Boris Johnson’s conversion to the Leave cause had little to do with personal conviction and everything to do with personal ambition: he wants to be prime minister one day. Arguably, without the flamboyant, roguish and charismatic Johnson, the Brexit vote would not have been won. Had the promises that he and his fellow leavers made had to be deliverable, leave would certainly not have won (the NHS will not be getting a £350 million a week “Brexit bonus” – shocking, I know). Johnson famously said he was “pro cake and pro eating it”; a reworking of the maxim “you can’t have your cake and eat it”. Many misunderstood the phrase: what’s the point in a cake if it can’t be eaten? Rather it means if you eat your cake, you can’t have it later because it is gone.
Mad “cakeism” seems to have infected cabinet, even if Johnson is no longer in it. The current impasse which may come to a head tonight is over the vexed subject of the Irish border. Nobody wants a border in Ireland, preferring that the current situation for the movement of goods, people and livestock over the border with the minimum of checks and disruption should continue. However, since the UK wishes to leave the EU, the jurisdiction of the ECJ, the customs union and the single market, this simply cannot happen. In the longer run May’s “deep and special relationship” with the EU could mean that the UK might continue outside the EU as if it was really still a member (oh, do you see that lovely unicorn over there?), but this is more cakeism. The fix for the problem is that Northern Ireland would stay as a de facto member of both the single market and the customs union. This is known as the backstop arrangement and it was what the British agreed to in order to get talks moving forward last December.
The problem with the backstop is that it leaves part of the UK behind the EU border and the rest of the UK outside it, so some regulatory checks would have to be conducted on goods transiting between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK (notably on livestock and some agricultural products); this would set up an internal UK border. The EU insists that if such an arrangement is granted, it would need to be permanent or remain in place until another agreement made it obsolete. The problem for Mrs May is that the DUP who provide her government with a working majority will not accept this. Mrs May is saying that no PM could agree to something which interferes with the integrity of the UK as a geopolitical area (except that she did in December) and is hoping that the EU will agree to such an arrangement being time limited: they won’t. Mrs May is not the only politician with a set of “red lines” after all.
If the UK government shifts position, the DUP and hard-line Brexiteers in the Conservative party will revolt against it. If it doesn’t change tack, there is every chance that the negotiations with the EU will suffer a terminal breakdown (possibly as soon as this week). This would leave the UK with the prospect of crashing out of the EU on 29/3/19 at midnight with no transitional deal in place – the hardest of hard Brexits. Under WTO rules, a hard border between the UK and the Republic of Ireland would have to be established and inspections of goods required with appropriate tariffs being levied.
The whole Brexit mess just underlines the fact that it is impossible to eat your cake and still have the same cake available to be eaten later – even Boris Johnson has always known this to be true.