Now we know why Boris Johnson refused during the Tory leadership campaign to rule out shutting down parliament to push through a no-deal Brexit.
Johnson and his controversial closest adviser Dominic Cummings, knowing they could lose a no-confidence vote in the Commons, plan a general election soon after 31 October. So the UK would crash out of the EU while parliament was prorogued for the election. “It would be in the days afterwards,” one Johnson ally told me.
At first glance, it looks like a bluff. Under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, a no-confidence vote would trigger an election if the PM failed to win a positive vote of confidence in the subsequent 14 days. So telling Tory MPs already agonising over whether to bring down their own government that it would not prevent no deal is a good shield against their nuclear weapon.
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But there’s more to it than that. It’s potentially a win-win for Johnson. After speaking to some of his allies this week, I don’t think he’s bluffing when he tells both the EU and MPs he would press ahead with a no-deal exit. He would still prefer a revised agreement with the EU, but he’s not going to blink first. Some Whitehall officials worry that Johnson has “painted himself into a corner” by saying the UK will leave on 31 October “do or die”. But what if he did so with his eyes wide open? I suspect he did.
With Labour already attacking the PM as untrustworthy, he surely could not risk failing to meet his self-imposed Halloween deadline.
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The most important phrase in the Cummings playbook is not “do or die” but delivering Brexit “by any means necessary”, a deliberate echo of Malcolm X, the US civil rights activist.
If that means stripping out the hidden wiring of the UK’s largely unwritten constitution on a daily basis, so be it. Team Boris argues that MPs, and the speaker John Bercow, tore up conventions and the rule book to close off a March no deal – though Theresa May’s heart was never in it, as she feared it could lead to Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the UK. So now we have a prime minister prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve Brexit, even if it means gambling with the economy and the union.
Does unpicking the constitutional glue matter? Yes. Jeremy Corbyn makes a powerful argument in his letter to Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, urging him to uphold the convention that major decisions should not be taken in the middle of an election campaign.
Team Boris is right to argue he has the power to delay an election until November. More debatable is its claim the exit date should hold because a decision to leave on 31 October has already been taken by parliament. That seems like nonsense when the critical issue at such an election would be whether to crash out. No one voted for no deal in 2016. To claim that this was debated during the referendum campaign, as the foreign secretary Dominic Raab does, is fiction.
Some senior MPs hope the courts will intervene, pointing to the Supreme Court’s “activist tendencies”. There will certainly be legal action to try to halt no deal, but I suspect the courts might decide it’s a matter for the politicians.
Another hope is that the Queen will be drawn in. She will be very reluctant, but could have a dilemma: if MPs pass a no-confidence vote, they plan to use the archaic procedure of sending a humble address to the monarch, saying an alternative PM – such as Kenneth Clarke, the Father of the House – enjoys the confidence of the Commons. Even if Johnson refused to resign, would the Queen then dismiss him by asking Clarke to form a government? Tricky.
The flaw is that MPs might well struggle to agree on a caretaker PM, even on the basis they would merely seek an extension to the leaving date and then call an election. Corbyn would get first crack during the 14-day cooling-off period. But he would be unlikely to get enough votes from Tory, Liberal Democrat and independent MPs to win a confidence vote. In turn, No 10 is banking on Corbyn being unwilling to endorse “a Tory or Blairite PM”.
The best course for MPs is to pass a law instructing Johnson to ask the EU to extend the Article 50 process beyond 31 October. It would be illegal for him to ignore that. Time is very short, and backbenchers will need to seize control of the Commons timetable from the government. This is the scenario No 10 fears most and, revealingly, talks about least. Yet it is where the “no to no deal” vote can be maximised. It is therefore where MPs should put their energy, rather than playing fantasy national unity cabinet.
There could be an unexpected final episode to this drama. Even if Johnson took the UK out on the eve of a November election, voters could elect a parliament that overturned the decision in retrospective legislation, according to Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of politics at King’s College, London. Now that really would be a twist in the tale.