Boris Johnson seeks legal advice on five-week parliament
closure ahead of Brexit
Secret plan to block any delay in leaving EU is likely to
anger European leaders at G7 summit
Dominic Grieve said: ‘This memo, if correct, shows Boris
Johnson’s contempt for the House of Commons.’
Toby Helm and Heather Stewart
Sat 24 Aug 2019 21.02 BST First published on Sat 24 Aug 2019
21.00 BST
Boris Johnson has asked the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox,
whether parliament can be shut down for five weeks from 9 September in what
appears to be a concerted plan to stop MPs forcing a further extension to
Brexit, according to leaked government correspondence.
An email from senior government advisers to an adviser in No
10 – written within the last 10 days and seen by the Observer – makes clear
that the prime minister has recently requested guidance on the legality of such
a move, known as prorogation. The initial legal guidance given in the email is
that shutting parliament may well be possible, unless action being taken in the
courts to block such a move by anti-Brexit campaigners succeeds in the
meantime.
On Saturday Labour and pro-Remain Tory MPs reacted
furiously, saying that the closure of parliament, as a method for stopping MPs
preventing a potentially disastrous no-deal Brexit, would be an affront to
democracy and deeply irresponsible, particularly given the government’s own
acceptance of the economic turmoil no-deal could cause.
Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer said: “Any plan to
suspend parliament at this stage would be outrageous. MPs must take the
earliest opportunity to thwart this plan and to stop a no-deal Brexit.”
The prominent Tory remainer and former attorney general
Dominic Grieve added: “This memo, if correct, shows Boris Johnson’s contempt
for the House of Commons. It may be possible to circumvent the clear intention
of the House of Commons in this way but it shows total bad faith. Excluding the
house from a national crisis that threatens the future of our country is
entirely wrong.”
Johnson has said he is “not attracted” to the idea of
proroguing parliament and that he wants a Brexit deal, but has repeatedly
refused to rule it out. After becoming prime minister he immediately promoted
Dominic Raab, the first senior Tory to propose the idea of shutting parliament
to get Brexit through, to the post of foreign secretary.
The email shows that the feasibility of a five-week
parliamentary shutdown is under active consideration, from soon after the date
on which parliament returns on 3 September, until the eve of the last EU summit
before Brexit, on 17 and 18 October, when it will be too late for MPs to block
no deal. The revelation will also anger EU leaders as Johnson makes his
international summit debut at the G7 in Biarritz this weekend.
Johnson was due to meet US president Donald Trump for talks
on Sunday, with Brexit and international trade high on the agenda. He will also
meet EU council president Donald Tusk who said on Saturday that he would not
cooperate with Johnson on a no-deal Brexit, but rather wanted to find a way
forward with him to secure a deal on issues including the Irish backstop.
Tusk said as G7 leaders gathered that he was “willing to
listen to ideas that are operational, realistic and acceptable to all EU member
states, including Ireland, if and when the UK government is ready. The one
thing I will not cooperate on is no deal, and I still hope that prime minister
Johnson will not like to go down in history as ‘Mr No Deal’.”
Pro-Remain MPs have spent the summer recess planning how to
block a no-deal outcome and, if necessary, force an extension to the Brexit deadline
beyond 31 October, when parliament returns on 3 September.
Among the options being considered are taking control of
Commons business for enough time to pass legislation that would mandate the
prime minister to seek another extension.
An alternative backed by some Remainers is to amend
Brexit-related legislation to force an extension.
EU leaders will be closely monitoring the clashes in
parliament in September. Brussels sources say the bloc is reluctant to make
fresh concessions before MPs have had an opportunity to tie Johnson’s hands by
seeking to block no deal.
Speaking en route to the French resort, the PM urged MPs not
to consider trying to do so. “I think it’s parliament’s job now to respect not
just the will of the people but to remember what the overwhelming majority of
them promised to do over and over and over again, which is to get Brexit done,
to respect the will of the people, and to come out of the EU on 31 October.
That is what I am confident our parliament will do,” he said.
The leaked email will fuel speculation that Johnson is
prepared to make the delivery of a “deal or no deal” Brexit an issue of
parliament versus the people. The email examines whether the prime minister
could thwart MPs’ plans by shutting parliament until a Queen’s speech would
herald a new parliament on 14 October.
A government source said there was a definite and clear plan
to prorogue parliament being hatched by Johnson’s closest advisers.
In particular the memo examines whether Johnson could
circumvent a previous amendment, championed by Grieve, that was inserted into a
bill relating to the Northern Ireland Assembly earlier this summer. It requires
ministers to report regularly to parliament on progress in restoring the
Stormont Assembly. The email suggests the Grieve amendment does not necessarily
prevent the prime minister activating the prorogation plan.
The news will add greater urgency to talks that will take
place on Tuesday between Jeremy Corbyn and cross-party MPs on how to prevent
no-deal. Corbyn has said he will call a confidence motion in the government
when parliament returns, and if successful, would seek to become prime minister
for an interim period before calling a general election. Starmer is understood
to want MPs to try to pass legislation specifically to mandate the prime
minister to ask the EU for an extension.
Senior MPs believe Johnson may think that he can win such a
confidence motion, and believe that having done so that he would have a mandate
to drive through a no-deal Brexit even if he had to shut down parliament to do
so. Any move to prorogue parliament would enrage Commons speaker John Bercow
who said recently at the Edinburgh festival that parliament could stop a
no-deal Brexit.
The campaigner and businesswoman Gina Miller has said she
will spearhead an immediate legal challenge should Johnson try to shut down
parliament in order to drive through a no-deal Brexit against the wishes of
MPs.
A government source did not deny that legal advice had been
sought. They added: “As a matter of
routine, No 10 officials ask for legal and policy advice every day.”
Trump officials voice anger at G7 focus on 'niche' issues
such as climate change
The spark for the fuse appeared to be an impromptu lunch
between Trump and Macron, without any aides
Graham Russell
@G_J_Russell
Sun 25 Aug 2019 03.08 BST Last modified on Sun 25 Aug 2019
03.10 BST
Donald Trump sits for lunch with French president Emmanuel
Macron at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz on Saturday.
Senior aides in Donald Trump’s entourage have accused the G7
host and French president, Emmanuel Macron, of seeking to embarrass his US
counterpart by making the summit focus on “niche issues” such as climate
change, according to multiple US media reports.
Macron’s plan to heal divisions among G7 leaders in Biarritz
this weekend apparently did not factor in the need to keep Trump’s aides happy
too, a group that began briefing against him within hours of Trump’s arrival.
The spark for the fuse appeared to be lunch. Macron whisked the US president away for an
impromptu meal for two on an oceanfront terrace at the Hotel du Palais. Trump
initially appeared frosty but later called it “the best meeting we have yet
had”.
Senior administration officials quoted by the New York Times
among others were not so sure, complaining the summit had moved from core
issues such as global economics and trade to “niche issues” such as climate
change, gender equality and development in Africa. The topics were chosen to
appeal to Macron supporters, and even to embarrass Trump, who pulled the US out
of the Paris climate accord, they said, as protesters marched the streets of
the French city calling for action to tackle the fires ravaging the Amazon
rainforest.
“It’s our view that with France trying to drive these other
issues outside of global economics, national security and trade, they’re trying
to fracture the G7,” one official told White House reporter Gabby Orr.
Days earlier, Larry Kudlow, the director of the White
House’s national economic council, criticised Macron’s decision to ditch the
usual consensus communique at the end of the summit in favour of “coalitions’
of like-minded states. “These coalitions produce politically correct bromides
such as calls to ban everything from straws to fossil fuels,” he said in a Wall
Street Journal opinion piece.
Some US officials went further in their diaries, saying
French officials had been difficult to work with in the build-up to the summit,
and that the original schedule had said little or nothing about trade and the
global economy until the US complained, a claim French officials deny.
America’s differing stance on the climate crisis has been a
feature of the past two G7 summits, and just one issue on which divisions were
so deep that the meeting was increasingly referred to as the G6 in Quebec last
year, when Trump left early.
Boris Johnson
prepares for Biarritz balancing act with Donald Trump
The Observer
Brexit
The PM has so far
been careful not to break with the EU on key policies. Now the US
president could force his hand
Julian Borger
Sat 24 Aug 2019 19.00 BST Last modified on Sat 24 Aug 2019
22.59 BST
Boris Johnson arrives in Biarritz for the G7 summit on
Saturday.
Boris Johnson will sit down for breakfast on Sunday morning
with a man he once famously described as “betraying a quite stupefying
ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the
United States”.
Not too long after Johnson made that remark, Donald Trump
went on to win that office. And today Johnson – having defied similar
assessments of his own fitness for the highest office – will come face to face
with him at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, on the sidelines of the G7 summit,
in his first major event on the international stage as prime minister.
Both men rose to the top by portraying themselves as
outsiders who were prepared to break some furniture in pursuit of an imagined
national greatness. Now they must rearrange that furniture, or make some of
their own.
Johnson flew into Biarritz after meetings with his
counterparts in Berlin and Paris, meetings which appear to have brought them no
closer to a Brexit deal.
At the three-day summit in Biarritz, amid the grandeur of
the historic seaside resort on France’s Atlantic coast, the prime minister will
be under particular scrutiny. Every word and gesture from Johnson at this
annual gathering of the world’s major industrial democracies will be analysed
for clues as to where he intends to position the UK on the gaping transatlantic
divide between the US and Europe.
If the past is any guide, the prime minister will try to
avoid giving away that location, and if Trump has an interest in helping him,
he will not put on him on the spot when it comes to issues and instincts on
which the UK has thus far been on the European side.
Those pivotal issues include UK support for the 2015 nuclear
deal with Iran; backing for the Paris climate accord and acknowledgement of the
urgency of the climate crisis, particularly against the blazing backdrop of the
Amazon wildfires.
The UK has maintained its support for an international
rules-based system with multilateral institutions and free trade at its centre.
It has promoted a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and a rejection
of both occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories. Britain has also
maintained a firm line over the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and
Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, denying Russia readmission to the G7 club until
it reverses those actions.
These are all shibboleths of the liberal international
order, and they are being challenged daily by the Trump administration. Would a
no-deal Brexit mean that Britain felt under pressure to do the same?
Since taking over as prime minister, Johnson has stuck to
the consensus European script on all these critical foreign policy issues.
He has restated his faith in the nuclear agreement and the
need to defuse tensions in the Gulf, rather than tighten the US stranglehold on
Iran.
Johnson has also warned against the dangers of trade wars,
in the face of Trump’s worsening face-off with China, and he has stuck to
European orthodoxy on the need to preserve the Paris accord on climate, and to
build on it.
Any substantial deviation at the G7 summit from such
entrenched, shared positions would mean Johnson risking the toxic label of
“poodle”, which his predecessor Tony Blair never managed to shake off.
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is already framing Johnson
as a “Trump first” prime minister, and there will be plenty of jilted European
partners on hand to draw attention to British humiliation.
Emmanuel Macron, when asked last week if he thought that
Johnson and Trump would team up together in a united front against other
Europeans at the G7, played on deep British fears about the future.
“I don’t think it’s Boris Johnson’s project or the British
people’s project, as Britain leaves the EU saying it wants a bigger space in
the world, to then become the junior partner of the US,” the French president
told reporters last week.
He said any future trade deal between the US and the UK
would not make up for the UK’s geographical and strategic links to Europe, and
a trade deal with the US could come at a high price for Britain: a “historic
vassalisation” to the US.
It is unlikely Macron chose his words carelessly. Johnson
first signalled his break from Theresa May at the end of 2017 by warning that
the UK must not become a “vassal state” of Europe. With the EU, the UK had one
of the bigger seats at the table, but in the absence of a withdrawal agreement
with Europe, Britain approaches the US as a junior partner at best, a
supplicant at worst.
Johnson has insisted that he will defend British agriculture
and the National Health Service against the predations of US corporations, but
that will be harder if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal, a course of
action Trump and his administration have repeatedly advocated. Johnson’s readiness to embrace such an outcome
distinguishes him from Theresa May, and is arguably the most important reason
Trump openly preferred him to his predecessor.
On this issue at
least, Johnson has, with his brinksmanship, placed himself closer to Trump and
further from the EU. The European Council president, Donald Tusk, drily noted
that when he meets Johnson on Sunday, he will be the third Tory prime minister
with whom he has sat down to discuss Brexit. He warned Johnson on
Saturday that he risked going down in history as “Mr No Deal”.
On the way to Biarritz, Johnson sought to defend his
strategy of blaming Britain’s EU partners for failing to come up with a
solution to the Irish backstop impasse.
“I don’t want a no-deal Brexit but I say to our EU friends
if they don’t want no deal they have got to get rid of the backstop from the
treaty,” Johnson told reporters. “If Donald Tusk doesn’t want to go down in
history as Mr No-Deal Brexit, then I hope this point will be borne in mind by
him too.”
Trump, ironically for a self-proclaimed master of the deal,
can be expected to continue to pull in the other direction, seeking to persuade
the prime minister that “Mr No Deal” would be a badge of pride.
In the absence of specifics, both Trump and Johnson will
seek to play up the manly bonhomie of a renewed “special relationship”. The US
president will want to show he has at least one friend in Biarritz, the man he
proudly referred to as “Britain [sic] Trump”, and has shown that he is prepared
to overlook past slights in special circumstances.
For his part, Johnson – who declared only a few years ago
that the only reason he would avoid some parts of New York was “the real risk
of meeting Donald Trump” – must seek to show he can connect more successfully
with the US president that his hapless predecessor.
Both men will paint a rosy picture of a future US-UK trade
deal, because the ugly reality of the negotiations can be put off until later.
At some point post-Brexit, the UK will have to make a decision on whether its
regulatory standards are to converge with the US or with the EU.
It cannot do both. Converging with the US would be likely to
involve breaking promises about British food, agriculture and animal welfare as
well as the National Health Service.
Moreover, any trade deal with the US would have to gain
approval from Congress, and the House of Representatives will be in no mood to
cooperate if Brexit has an impact on the Good Friday peace agreement in
Northern Ireland. The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy
Pelosi, has repeatedly said there is “no way whatsoever” a US-UK free trade
deal would be approved if Brexit affected the border between the two Irelands.
So whatever the upbeat noises about future trade Trump and
Johnson make on Sunday, it will mean little in real terms. The rest will be
mood music, and Johnson has shown himself adept in that department. The G7 is a
big stage, but not a particularly challenging act. There are set scripts and
orthodoxies to follow.
But as ever, Trump is the wild card, constantly threatening
to upset the comfortable western consensus of years past. If he so chooses, the
president could set the rejuvenated special relationship with the man he has
frequently called his friend, and force Johnson to make the hard choices he is
hoping to postpone until after an election.
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