Boris Johnson Gambles Brexit on a General Election

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

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The United Kingdom is having another general election, its third in five years, on December 12th. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wanted it, even if some in his Conservative Party didn’t. So did the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalist Party. The main opposition Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, agreed to it at the last minute. All the parties say that they are ready and eager to fight for the public’s votes, or at least that they see the necessity of doing so. The debate on whether to call an election, which took place on Monday and Tuesday, included references on all sides to “impasse,” “deadlock,” and “paralysis,” over the issue of how to leave the European Union, in keeping with the 2016 Brexit referendum, or whether to leave at all. The latest deadline for getting out was supposed to have been Halloween; it was extended till January 31st. Johnson boasted that, with his push for a new vote, “the ice floes have begun to crack.” But there is no one in British politics for whom the new elections don’t represent some kind of failure—with the possible exception of those, such as the Scottish Nationalists, who see in the breakdown of the British parliamentary system an opportunity to break away. Whatever happens to the ice floes, though, an election might not even crack Brexit.

Just a week and a half ago, Brexit seemed as close as it has ever been to being settled. That prospect, depending on one’s political perspective, was either tantalizing or alarming. Johnson had agreed to an exit deal with the European Union—Parliament had rejected a previous one, which Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, negotiated, three times. Johnson’s deal had the virtue of addressing the question of what the border between Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.) and the Republic of Ireland (part of the E.U.) would look like after Brexit. The legal border, which runs along a winding path across Ireland, will be mostly frictionless and invisible, but there would be regulatory and customs checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. The Republic of Ireland was happy with the deal; so was the rest of the E.U., whose leaders are tired of dealing with Brexit. Northern Irish Unionists hated it. But many Brexiteers who either realized that something had to give with respect to Ireland or thought that, though bad, the deal was less bad than a no-deal crash-out Brexit, were, at least, willing to compromise. It looked like Johnson had the votes. But he wanted it all done by Halloween. When a series of Parliamentary machinations made that impossible, he essentially stopped the ratification process and said that he wanted an election—at the earliest possible date—instead.

Some of those most dismayed were Brexiteers who thought that, if Johnson had just stuck to the task at hand, “we would be well on our way to leaving in the middle of November,” as Kenneth Clarke, a senior Tory, put it in the election debate on Tuesday. But, with Johnson, it is a fundamental mistake to think that anything he says he believes takes priority over his own ambitions, and he clearly believes they are better served by a quick election before everyone notices the full extent of the mess he’s made. He has been operating without an effective majority for pretty much the entire time that he’s been Prime Minister; the election might give him one.

It wasn’t obvious that Johnson could get an election; one wasn’t required until 2022. Under the British system, there are three routes to early polling: he could invoke legislation called the Fixed Term Parliament Act and, if two-thirds of the House of Commons agreed, hold a vote. He tried that route twice, most recently on Monday, and two-thirds did not agree. The second route was that Corbyn, as the leader of the largest opposition party, could call for a vote of no confidence in the government, which would require a simple majority to pass. He would not do so, despite Johnson daring him and eventually taunting him about his hesitancy. “Dogs bark, cows moo, and oppositions are meant to campaign for elections—except for this one,” Johnson said during the debate on Tuesday. The day before, when a Tory M.P. asked Johnson if he could “make sure that there is plenty of corn feed for the election chickens on the opposite benches” the Prime Minister replied, “Elegantly put.” (Johnson also compared Corbyn to Fidel Castro, and referred, with faux grandiloquence, to “a shadow of Transylvanian horror” passing over “the semi-Communist faces of the opposition front bench.” Corbyn called Johnson a “reckless” Prime Minister with “authoritarian instincts.”)

The third route was to pass a law saying that there should be an election on a certain date—Parliament is sovereign, and the U.K.’s constitution unwritten, so that would be possible. The problem is that such a bill is amendable, and there was a possibility that something could be added on—a promise of a second Brexit referendum, say—that would make it untenable for Johnson. What changed was that, over the weekend, the Liberal Democrats (whose priority is remaining in the E.U.) and the S.N.P. (which would like to stay, but whose main goal is Scottish independence) indicated that they wouldn’t insist on such amendments. Nor did they insist, in the end, on their preferred date for an election, which was December 9th. The prospect of an actual Brexit on January 31st was too close either way, and the Remainers were running out of options; E.U. leaders such as President Emmanuel Macron, of France, wanted the British to know that the current extension might be the last one. (When a Tory M.P. said that the S.N.P., in calling for an election, was just looking for a way to “obstruct Brexit,” the Party’s Parliamentary leader, Ian Blackford, replied, “Guilty as charged.”) Despite the massive marches calling for a second referendum, the Remain-oriented parties have not managed to summon up a true consensus on holding one. Their consolation is that the voters may at least give them credit for knowing what they want. The Labour Party can’t count on that. Its internal divisions on Brexit have yielded confusing positions and hedging; it’s not even clear what Corbyn himself wants to happen. (Sam Knight wrote about the politics of Brexit for last week’s edition of the magazine.) He didn’t have an effective response to Johnson’s election-chicken needling. Instead, he rhetorically wriggled to the last, with complaints about how inconvenient it is to hold an election in December, when it gets dark very early in the U.K. He pointed out that no one trusts Johnson. But too many people don’t trust Corbyn, either.

Asking people, directly, whom they trust is what elections are for. The outcome is hard to predict; polls show Labour more than ten points behind the Conservatives, winning about a quarter of the vote, but adding in the smaller parties, including the new nationalist-populist Brexit Party, the math gets complicated. This week has already seen a sifting of candidates, with dozens of M.P.s retiring. Others have switched parties or become independent since the last election. A persistent problem in Parliament over the past couple of years has been that the party divisions no longer entirely line up with the divisions over Brexit. (There are Labour Leavers and Tory Remainers, and vice versa.) An election may not resolve those divisions. It will certainly expose them. The result might be a “hung Parliament”—no majority, deadlock, and paralysis, but with a slightly different cast of characters shouting about Brexit.