Let’s just get this done! With a smidgen of Churchillian grit, the fighting will be over before Christmas. Boris Johnson is summoning up the spirit of the Blitz. Britain may be battered, but it is never broken. Once the new prime minister has severed the EU shackles on October 31, people will come together again in a great hug of national celebration. Call it Victory in Europe. VE Day. Mr Johnson would like that.
Britain is living through the most profound crisis it has faced in modern peacetime. Its politics are dysfunctional, its society badly fractured and its economy weakened. The UK union is imperilled. The Conservative party’s answer is to put a second-rate huckster in 10 Downing Street. Mr Johnson scorns truth and is blind to ethics. Civil servants doubtless will do their impartial duty. They can be sure that when things go wrong, Mr Johnson will throw them overboard.
Britain’s new prime minister sometimes strikes a pose as a metropolitan liberal. This week, aides have ensured his new ministerial line-up nods in the direction of diversity. At heart, he is a reactionary. With a worldview drawn from Rudyard Kipling’s paeans to English exceptionalism, he mourns the loss of empire, rails against the “nanny state”, and thinks the French should be eternally grateful for being rescued in two world wars.
And so to Brexit. Mr Johnson’s campaign for the leadership was studded with all manner of fairy tales and fantasies. Perhaps the most palpably false was a promise that Brexit would soon be recognised as another great victory. Another was that he could dictate to the EU the terms of departure. A third, that he would sprinkle harmony and unity across a deeply polarised nation.
As intensely as Mr Johnson gazes into the mirror in the effort to sharpen his Churchill mannerisms (have you noticed the studied stoop?) he is running out of road. He will whip up the familiar blizzards of bluster and chaff. There comes a moment, though, when chancers are found out.
There are three safe bets to be made about Mr Johnson’s premiership. The first is that for all his do-or-die promises otherwise, Brexit will not be settled any time soon. Deal or no-deal, Britain will be trapped in uncertainty for years to come. The second, that the splintering of national unity will set the UK on a path that leads to the break-up of the four-nation union. And the third, that Mr Johnson’s spell in No 10 will end in dismal failure.
The idea that crashing out of the EU would “settle things”, and thus put an end to uncertainty, has always been a nonsense. Sure, a no-deal Brexit would dissolve in an instant the panoply of institutional, political and economic connections between Britain and the EU27. Far from allowing a clean break, however, this would be a prelude to years of complex and difficult negotiations to restore a sustainable relationship. The government would be entirely at the mercy of Brussels in terms of the pace of talks and scope of an accord.
Mr Johnson could decide to betray the ideological zealots who have put him in No 10. He could petition German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron for a few cosmetic adjustments to the withdrawal agreement secured by his predecessor Theresa May, and then declare the package a victory. With backing from some Labour MPs, the House of Commons might vote for it. Or, more likely, not.
Even a deal, however, would provide only temporary certainty. Beyond a transition would lie another cliff edge - and the prospect of uncertainty well into the mid-2020s until the terms of a comprehensive trade agreement had been hammered out.
I have heard talk in Mr Johnson’s camp of a third option - a so-called “managed no-deal” with an open-ended transition period. The aim would be to render redundant the backstop plan to keep open the Irish border. I cannot see why the EU27 would offer such an accord, but in any event it would scarcely represent the clean break promised by Mr Johnson.
The prime minister’s promise of post-Brexit unity belies his contempt for the nearly half (48 per cent, or more than 16m) of voters in the 2016 referendum who backed membership of the EU. He dismisses them as “Remoaners” seeking to overturn the “will of the people”. Leave voters who wanted to withdraw from the EU’s political project but maintain close economic ties have likewise been disenfranchised.
The notion that these people are now waiting meekly to fall in behind Mr Johnson’s infantile “global Britain” strategy is surely beyond even his imagination. The Brexit struggle between those who believe in a progressive and open Britain and those throwing up the barricades of nostalgia will shape politics for a decade. In England it will widen the gap between cosmopolitan London and the less prosperous regions. In Scotland it will nourish support for independence by forcing a choice between little England and Europe. In Northern Ireland it may tip the balance to reunification with the Republic.
Absurdly, Mr Johnson says he can restore public trust in politics. The narcissism is heart-stopping. The fact of his premiership is a sorry measure of how far Britain has fallen. You could say it is fitting that now, at least, he will be confronted directly with the consequences of a career steeped in mendacity. Britain, though, will be paying the price.
Philip Stephens is a Financial Times columnist