Jeremy Corbyn’s government of national unity plan is ridiculous – but Jo Swinson has fallen into the trap There are so many holes in the scheme you could use it as a cheese grater

From time to time, a political story emerges that is so silly, I begin to worry if I am in fact not covering politics at all, but have actually been hit by a large object and fallen into a deep coma, or perhaps have accidentally ingested a great quantity of mind-altering drugs.

The latest brain-melter is the “plan” to prevent no-deal through a government of national unity. The problem the plan seeks to solve is this: Boris Johnson’s Downing Street has vowed to do everything within its power to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union without a deal. The only guaranteed way to prevent that is for a ragtag bunch of MPs, united only by their opposition to a no-deal Brexit, to first defeat Johnson’s government in a vote of no confidence and then to vote confidence in another one. This is to be done with the express purpose of securing an extension to Article 50 in order to hold either another referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union or a fresh general election, depending on the preferences of the politician in question.

There are so many holes in the scheme you could use it as a cheese grater. The biggest is that to win a vote of no confidence, you would need the votes of every single opposition MP, plus three Conservatives in order to overcome the combined parliamentary forces of the Tory government and its parliamentary allies. It is doubtful in the extreme that even three Conservative rebels can be found. An iron law of parliamentary rebellions is that they are smaller than the number of publicly-advertised dissenters. It is one thing to tell a journalist that you might rebel and quite another to actually do it. The only exception is when rebelling puts you on the right side of your party membership. As members of the Tory party quite like Brexit and have an intense dislike of Jeremy Corbyn, that exception doesn’t apply.

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Parliamentary arithmetic is against Corbyn’s plan

Getting even three Tory names is a major difficulty, but clearing that hurdle on paper still isn’t enough. There are also the ten MPs who were elected in 2017 under Labour colours, but who have since quit because they believe that Jeremy Corbyn is unfit to be Prime Minister. This is due to what they see as, at best, toleration of anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks and a collection of political views that are dangerous to the country. Then there is Sylvia Hermon, an independent Unionist MP who opposes the Conservative party but has vowed never to make Corbyn Prime Minister due to his historical ties to the Republican movement. So to cancel out their votes you need not three Conservative MPs, but fourteen. There is no chance of attracting anything like that many Conservative rebels.

Just three have even bothered to respond to a letter from Corbyn calling on them to make him Prime Minister on a temporary basis in order to stop no-deal – and one, Caroline Spelman, has made it clear that she will not back him in a confidence vote.

Yet without the votes of the 247 Labour MPs, there is no hope for a government led by anyone but Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn is not going to support a government led by anyone but him. Why? Because that would mean publicly acknowledging that a critical bloc of MPs believe him to be anti-Semitic and dangerous to the country, while another MP believes him to have been too closely linked to practitioners of terrorist violence to be given the keys to Downing Street. Morever, it would show that Corbyn himself feels these objections are reasonable enough to be acceded to. That would hole below the waterline any hope of becoming Prime Minister on a longer-term basis.

As plans go to stop no-deal, a unity government is so farfetched, it would be less ridiculous than crowdfunding the invention of time travel and heading back to 2016 with a bunch of ballot boxes full of Remain votes.

Talking about the GNU is a political tool

But the plan is still being talked about because it is a useful stick for politicians to beat each other with. The idea originally started life as a device to undermine Jo Swinson’s campaign for the Liberal Democrat leadership – for supporters of Ed Davey, her defeated rival, to gently suggest that the job required an experienced politician who had been a Secretary of State in the coalition government, while Swinson had only been a junior minister.

The stick was briefly pressed into service by Caroline Lucas, the sole Green MP, who proposed a government led only by women to stop no deal, as if Jeremy Corbyn would suddenly come around to acts of political self-destruction if the instrument of his demise was a woman rather than a man. It’s not wholly clear who the stick was meant to hurt but it successfully got Lucas a day of frontpage coverage, something that all too often eludes the Green party.

The target was Corbyn: to pass the blame to him for failing to work sufficiently bravely cross-party to stop a no-deal Brexit. Understandably, the Labour leader didn’t enjoy that at all and turned the focus onto Jo Swinson, the original intended victim of the unity government wheeze. Swinson jumped the gun in pointing out the obvious – that Corbyn had no hope of forming a government – allowing Labour to paint her as the agent of no deal.

But the reality is that what will cause no deal if it happens is a government that thinks it can ignore votes in our elected House of Commons, whose will has, repeatedly and demonstrably been for further extensions to the Article 50 process rather than a no deal Brexit. In a sane world, it would be that government that is the focus of people’s wrath, rather than Swinson or Corbyn.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman