Johnson’s
plan is to turn his supreme court humiliation into rocket fuel at the polls
Martin
Kettle
A pumped-up
prime minister is betting that the judges’ decision will play well for him with
leave voters
@martinkettle
Wed 25 Sep
2019 20.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 25 Sep 2019 21.29 BST
An angry
and disturbingly pumped-up Boris Johnson’s response to the court in the
recalled House of Commons tonight was an act of total contempt – for the
courts, for parliament and ultimately for public and political decency. For the
time being, Johnson still retains much of the formal power of the prime
minister. But the role’s inner power, its moral authority, the holder’s ability
to govern and his meaningful capacity to represent the country are practically
shot. There is nothing tragic about this for Johnson personally. There is
everything tragic for the country that never asked for him to become its
leader.
He can’t
blame the judges, because he does not dare. He likes to blame MPs, because they
are an easy target. But the real blame lies with himself and the Tory hard
leavers.
On Tuesday,
in the immediate aftermath of the supreme court’s unanimous finding that
Johnson’s attempt to silence parliament was unlawful and void, it was still
just possible to suppose that the prime minister’s instant reaction in New York
was merely foolish and off-the-cuff. While claiming to respect the court,
Johnson and his lieutenants had gone into instant denial. Johnson announced
that he “disagreed profoundly” with the ruling, as if that disagreement was in
any way relevant. Meanwhile in London, Downing Street charged the justices with
extending their reach into political matters, and Jacob Rees-Mogg was alleged
to have described the ruling as a “constitutional coup”.
Perhaps,
after sleeping on the matter, and with the prospect of a resumed parliamentary
session in front of them, there was a possibility that the Johnson government
would adopt a humbler and more contrite tone in the light of day today. Not a
bit of it. First, with Johnson still in the air over the Atlantic, Michael Gove
went on a media round and announced that the government had done nothing wrong
in suspending parliament in the way that the court had ruled against. Then the
attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, told the reassembled MPs that the government
had acted in good faith, refused to rule out a further prorogation, and then
lost it altogether, dismissing parliament as “dead”, “a disgrace” and
possessing “no moral right to sit”.
These were
merely the warm-up acts for Johnson’s own eventual appearance in the Commons
this evening. But they had already pointed unerringly to the strategy that the
prime minister was to adopt and which, it was now clear, he had intended to
adopt from the very start when he spoke in New York. That strategy was that
this is now a naked political fight to the death with the opposition and with
the unbelievers. He is not interested in any of the issues on which the judges
ruled. All that matters to him is to wade through chaos to Brexit. The twin
objectives of the Johnson government when it took office after the ousting of
Theresa May – Brexit by the end of October and a general election fought on a
“people versus the elites” platform – remain utterly unchanged by the supreme
court ruling.
Johnson’s
two-month premiership has been based on an audacious and slightly crazy plan.
It still is based on it today, even after Tuesday’s humiliation. That plan is
the overriding need, as the Tory right sees it, to deliver Brexit after three
years, and in so doing marginalise the Brexit party in a general election. The
as yet insuperable problem with the plan is that it is fuelled wholly by the
kind of bravado and pomposity that Johnson displayed this evening. There is a
hung parliament, which means the Johnson Conservatives cannot get their own way
without compromises they are not prepared to make. And there is the rule of
law, which means they cannot ignore the constitution and the courts.
To Johnson,
these are merely distractions. His objective remains to achieve his two goals
by hook or by crook, come what may. If parliament supports him, fine. But if
parliament opposes him, he will simply bank the defeat and use it to accuse MPs
of being determined to frustrate the 2016 vote. Similarly, if the law supports
him, that is fine too. But if it doesn’t – and this week it has not – then this
too becomes part of the narrative that sees Johnson as the tribune of the leave
majority and the courts as part of the resentful, threatened remain minority of
establishment bad losers. There are loud echoes here of Donald Trump’s response
to this week’s early moves to impeach him.
It may have
been tempting, especially for liberals, to imagine that an event like an
impeachment process or the supreme court ruling will be generally seen as
disturbing enough to change the public mood. Maybe it should be. But it might
be wise not to bet the mortgage on that. Most of the public say that they
support the rule of law. Most, to judge by the instant polling after this
week’s ruling, think it is bad that Johnson broke the law. But that does not
mean that they will necessarily turn against Johnson in decisive numbers on
issues such as Brexit or parliament’s delay in implementing it.
Modern
Britain has undoubtedly become a much more law-respecting society today than it
was in the past. This is an enormous change from the mid 20th century. In the
1970s, for instance, belief in the rule of law was far from universal, notably
in industrial relations, where several unions boycotted the industrial
relations court set up by the Heath government.
But the
vestigial belief that the law should keep a certain distance from politics is
deep-seated. The trade union movement spent most of its existence believing
that the law had no place in industrial relations. Media interests, old and
new, often talk in similar terms about the news business. Jonathan Sumption, a former
supreme court justice, gave his Reith lectures this year on these delicate
boundaries. So when Downing Street says the courts are overreaching themselves,
they are not playing to an empty house.
Liberal
Tories may be deceiving themselves in another way. They continue to believe
that Johnson’s aim is really to make a deal with the European Union at the 11th
hour. It would be the rational thing to do, they say, and in their own terms
they are entirely right. Ken Clarke said this today. David Cameron said much
the same in interviews last week. Johnson repeated it last night. All this,
though, mistakes the fact that Johnson is rounding the point of no-return. Like
Macbeth in blood, he is stepped so far in recklessness that there is no going
back to the kind of compromises and trade-offs that even Johnson voted for
earlier in the year.
Sooner or
later, all this will be put to a general election. When that happens, it is
clear that Johnson intends to focus his campaign against the pro-European
establishment of liberal Britain. That was his aim in July, and it is still his
aim now. He is calculating, in other words, that this week’s defeat in the
courts can be leveraged into a much bigger victory at the polls. To be savaged
by the judges is indeed humiliating. But if it helps to fire up enough leave
voters in enough places to give Johnson some sort of electoral victory under
Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, and with the anti-Tory
opposition deeply split, it will all be deemed to have been thoroughly worth
it.
• Martin
Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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