stark reminder of the challenge his premiership will face.

After the upper house voted to ensure parliament must sit in the weeks leading up to the Brexit deadline, MPs – including Conservative rebels – followed suit, blocking any attempt to suspend parliament in order to force through a no-deal Brexit.

The presumed prime minister’s march into Downing Street on Wednesday has also been spoiled by a string of ministerial resignations, with Philip Hammond and David Gauke saying they would step down before then, and Alan Duncan quitting on Monday in an unsuccessful bid to test parliament’s confidence in Johnson.

Dominic Grieve warned that former ministers would join those prepared to vote down a Johnson administration heading for no deal and Labour’s Keir Starmer is seeking a cross-party alliance to block any attempt to leave without an agreement.

However, Labour is thought unlikely to table a no-confidence motion in the new prime minister immediately, mainly because it stands little chance of winning before Johnson has at least tried to renegotiate Theresa May’s deal with Brussels.

The new prime minister is therefore likely just to make a statement setting out his summer Brexit plans – at which point parliament breaks until September. “We’ll give him a time-limited chance,” one minister said.

Assorted senior figures including three former prime ministers, meanwhile, poured scorn on Johnson’s embrace of a no-deal Brexit and his insistence, in his Telegraph column, that Brexit was like landing on the moon – all that was needed to pull it off was a bit of “can-do spirit” and a “sense of mission”.

As the Democratic Unionist party impressed on him the need to resolve the issue of the Northern Ireland backstop to keep its support, Johnson claimed – giving no evidence as to how – that technological solutions could be found to prevent a hard border in Ireland.

To add to Johnson’s concerns, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned that a no-deal Brexit would plunge Britain into a recession that would shrink the economy by 2% and push unemployment above 5%.

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Amid reports in the British press of all sorts of possible concessions being lined up by the EU27, including a “no-deal Brexit extension” beyond 31 October, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, insisted a new British prime minister would not change the fundamentals and there was no chance of the EU ditching or watering down the Irish backstop.

The EU said it had no off-the-shelf Brexit plan for the new prime minister, was not working on one and there was now a “worrying lack of time” to find a compromise. It would put nothing new on the table but remained open to reworking the political declaration on future relations, sources said.

Bronwen Maddox of the Institute for Government said Johnson faced four major and critical tasks in his first week: pick his cabinet, replace the chief negotiator, Olly Robbins, restart no-deal preparations and devise a plan for winning parliamentary support.

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Jonathan Freedland wonders in the Guardian whether a no-deal Brexit might not have a silver lining – but suspects not:

Perhaps no deal is what it will take to cure the country of its Brexit fever. Maybe nothing less than a complete severance of all ties is the only way to snap ourselves out of this delirium. Until now, for example, the Brexiters have been able to cast every hitch and disappointment as the handiwork of wicked remainers bent on thwarting Britain’s destiny. If there’s been no stampede of unicorns towards the sunlit uplands, that’s because the faint-hearts and fifth columnists connived with Brussels to deny the British people their will. A no-deal exit would end that betrayal myth once and for all. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the others would have got everything they wanted. They would be unable to cry treachery, because we would have left the EU the way they demanded we leave. They’d be unable to blame remainers or the judges or the BBC or the universities, because no one would have stood in their way. It will be their Brexit and they will have to own it … But how plausible is it to imagine that, even if Brexit is the total rupture Farage yearns for, he won’t still insist that the people were betrayed and that this Brexit was insufficiently pure? And expectations of a no-deal exit are so low, if Britons are not living in the streets wearing animal skins and foraging for weevils by Christmas, the Brexiters will declare it a triumph.

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Nothing is certain, as we well know. But you would have to say that this appears somewhat unlikely: