For the last three years, the UK has been driven by a polarizing decision called Brexit; all talks were about uncertainty and divisions, about the divisions between remain and leave. At present, that seems to be an era long gone.

Brexit Seemed to be on Track Until Covid-19 Changed Everything

With the last general election, Britons asked the new government to move on and leave the EU. Boris Johnson’s address to the Nation on January 31 promised to be ensuring that.

Nobody could have ever imagined that things would have gone so differently. After the coronavirus has changed everybody’s life and expectations, is Brexit still a priority in the agenda?

Larry Elliott, a longtime Eurosceptic journalist, argues that the pandemic is exposing the EU’s failures: “The message being sent out is that Europe is a project for the good times and that when the going gets tough people can only really rely on their own government and the nation state.”

Is Brexit what Great Britain really needs to talk about with Europe right now or is the pandemic sending Brexit into lockdown?

The Pre-Covid-19 Brexit Stalemate

On February 26, David Frost, the Uk’s chief negotiator, called a press conference with the FPA in order to introduce the 30 page publication setting out the UK’s approach to the negotiations with the EU supposed to begin shortly, from that week on. He than left to Brussels in order to start the first round of the talks with Michel Barnier, his EU counterpart. After that meeting, Barnier announced on Twitter that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, sending Frost into self-isolation as he was also showing symptoms of the disease.

Coronavirus Shelved EU-UK Brexit Negotiations

While talks were put on hold, the pandemic started causing chaos all around the world. The British PM called for lockdown and the civil servants working on Brexit were switched to dealing with the coronavirus, or being sent home. As a consequence, no meaningful work has been done in Whitehall to prepare for the negotiations, which are supposed to conclude by the end of the year.

On April 8, after recovering, Barnier started preparing his work at the European Commission which includes organizing upcoming negotiation rounds with Frost, who has also recovered. Obviously, it would be impossible to continue face-to-face talks which have been suspended because of social distancing measures.

As the coronavirus has struck at the heart of the post-Brexit trade talks, is there any hope that cross-channel negotiations could make any substantial progress while the pandemic continues?

Videoconferencing vs. One-on-One Talks

On April 5 after the Queen’s speech PM Johnson was admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital due to coronavirus after suffering 10 days of symptoms including a high fever.

Prior to that day, Johnson had consistently dismissed calls to seek an extension to the negotiating period Britain entered after officially leaving the bloc on January 31: “no ifs, no but”. After all, he won the election on this pledge.

The thing is that, what looked certain before the outbreak looks doubtful afterwards, as everything has changed and nobody knows how the world would look like when all this is over.

EU Official: Johnson’s Year-End Deal Scenario ‘Fantasy Land’

Boris Johnson’s plan to seal a deal with Brussels by the end of December  “which was already hopelessly optimistic”, has been described as a “fantasy land” by EU officials, the Guardian reports.

The German newspaper, Der Spiegel, published a leaked letter from Michael Clauss, the German ambassador to the EU, where he outlined the scale of the bloc’s inability to work during the outbreak.

While the first round of the talks at the European Commission could have a chance to be held, the second one, at the European Council HQ where all the member state’ positions are coordinated, will be more complicated due to the lack of facilities. The pandemic has cut the capacity of carrying out work which is now 25% of what it would usually be.

With only one videoconference available per day “and worse facilities than the EU commission, it would be impossible for the member states to have the same input through the EU Council. This would make a successful negotiation nearly impossible,” an EU official told the Guardian.

All Nonessential EU Matters On Hold

In the leaked letter from Clauss to Berlin, it was also explained that all nonessential issues, the ones not-related to rebuilding from the pandemic, would be temporarily suspended.

These words resonate more significantly as we consider that Germany will take over the rolling EU presidency semester from Croatia, in July 1 and what the German Ambassador wrote implied that Brexit will not be on the top of the EU’s economics agenda.

He also wrote that videoconferences are not able to replace face-to-face meetings. “No formal quorum, no marginalized conversations, no confidentiality of the negotiations, no interpreting. Difficulties in text work.”

It takes two to negotiate and a UK government spokesman made it clear that the PM remains fully committed to the negotiations and that “discussions with the commission are continuing, with the aim of reaching an agreement by the end of the year with no intention of changing.”

Delay is the Smartest Option

Nick de Bois, former chief of staff to Dominic Raab at the Department for Exiting the European Union in 2018, is among those who believe that delaying the Brexit trade negotiation talks could be the best thing to do now, due to the heightened difficulties from the pandemic.

“Videoconferencing can go so far, but it was the personal chemistry of Johnson that clinched the withdrawal agreement, first by settling the Northern Ireland backstop with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and then deploying his considerable charm offensive to win over EU leaders to support the deal,” de Bois said.

In the best case scenario, meaning that a deal is agreed by the latest possible date of October 2020, what happens from that moment on is that all the 27 member states will be called to endorse the trade agreement. But, if this process would have been difficult without the outbreak, things are getting worse now.

“With the inevitable financial fallout from the coronavirus shown by a North-South divide within the Eurozone countries on who should be picking up the bill for the extensive intervention measures undertaken by national governments, ratification of what would be a very important trade deal could well be weaponized by southern member states to secure more generous EU bailouts that are inevitably down the line,” he concluded.

As Boris Johnson has high personal poll ratings at the moment, he could postpone the transition period without betraying his pledge, simply shifting  his investments and attention into coping with the pandemic. Nobody would probably be surprised by the PM changing his mind, because the UK is used to that and will probably approve this decision. Ubi maior.

Shifting Public Opinion

From the onset of the outbreak, it looks as if the British people are slowly starting to get prepared to see who was supposed to be the “Brexit PM” turning into the “Pandemic PM” and swallow the idea that the divorce from the EU can and must wait.

“Some argue that the UK government was elected on a promise to Get Brexit Done, and allowing a delay would be a betrayal of the voters,” the Times reads while calling for an online surrey to its readers and adding that: “Others say the coronavirus crisis is more important, and its impact would prevent a satisfactory deal being struck in any case.”

Fully 75% of the people answering this question said that Brexit can wait. A Focaldata poll, commissioned by the campaign groups Best for Britain and Hope Not Hate, found that 64% of voters want Johnson to “request an extension to the transition period in order to focus properly on the coronavirus.”

UK Conservatives Are Also Changing Their Tune

Tom Harwood, journalist in the FM Conservatives says that Rishi Sunak reiterating the Government’s commitment to concluding UK-EU FTA by December is not believed to by possibile by several Tory MPs. “Let’s be clear we’re in the midst of a global epidemic, many Brexiteers would not see a short extension to the transition period as the end of the world,” he concluded. The key issue, picked up on by Peter Foster, Financial Times, is that “pushing ahead on the existing timetable would not just be a diversion, but a self-inflicted one”.

Adding, that more time would probably help in achieving a better post-Brexit trading relationship, given the circumstances and people would accept and forgive if the government will not be able to stick to the original timetable choosing to prioriti\e the emergency, now.

The National Audit Office said that between 2016-17 and 2019-20, the Treasury made available £6.3bn of additional founding to cover the costs of the UK leaving the EU with or without a deal. Government departments already spent more than £4bn on preparations for leaving, the public spending watchdog said.

Are we sure the Britons will accept more funds to be spent tackling this issue while the sountry, as all the rest of the world, struggles to cope with the coronavirus pandemic?

Brexit vs. Pandemic

“Freedom of movement brought the man who is currently saving the PM’s life,” Naomi Smith of Best for Britain, said.

One in every 20 NHS employees is from the EU making up 20% of the UK’s GPs. Since the 2016 referendum result, the number of European Economic Area (EEA) nurses to have left the NHS has tripled.

On March 31, due to the emergency, doctors, nurses and paramedics from abroad had their visas extended so they could “focus on fighting coronavirus,” Pritti Patel, Home Secretary, said. The extension applied to around 2,800 migrant health professionals working in the NHS with UK work visas due to expire before October 1. “They will be renewed automatically for a year free of charge so they can remain working in the country,” the Home Office said.

But this is not enough. The NHS was buckling under the weight of rising demand, facing a severe staffing shortage even before the pandemic outbreak. “More than 40,000 nursing roles are currently unfilled amid a sector-wide crisis,” the Telegraph read, last January.

Mark Dayan, policy analyst at health think tank the Nuffield Trust, said that continued migration into the UK is critical. “The NHS has a long-term tendency to rely on non-UK migration,” he explained adding that “The NHS is also more dependent on migrants than other sections of the economy are on average.”

What happens is that, while staff from the EU dry up, the UK — still relying on migrants — is now looking back again to the Philippines and India. In the last two years, the number of Filipino recruits has grown by more than 20 per cent, while those from Spain, Portugal and Romania quit. But this is still not enough to cope with the national emergency all the countries, India and Philippines included, are facing now.

The thing is that, the workers’ shortage due to Brexit is now more prominent than ever; plus, the coronavirus crisis has made certain roles more essential than ever before, showing that they are necessary to society and the economy at large.

The ONS data shows that on average 50% of jobs in the food chain (excluding hospitality) are held by foreign, mostly EEA (40%), workers. Same goes for logistics and wholesale where the non-UK workforce is 39% or cleaning where it is at 35% on average. 

A “Pick for Britain” campaign has been launched by the government and the farming industry to recruit up to 7,000 British workers to harvest fruit and vegetables as travel restrictions means that only 10% of Eastern European workforce is now available.

Europe has never looked so far away, especially when, at the beginning of the outbreak, the UK originally rejected the EU scheme to work together to order the life-saving equipment. The government claimed that they had missed the email communications to join and this is the reason why they didn’t joined. Michael Gove, Minister for the Cabinet Office, explained that, as an “independent nation”, it was able to create the ventilators it needs without the support of other countries. More than 480 ventilators have arrived from overseas in the last month, either donated or bought from countries including US, Germany, China, Sweden, Turkey and Taiwan.

Should Brexit be Put on Hold?

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people in the UK still think that Brexit has to be done quickly and talks should not stop.

Nigel Farage has warned that the EU will force Britain to pay billions towards Brussels’ coronavirus bailout fund if the UK extends its Brexit transition period. He told online viewers that the UK still has £7billion left in the European Investment Bank (EIB), which, he warned, could be used to prop up the collapsing European Union.

Whilst the Prime Minister has remained resolute in its bid to complete post-Brexit talks by December 31, Brussels sources have ruled out renegotiating the terms of the transition period to allow for a “Flextension” for just an extra few weeks.

Such an arrangement would require a new treaty which is not theoretically impossible, but basically more difficult during these hard times.

Boris Johnson still has a B plan in his pocket: a no-deal Brexit.

The question is: is this the proper bid to think about in these hard times, or, once again, Brexit can be put on hold one more time?

L'articolo Is the Pandemic Sending Brexit into Lockdown? proviene da InsideOver.

Since 2010 the United Kingdom has contended with four general elections, three Prime Ministers, two referendums, one coalition and a period of minority government. Finally, the country will have Brexit finalized and everything will change. Maybe.

It’s understandable that a country which is sick and tired of such a never-ending limbo situation would consider Brexit to be good news, but the bad news is that uncertainty is not over yet.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit Plan

Boris Johnson won the UK’s latest snap elections on the promise to “get Brexit done” and “unleash Britain’s potential” by January 31. He is asking the new members of parliament to work hard before Christmas and to back his Withdrawal Agreement Bill before introducing it to the House of Lords by the end of this year.

The aim would be to get Johnson’ deal completed in time for Brexit to happen by January the 31st, and with the large Conservative majority in the House of Commons, it should be fairly straightforward to pass. However, even though there is a sense of clarity now all around the UK regarding Brexit, dilemmas still remain.

The Bill passing through the parliament should be considered as the first piece of law that lays the framework for Brexit happening. The next steps will get complicated as the PM is planning a detailed template for consultations with the EU supposed to start right after February and supposed to end by December 2020. This will be the hardest part.

Boris Johnson gambled his career on Brexit and won many people’s trust, as a result he changed the political landscape of the country. The new blue-dominated Tory map drawn up by his stunning victory will not last forever, though; Johnson knows voters lent him their support on this occasion, but he must give back exactly what he promised: especially in terms of delivering Brexit. 

What Comes Next?

Johnson’s focus on Brexit makes it very likely to happen. As Professor Ian Begg of the London School of Economics put it, “the elections drew the line under the withdrawal and that itself makes a significant change to what happens next, because instead of endless speculations about whether Brexit will or will not happen, I would be 99,9% confident that by the end of January Britain will have left the EU.”

Once Johnson’s bill is backed by the parliament the main issues will be decided on: the Irish border, citizens’ rights, the role of the European Court of Justice and, last but not least, the money, meaning how much money the UK must pay to leave the EU.

“What I think the public has not really understood yet is that there is then a huge new process of thinking about the future relationship which is going to drag on,” professor Begg added, explaining that he is not sure Mr Johnson is going to complete it by the end of 2020.

Johnson’s Paradoxical Position

On one side, the PM is now stronger and powerful due to the fact that the  outcome of the election is a far bigger majority than anybody expected. This  new position means a bigger room for maneuver to do things which he might not be able to do with a very tight majority. In particular he is no longer subject of the pressure from the ultras, the hard-line Euro-sceptic Brexiteers who won’t accept any compromise.

On the other hand, Johnson now has to face the European players of this game and all the national interests of every member state and come out with the deal that is best for the UK. Negotiating a trade deal with the EU could take weeks, considering that all the remaining 27 member states and the European parliament have to agree and will likely inject their own demands and concerns. Time is short, but talks are unlikely to wrap up quickly.

One potentially positive aspect is that because the UK belonged to the EU, it used to speak the same negotiating language and “because we start with identical trade position it is far easier to do a deal than with Canada, Vietnam or Korea,” as Begg explains. This means that matters could progress more rapidly than expected.

Every European country may likely demand its goods to be protected in some way. For example, you could expect Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to say “yes, but we demand closure on the status of Gibraltar.” Alternately, what if Italy wants more done to protect Parma ham. All these debates could come up during the negotiations and clash with the UK’s hope of getting as much access as possible for its own goods and services to the EU market.

Past Mistakes Are Key Lessons For What To Avoid In The Future

Johnson must work to avoid former Prime Minister Theresa May’s mistakes and learn from the past fiascos surrounding Brexit. A report for the Institute for Government authored by May’s former special adviser Raoul Ruparel on how the UK can successfully exit the EU analyzes various mistakes May made in her negotiations and how Johnson can learn from them.

First of all, “the UK failed to put forward a plan,” the report reads. This first mistake is a key lesson: the government claims it wants a free trade agreement with the EU by the end of 2020 but, to have any hope of obtaining it, the UK government needs to think about how it wants to run those negotiations. Ruparel brings up a useful mantra in this regard: “control the process, control the outcome.”

Secondly, Johnson has to consider how, in the past, the EU was setting the agenda and putting the opening demands on the table. The UK was always in a position of arguing other member states down, rather than starting proactively with its own demands. Ruparel argues that success is more likely if the UK adopts a more proactive approach and establishes a clear line of communication and public support and involvement throughout the process.

Negotiations should not be a solipsistic exercise. Theresa May did them largely alone, or maybe was left alone. Johnson must go to Brussels with a team of MPs⁠—and we know Michael Gove has his luggage ready and packed to fly to Belgium⁠—but also external stakeholders and diplomats. Brexit should not look like a closed-door policy. Ruparel also suggests that, even if Johnson now owns a commanding majority in parliament, he still needs to transform it into a long-lasting coalition outside the House of Commons by ensuring wide support on the way to the divorce from the EU. It may be a harsh path with difficult decisions to be made, so the public will appreciate being kept in the loop and spoken with forthrightly by Johnson.

Forging A New United Kingdom

Boris Johnson changed the political map of the UK, but what is he planning for the future of the once-again independent nation that will emerge from this revolution?Answering this question requires an explanation of what “global Britain” was supposed to be about in terms of serving as a starting point for thinking about Britain’s future role in the world. When this project first came out, Theresa May’s intention of creating an “outward-looking country” that would interface with the international community effectively won major support from Brexiteers including her foreign secretary at the time, Boris Johnson.

UK Conservatism’s project of realizing a global Britain outside the European Union was about connecting with old friends in Europe and North America, but also finding new allies and a “new place itself” outside the restrictive confines of the EU. The manifesto was based on pillars such as: negotiating a free trade agreement with the EU and bilateral trade agreements with new partners. With strong support from the United States and US President Donald Trump who calls Johnson “the British Trump,” America is waiting for the UK to take back control of its decision-making and open its trade doors wider to the United States of America. Johnson has to make his voters happy and Trump; missteps will not be allowed.

Global Britain? Tory Voters: No Thanks

Even though Boris Johnson talked frequently about “global Britain” in past years, and still does at times, he understands that his electorate is not enthused about a universalized open-Britain concept. “There is a very clear disjunction between what people that voted for Brexit expect” and what the Tories and their leader are talking about. People didn’t vote for free trade markets as they only voted for protecting Britain’s sovereignty; they were not interested in a deregulated market,” explains professor John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde. In terms of immigration, Curtice points out that Conserative voters are not worried about “the level but the lack of control.”

Singapore-on-Thames

The new foreign policy agenda the PM is going to deliver has yet to be clarified. Getting rid of restrictive European  rules and opening to a new global scenario without turning off voters is the big challenge the British government faces going forward. The Conservatives have made it clear that their future plan means leaving the customs union and the single market.

This means that the new government will have to develop a strategy around deregulation and, as it was announced during last campaign, look for a “better homegrown alternative to the overbearing bureaucracy and inefficient EU regulations.” If put into a single book, the EU legislative code would amount to more than 168,000 pages, a length which has nearly doubled between 2005 and 2015. If stacked into a single pile, the rule book would be taller than Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square, and it is 169 feet 3 inches high. That’s a lot of regulations.

The Institute of Economic Affair has estimated the total cost to the UK economy of EU regulatory compliance may be as high as £120 billion a year and suggested turning the Department for Exiting the EU into a Department for Deregulation.The challenge would be to begin dismantling and liberalizing regulations and restrictions the UK was compelled to accept as part of being in the EU and go from there.

But what does “liberalize” precisely mean? Is Britain becoming a low-tax, low-regulation and low public spending paradise in the same manner as the Southeast Asian city state of Singapore?

The idea of a Singapore-on-Thames has several admirers, including Johnson himself and Micheal Gove. This model was lauded by many Tories who see it as a positive outcome of Brexit that would draw enormous investment back into the UK. Shifting headquarters away from the UK to Singapore has become increasingly common, with the British company Dyson, for example, relocating to Singapore in the past.

Johnson and Gove’s vision of Singapore-on-Thames is unlikely to resonate with Brexit voters, however and is also unlikely to become the dominant vision going forward.

“I don’t think anybody voted for Singapore,” Begg explains. “This story is very close to fake news and it is remotely likely,” he added stating that Britain has a social model which is pretty close to the European average … It is not the American social model and there is no intention inside the UK to move to an American or Chinese social model.”

The UK has a publicly-funded health care model, the expectation of a rising minimum wage and a social safety net that makes it quite unlike Singapore or the American or Chinese model that some might envision. All these ambiguities are supposed to end when negotiations will start and Johnson’s plan will show up.

‘No Deal’ Is Still On The Table

The tensions of Global Britain and Singapore-on-Thames could be considered as merely speculation at this point, but one big contradiction in Johnson’ plan really exists. According to what Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain former envoy to the EU, told the Observer, the PM “wants the UK to diverge from EU rules while also wanting a comprehensive trade deal in place, in just a year’s time. But it’s because you say you have no intention of remaining aligned that the negotiation will take the time.”

The negotiations between EU and UK need to produce a final agreement by the end of June 2020. By that precise time, the UK could make the decision of extending the transition period by one or two years even if Johnson has made it clear that he has no intention of asking for any form of extension. The government wants to leave by the end of December 2020, and this brings up the best-case-scenario of leaving with a deal or the worst-case-scenario of leaving without a deal.

Johnson recently announced that his deal, which supposed to be approved by the end of this year, would make it illegal for the parliament to extend the transition period, opening a conflict and further points of tension with the EU. Risks that these barriers could grow persist in both camps therefore the next phase could run into the ground, raising the chance the UK leaves without a deal and making it a very real possibility.

L'articolo How The UK Wants To Take Back Control Of Its Destiny With Brexit proviene da InsideOver.

In an interview with the Metro eight years ago, Boris Johnson described his morning routine “virtually erupt[ing] from bed like a rocketing pheasant. I then go for a run, because if you go for a run in the morning, nothing can get worse.” However, he doesn’t seem to have time for running anymore while his political career is moving fast and high.

Boris Johnson is probably the most controversial figure in the history of British politics; liked by some, hated by many. A majority fail to believe he tells the truth, yet people still vote for him and will probably do so on the 12th of December –  the date of the UK General Election – because he promotes himself as the only one able to reunite a divided country, despite being a very divisive political figure.

His message is a simple one: “Get Brexit Done” which is exactly what the nation wants after three and a half years of endless discussion. Johnson’s fictitiousness claims appear to play well with many who have been seduced to believe that being a member of the EU is a problem and that there is some sort of ‘Nirvana’ once the UK leaves.

He has given a clear answer to the demands of the people, regardless of the accuracy of his pledge. “‘Get Brexit Done’ is itself a lie because it lacks meaning; there is no apparent or revised deal, there is only a withdrawal agreement which leads to the conclusion of negotiations that the PM says will be ended by December 2020; which is impossible,” Gavin Esler, journalist and author of the book “Brexit Without The  Bullshit: The Facts on Food, Jobs, Travel and the NHS,” said. The slogan is short, catchy and has received a good reception. People are too busy to pay too much attention to politics and lack the time to deeply analyse the manifestoes of each candidate, so an easy and direct claim is likely to attract the attention of the British public and garner votes.

Boris Johnson’s adversary,  Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, is somewhat distrusted, being considered an ardent socialist, but the Prime Minister is a simplifier of complicated matters and this makes his campaign powerful, although details may be omitted for the sake of simplified claims.

Boris the unruly one

Boris Johnson, born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, grew up wanting to be ‘King of the World’. Lacking attention to detail, he has followed no strict rules to build his success, instead, he has just followed his instinct. He has unruly platinum blonde hair to look non-conventional and disruptive. Supporters praise him as an entertaining, humorous and popular figure with an optimistic inclination and a spontaneous enthusiasm. He is fascinated by Winston Churchill and people accuse him of modelling himself on the wartime prime minister ‘without possessing a scintilla of Churchill’s greatness,’ Andrew Gimson, the author ‘The Adventures Of Boris Johnson’, remarked.

He became Mayor of London defeating Ken Livingston twice and was running the non-Conservative and Labour-leaning city by surrounding himself with valuable lieutenants and directing them. Whilst campaigning against Livingston, he avoided telling jokes in an attempt to show he could look more serious, but once in the office he never stopped tainting his political career with blunders, some worse than others and far from humorous.

Johnson has been accused of dishonesty, elitism, of using racist, sexist, islamophobic and homophobic language and has been the subject of several biographies; most of them harsh and ruthless. Furthermore, in 2015, in Japan, he managed to flatten an opponent in what was supposed to be an informal game of rugby. The player he tackled was a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy. “I’m so sorry,” Johnson told the child afterwards.

“There is not a single thing he did as the Mayor of London that will be remembered,” Gavin Esler said recalling his mistakes.

He removed many buses and replaced them with others which were more polluting; he firmly supported the proposal of the Garden Bridge, a new pedestrian bridge over the River Thames which has never been built. He bought three water cannons for more than £322k that had never been used and were inevitably sold for scrap.

“I talked to audiences all around the country and to those who admire Boris Johnson and I always ask: What has he achieved that you most admire? And they can’t answer,” Esler explains us.

“He was such an incompetent Foreign Secretary. I talked to a lot of British diplomats and they said he is fundamentally lazy, he doesn’t read the briefs he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Thinking about what he has achieved, I can’t think about anything else except what he has achieved for himself,” Esler concludes.

Boris the populist

Boris Johnson is an old Etonian classicist who has made efforts to let people believe he is ‘one of them’. He has sold himself as an anti-élite and anti-establishment leader; with a simple and crystal clear message, he has become a successful populist and a cogent demagogue.

Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, harshly attacked him saying that: “Boris Johnson only cares about Boris Johnson and he will do whatever it takes, sacrifice whoever is needed to get what he wants.” One may think he wants to “Get Brexit done”, but Ms Swinson didn’t mean that.

BoJo’s life has been about becoming Prime Minister, “not out of some burning desire to make people’s lives better, but out of some sense of Etonian entitlement because it’s what people like him get to do,” Swinson concluded.

When he misled the Queen over his proroguing of Parliament, a few weeks ago, there was an Ipsos Mori poll asking people if they believed he had prorogued parliament for the reasons he said. 70% of British people answered stating that they didn’t believe him, but some of those people are likely to still vote for him. The great paradox Great Britain is facing now is that, even if people, or some of them, really believe Johnson is not telling the truth because of his persuasive attitude, he may still become PM.

Even members of his family, fail to believe he is telling the truth either: Jo, his brother, quit his ministerial task and seat while Boris was in office saying he was “torn between family loyalty and the national interest,” while Rachel, his sister, is a broadcaster and pro-remain campaigner who is often interviewed about her brother’s lies and defaults.

His strength is represented by being the opposite of a stereotype, the exception to the rule. He appears to connect with people even if he is considered to be unable to achieve what he claims. Due to a disregard for truth that has come to characterize global politics, many voters start from a base assumption that politicians are dishonest.

Fake and true lay at the same low level, making big promises and getting away from them seems to provoke no outrage; nothing seems to be enough to convince an individual to say: ‘I will never vote this person anymore’. Boris Johnson is currently benefiting from the scepticism he has created, while his opponents are likely to pay the price of it.

Boris and the women

Boris has always been rather furtive with matters of his personal life. Whilst being questioned during a recent radio interview, he refused to disclose how many children he had or whether he was involved in their lives. Wikipedia reads “At least five.”

It is known that he has four children with his ex-wife Marina Wheeler and it is believed that he has one or possibly more from other relationships, though Johnson has always refused to discuss this. His current partner, Carrie Symonds, is the former Conservative Party’s Head of Communications. She is supporting Johnson’s campaign while another women is publicly struggling from his alienation.

Jennifer Arcuri, a 34-year-old American entrepreneur, is the reason why journalists keep on asking Boris Johnson why he gave her £120,000 in public money while he was Mayor of London and why she was given privileged access to three foreign trade trips led by him. The PM has refused to comment about any relationship with Arcuri stating that: “Everything was done entirely in the proper way” and denying any conflict of interest.

At the end of October, the Government Internal Audit Agency concluded that a grant of public money to Arcuri’s High Tech Company, Hacker house, was ‘appropriate’. During a radio phone-in show, on LBC, Johnson was questioned over past comments he had written about women during his time as a journalist. An article written in 1995 on the Spectator reads that: “Single mothers are producing a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children” arguing that social housing available to single mothers was ‘an enticement’ for them to become pregnant.

On an article published on the Daily Telegraph last year, he described women who wear burkas looking like ‘letter-boxes or bank robbers’. He repeatedly said any claims in which he had expressed sexist and racist opinions in articles were a misrepresentation of his view. He further apologised if any offence was taken, but declined to rescind any of the stated views. Boris Johnson was sacked by The Times for lying.

Boris could win and lose the election at the same time

Sir Max Hastings, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, told the Financial Times that Mr Johnson was a ‘brilliant journalist’ who was one of his “favourite colleagues.” Asked by TalkRadio to give an opinion, he added: “He’s always been a fantasist. He’s never had much grip on reality,” concluding that “He’s less fit to be Prime Minister than my labrador”.

Despite Johnson’s ex-boss’ point of view, one person appreciates his personality: Donald Trump. There is an affinity between the two; they were both born in New York, President Trump in an upper-class environment, Boris Johnson in a middle-class family, they are both divisive figures: strongly admired and harshly hated, and they are populist leaders sharing a tough relationship with mass media due to the accusations of being buffoons and, above all, liars.

The Washington Post, every three months, counts and publishes how many lies Mr Trump has told since he has been in office. In the first half of October, after 993 days in the presidency, The Fact Checker stated he made more than 13,400 ‘false or misleading claims’. Despite this statement, the latest Economist and YouGov poll, conducted right before Thanksgiving, showed that a majority of Republicans, 53%, think Donald Trump is a better president than the first Republican elected to that position, Abraham Lincoln.

Commenting on the results, the CNN website reads: “The poll demonstrates one of the historical givens of American politics: facts, evidence, expert opinion, rational analysis, and historical consensus fail to matter when it comes to political preference. Perhaps they also demonstrate a given of human nature: feelings, self-image, self-interest, life-long influences, birth and parentage, group affiliation and economic and social status are all-powerful forces that often determine what we think and how we vote.”

Boris Johnson is also struggling with trust and honesty issues in his country. Peter Oborne, a British well-known journalist, is part of the team that launched the website “boris-johnson-lies.com” which gathers “The lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations of BJ and his government.”

However, Boris Johnson has other anxieties to deal with.

“What we don’t do traditionally as loving allies and friends, is get involved in each other’s election campaigns,” Mr Johnson said during a radio interview that he did not wish to receive any endorsement from Donald Trump (coming to London for the NATO summit). Johnson and his party fear that whatever comments made could damage their political campaign with one week to go until the end. 

But Johnson has also something else to concentrate on. His last nightmare is that of winning the general election but losing his Uxbridge constituency. The Sunday Times showed how tactical voting campaigns could damage the PM and six senior Tories. “The calculations were made by putting private poll findings and 270,000 voter interviews conducted by YouGov through a Datapraxis computer model, which analyses the specific demographics of each seat,” the newspaper explained.

Johnson has a 16-point poll lead against Labour in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Nonetheless, the analysis showed that if 13% of voters now intending to vote  Liberal Democrats or Green defect to Labour and turn-out is high, then Johnson could lose his seat even if he could win the election.

L'articolo Boris Johnson Could Win and Lose the Election at the Same Time proviene da InsideOver.

With only a few weeks to go until the UK general election, the opinion polls are suggesting that the Conservatives are definitively heading for a majority. Data must be read with some scepticism, but there is a strong chance that the Tories, led by Boris Johnson, will win the elections with a big majority unless numbers change in the next two weeks.

The latest Opinium poll published by The Guardian shows that Tories have taken a commanding 19-point lead over Labour, meaning that their share of the vote now stands at 47%, with Labour on 28% and the Lib Dems falling back to 12%.

The Brexit party is also struggling, with only 3% after winning the European elections, last May, with 32%.

As Brexit still dominates the political campaign, the Tories’ success could be explained by the capacity of attracting support from Leave voters: three-quarters of them say they would vote Conservative even if they never have before.

This best-case scenario can be likened to one the Conservative party was facing two years ago. Theresa May was heading 20 points ahead of Jeremy Corbyn when, suddenly, the situation collapsed a few weeks before the election day.

Same premises, same adversary, but a different Tory leader.

Boris Johnson is traumatized by 2017 and as a consequence, he is now trying to avoid the breakdown endured by his predecessor Theresa May, gambling that the growing fear of a Jeremy Corbyn-led government will push more people to vote for him. People are supposed to believe that ‘a hard Brexit and a Boris Johnson government’ would be better than Corbyn’s supposedly outdated-socialist-plans for Great Britain’s future.

The 2017 scenario

“That this is a peculiar election goes without saying,” Steven McCabe, senior Fellow at the Birmingham City University, said.

“It’s the third in four years because of David Cameron’s decision to include a commitment in the 2015 Conservative Party election manifesto to have a referendum on EU membership”. In McCabe’s view, Cameron’s mistake was assuming that the referendum would be easy to win on the official government line of remaining within the EU.

The former PM was wrong. He was defeated and resigned.

Theresa May, the second woman to serve as the Prime Minister of the UK after Margaret Thatcher, entered Downing Street under the pledge to deliver Brexit.

To do that, she needed a stable majority but the ERG was not helping. So, ‘trusting the veracity of the opinion polls’, May believed that she could increase her majority – Mr McCabe explains – and side-line Eurosceptics by ‘rolling the dice’ and calling for a general election.

She lost both her gambles.

After the 2017 election, she lost 13 seats, she didn’t get the majority she had hoped to obtain and was forced to rely on the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party). Last but not least, she was unable to deliver Brexit as promised.

It makes no surprise that Boris Johnson’s campaign is now focusing on distancing himself from his predecessors, vowing he will deliver Brexit right after the elections so that a new wave of energy ‘will be released’ overcoming austerity and ‘allowing the country to get back on with life’ after ‘taking back control’.

“My hunch is that Mr Johnson’s desperate gamble will succeed in its terms, because of the bizarre symmetry between himself and Jeremy Corbyn, the only conceivable Labour leader he may be able to defeat at an early general election,” Mr Max Hastings, former editor at the Daily Telegraph and ex-boss of Boris Johnson, told to Talk Radio.

Learn from May’s manifesto lesson

By the time the UK parliament was dissolved at end of October, the two main parties’ campaign machines were already at work preparing for the December 12 elections.

“We were much more advanced than when Theresa May called her election in 2017,” one adviser said adding that the Conservative had a bounce in membership since Johnson became Prime Minister.

On the other hand, Jeremy Corbyn is struggling on his campaign with antisemitism accusations and low personal poll ratings.

The mainstream parties reflect the very different lessons learnt by each one from the 2017 election. 

Corbyn has always been considered a good campaigner and he believes he will replicate the party’s 2017 election strategy, which saw the Labour party defy predictions and unexpectedly gain 30 seats in parliament. 

But this time he is not challenging Theresa May but Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives’ leader begun with a clear lead in the polls and his team is wary of how harshly wrong May’s political decisions and personal behaviours were two years ago.

The team of Tories’ advisers is planning a radically different campaign in the hope that this time they will secure a success and a parliamentary majority.

The lesson learned from the 2017 fiasco has been successfully applied and the campaign looks disciplined and focussed so far.
Theresa May’s trajectory started downward after the big mistake was made.

A botched manifesto launch, on May 20, and the following arguments over the unpopular social care policy, dubbed the “dementia tax”, added in May’s weak performance in the campaign trail combined to play the major part in the collapse in her poll ratings.

As a consequence, the health secretary Matthew Hancock indicates the Tories are not committing to a firm policy on reforming adult social care in the manifesto, saying they would instead seek to work with other parties to build a cross-party consensus later on.

Johnson’s manifesto, as a result, is considered very unambitious, some MPs also claim it is not enough ‘One-nation Conservatism’ as they believe there are so few promises in it that they would put an end to the austerity.

A general election about Brexit

This election was supposedly called to settle Brexit, people have been repeatedly told that they are going to the polls for the third time in less than four years to resolve this great issue once and for all.

As the Conservatives want this to be an election about Brexit, the focus is about delivering it by the 31st of January and leaving the EU within the next year, which is unlikely to happen, according to experts.

Johnson’s big slogan is a promise to “Get Brexit done” by passing his deal through parliament before Christmas and banking on weariness in the country about a further referendum.

“Assuming Johnson wins the election and puts the Withdrawal Act Bill he temporarily withdrew a couple of weeks ago,” Mr McCabe explained “has stated he’ll put it back to Parliament so the UK leaves the EU by 31^st January. This would leave 11 months to negotiate a free trade agreement with the UK by 31^st December 2020, a timetable considered extremely difficult by experts.”

Speaking in a lecture at Glasgow University, former UK envoy to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, explained that ‘gain such a deal could easily take a decade’.

“Rogers believes that by the end of next year the UK will face its ‘biggest crisis of Brexit to date’ and claimed that to avoid the calamity of no-deal, Mr Johnson might, like his predecessor Theresa May, find himself ‘unwisely’ constrained by campaign promises made during his successful bid to become leader of his party and during this election,” McCabe concluded.

Women’s touch

As a weak point, polling show the Prime Minister’s popularity has slumped among female voters since he took office last July after a series of rows about sexism and allegations concerning his private life.

According to a YouGov poll last month, 47% of female voters found him ‘dislikeable’ – up seven points since the end of August – and five points higher than among men.

Mr Johnson said the Tories must ‘mobilise and support’ the female vote to stay in power.

Pointing out his manifesto was written by two women he said: “If you want any evidence of our commitment to having a wonderful agenda, I can tell you that the Conservative manifesto was drawn up by two particularly brilliant women, Munira Mirza and Rachel Wolf”.

Munira Mirza, 41, is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants; she heads up the Downing Street Policy Unit and has been a close ally of Mr Johnson since his run as Mayor of London, serving as his main policy adviser.

Rachel Wolf, 33, is the daughter of economics pundit Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and a key figure in Mr Johnson’s inner circle. She worked for Mr Johnson in 2006 when he was Shadow Education Minister

And in a dig at Ms May, whose 2017 Election imploded after an extremely hostile reaction by voters to her manifesto, Mr Johnson insisted their work is a ‘short, concise outline with no hostages to fortune’.

May and Johnson: The manager and the dishevelled

Johnson is considered to be a much better campaigner than May was, as it is hard to be worse, campaign chiefs at Tory HQ believe.

Love him or hate him, he is a figure that dominates the scenes, he looks strong and stronger than his predecessor and some voters will appreciate that, even if they are not natural Tories’ voters.

Boris Johnson, as a child, wanted to be “world king”, Theresa May didn’t and that’s for sure.

Remarkably, May did not enjoy being in the limelight yet her party’s campaign was built around her.

She was not comfortable when asked personal questions and she didn’t want the campaign to be about her, or her private life.

Despite his love for Winston Churchill, as an orator, “Johnson mumbles and rumbles, he’s not exactly Churchillian,” professor Eunice Goes, expert on British Politics at Richmond University, said.

That’s the reason why the Conservative staff avoids media interviews and is using him in a sparingly and strategic way.

Theresa May was ‘kind of a manager’ more than a visionary politician,  whereas Boris Johnson is essentially a personality-driven politician, divisive, but a strong leader.

“She was a very serious politician, perhaps not much fun, but she was someone you could rely on,” Ms Goes, added.

She was a ‘details politician’ and somebody who tried to negotiate even if she failed when her unceasing negotiations with the EU came to the parliament’s vote.

“Deliver Brexit is Boris Johnson’ focus but, as for the rest of the agenda, the bright future that he says will be unleashed after Brexit we do not know,” Ms Goes explained adding that we do not know the detail of that vision.

‘Get Brexit done’ is what BoJo claims, repeats and harshly wants, for now.

Johnson is known for being a person who does not pay attention to detail and this default might come back to haunt him if his party wins a majority and he will find himself at N10, once again.

The same default would come down to haunt him and he will have to face it when, if elected, he will start going to Brussels over and over again to negotiate the new agreement with the European Union.

Johnson hasn’t shown he is a visionary politician, yet.

Casting it as a ‘people versus parliament’ election, portraying himself on the side of the electorate, BoJo wants to frame himself as an anti-establishment candidate despite his privileged background and a lifetime spent in politics.

Which is the future of the Conservative party?

“The Conservative party is the oldest party in Britain,” professor Tony Travers,  LSE Department of Government, said. “Their success is the result of an amazing capacity to adapt to survive so long and to change in circumstances,” Mr Travers concluded.

After the Brexit issue exploded in the Country in 2016, becoming the Tories’ kind of obsession, the party started to change and transform itself.

“For half a century, division over Europe has been a poison seeping into the party, which has now reached its vital organs,” Max Hastings, former editor at the Daily Telegraph, told the Financial Times.

“It is sometimes suggested that the Tories are pragmatists, who care much more about the acquisition and maintenance of power than about pursuing any principle,” Sir Hastings added.

The thing is the Conservative party as we used to know it, a lightly right-of-centre alliance, seems not to exist anymore.

“The Tories used to be a very large tent accommodating many different views,” Ms Goes explains. Those views spread from the extreme to the moderated right-wing issues. Now things have changed, the centre-ones are gone standing down at the election or fighting as Independent or joining the Liberal Democrats as a reaction to the party’s descent into extremism.

The remaining conservative MPs and Boris’ cabinet are likely to turn the party into something different, a thing apart from the centre-ground Tories’ party we’ve known so far.

The question is: who is now going to develop and defend the moderate agenda inside the Conservative party?

“Boris Johnson on his own is an empty vessel; today he defends higher spending for the NHS, tomorrow he will defend the privatization of the NHS. He has shown no credibility in terms of the values he defends because the only thing that matters is himself and to defending his career,” professor Goes concluded. 

The Labour party, in its history, has often suffered ideological nervous breakdowns. Now it is the turn of the Conservatives and if their path is going to become a soft version of himself it remains to be seen.

L'articolo Boris Johnson’s Fight Against the 2017 Nightmare proviene da InsideOver.