Border winds through the USA

Another twist to the Irish border saga. As Johnson insists that there can be no backstop, while Varadkar insists the backstop must stay, purely to preserve Good Friday, of course,  the US Congress has fired a warning sho, says hte Grut:

Hostile Congress could hold up trade deal if Brexit jeopardises N Ireland peace agreement

Silence of the lambs

The Graun is well into Project Fear mk. 146 these days,having got over the hurt of Tory members rejecting their advice not to elect Johnson. The lead story on the website is this:

Stop playing Russian roulette with sheep industry, Johnson told 

Johnson himself had said:
 

he would “always back Britain’s great farmers” and promised to “make sure that Brexit works for them”...“That means scrapping the common agricultural policy and signing new trade deals – our amazing food and farming sector will be ready and waiting to continue selling ever more not just here but around the world,” he said. “Once we leave the EU on 31 October, we will have a historic opportunity to introduce new schemes to support farming – and we will make sure that farmers get a better deal.”

And:

Alun Cairns, the Welsh secretary, agreed that farming was a winner from having access to EU markets but said there was potential for exports to new markets...Asked for his response to threats of civil unrest, he claimed UK farmers could export their meat to Japan rather than Europe.

A bit like recommending cake instead of bread, perhaps. Others predict bloodshed, of course:

40% tariffs on meat exported to the EU could lead to the mass slaughter of sheep.[As opposed to letting them gambol freely for the rest of their lives as with the EU]...Helen Roberts from the National Sheep Association in Wales said it...could lead to civil unrest among sheep farmers...."... I suspect there will be protests."

Sheep farmers seem to have seen an opportunity here:

Roberts said she did not want to see a mass slaughter for welfare reasons so the government needed to get cold storage in place and talk about public procurement of lamb meat...Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers Union, said there would be no market for 40% of the UK’s lamb meat in the event of a no-deal Brexit....the government would need to look at forcing hospitals, schools and other public bodies to buy lamb meat.

Very sensible -- poke lamb down the throats of the sick and those at school and arrest all vegetarians as unpatriotic. The real problem seems to be not the increase in price due to tariffs,however, but a possible punitive EC policy:

In a no-deal scenario, the 37,000 carcasses a week that are usually sent to Europe would be stopped overnight under strict EU import rules that require de facto licensing for all farm exports.

Should do wonders for the price and will be very popular among European consumers.

Meanwhile. on Newsnight ( 31/07/19) a rather nice young woman read from a Welsh Farmer's handout to tell views that 90% of Welsh lamb goes to the EU (it is actually 90% of exports -- either 60% or 70% of total output is sold in the UK). She went on to dismiss any Government plans to buy up surpluses -- there just wasn't the storage capacity she told us (she totalled the lamb and beef annual output to make this claim).Then she slowly worked to a predictable joke -- we would have a meat mountain just like all those food mountains we once rebuked  the EC for! Probably an Oxford Arts graduate, or related to someone already at the BBC, but her heart was clearly in the right place.

Owl of Minerva sighted over Brussels

The Gru has an unusual piece from a (rather right-wing) analyst rather than banging on and on yet again. A McElvoy , 'senior editor of the Economist', leads with the alarming news that:

Fearing that a bounce in the polls will give Boris Johnson a mandate for a hard Brexit, Europe is starting to soften its stance

[The EU had] banked on Parliament rejecting no deal...Things do look more nuanced and interesting...my guess is that this summer the major member states will be more engaged in the key decisions on how to handle the threat of no deal. Until now, they have been happy to leave the pain to Brussels placemen. The timeline and the “Boris factor” are changing the calculation on the continent.

Declared unity in Europe is always questionable – there are too many faultlines, interpretations, passions and aversions for the harmony to be absolute or unchanging. The “Rhine divide” is a term popularised by the Princeton economist Markus Brunnermeier to explain the tensions between France and Germany in the Greek and wider eurozone crisis....Macron has to date thundered against any extension to the existing deal and suggested that the EU would do better to be shot of difficult Brits than put up with further months of dithering....The Merkel position, by contrast, reflects her preference for a calm approach when the going gets tough. So even on the backstop she calls for “fresh, creative thinking”

Putting aside whether we consider no deal to be an inherently bad idea [an unthinkable statement for Gru journalists], it is quite likely to happen....there’s a growing realisation that parliament may not reject this option, and that Brussels will have to face up to the prospect....With that in mind, the tone from Germany’s government has softened in the past few months.

[Overall] a Brexit “iron curtain” – in which a rupture in the trading relationship infects other aspects of cooperation – is invidious to both the UK and wider Europe’s interests. Brexit notwithstanding, we have much in common with the great European liberal democracies. It is always possible to make a bad crisis worse, which means that the Johnson era demands fresh reflection – and not only on the home front.

The online comments on this piece are very interesting too. They are substantial and  overwhelmingly hostile, as we might expect. The more interesting ones well demonstrate cultural cringe towards the EC -- it is united by a noble purpose, with sophisticated and personable leaders, it will put solidarity with Ireland above all else (it didn't during the eurozone crisis a rare critic noted), they are strong and united. There were confident cultural generalisations too about the Irish people,for example, which McElvoy would know about if only she had visited and talked to the people,or about the perception of cooperation and unity gained by travelling between France and Germany. Lots of class hate,mostly focused upwards this time, lurked not far beneath the surface.

Observer contradictions -- driven by class hate?

The Observer editorial is an (actually rather tedious) masterpiece

Britain has never been more in need of a leader capable of healing a divided nation. [The Graun/Observer has hardly helped with its own divisive hysteria] Yet though Johnson has promised to be a prime minister for the whole of the United Kingdom, the angry protests that greeted him at Downing Street symbolise how contentious and divisive a figure he is [He will never signal enough virtue for those people]  Though he lacks any mandate, [ignore the Referendum then] beyond winning a contest decided by the unrepresentative sliver of the electorate that makes up the Tory party membership, he has made no conciliatory attempt to unify the country, no effort to interpret the referendum result in the context of the slim majority it produced for Leave. He has left no doubt that he will not be a prime minister for Scotland and Northern Ireland [Scot Nats are hardly enthusiastic either, surely], for those who voted Remain, for the least affluent areas of the country that will be hardest hit if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal [but they frequently voted Leave]. 

[Johnson's first speeches] lacked gravitas [do bring back that nice Mrs May and spreadsheet Phil] and were characterised by the rambling and blustering that have come to be Johnson trademarks [quite unlike Observer journalists].[It can't be all bluster though because]...there is a dangerous strategy that sits behind it: to make demands of the EU he knows there is almost zero chance it can agree to, making a no-deal exit more likely. And to prepare for the parliamentary showdown that this will inevitably precipitate, by presenting himself as the prime minister standing up for the will of the people against an recalcitrant legislature. [And political guile too]...That Johnson has put his new government on a general election footing is obvious, not just in the spending commitments designed to appeal to Tory marginal voters, but in his dramatic cull of Theresa May’s cabinet. Out went the moderates [!] who have been clear they cannot countenance a no-deal scenario [to the extent of plotting with Labour!] . In came a sorry collection of incompetents, unreconstructed Thatcherites and anti-European ideologues.

Name'n'blame these terrible people:

Priti Patel, who was sacked as international development strategy in 2017 for carrying out unofficial meetings with Israeli ministers while on holiday, is home secretary. She has a dismal record on civil liberties, which includes making an incoherent case for the death penalty on the BBC as recently as 2011. Questions already hang over her appointment in light of revelations that she took a lucrative private sector advisory role without clearing it, as former ministers are required to do. The new foreign secretary is Dominic Raab, whose vision for post-Brexit Britain is a race to the bottom on taxes and regulation. Gavin Williamson, sacked just weeks ago as defence secretary for leaking sensitive information, is back as education secretary. Johnson’s cabinet shows he prizes loyalty over competence [May's Government was competent?] .

 Johnson has set Britain on a collision course with Europe in making scrapping the backstop a precondition for any further negotiations. The EU cannot remove the backstop from the withdrawal agreement unless there is another Irish border solution in place. To do so risks forcing a choice between undermining the Good Friday agreement or unravelling the integrity of the single market [we already know which one they have really chosen,and this will expose the hypocrisy about Good Friday] So it looks like Britain is heading for no deal, which every forecast predicts will hit the economy hard.

 A no-deal Brexit also makes the breakup of the UK more likely. [The Observer -- now unionist] It would provide further succour to the Scottish independence movement. It could necessitate the reimposition of home rule in Northern Ireland, which – together with a border – might sufficiently shift public opinion to require a poll on Irish reunification.

And the real beef [sic]:

And in making Britain more reliant on the US for trade, no deal risks putting us at the whims of a volatile, self-avowedly America First president....the UK can expect the tearing down of health and environmental standards to be on the table in any trade talks. The White House is also calculating that closer trade ties will increase its leverage over the UK, drawing us further into its geopolitical and foreign policy orbit, diminishing Britain’s sovereign control over its affairs.

All that sovereignty we had in the EU! All gone! The Observer argues only on behalf of deserving others, of course:

The pain will be inflicted most sharply on the areas that have suffered most as a result of deindustrialisation and on the families who can least afford to bear a further economic shock after a decade of austerity.[But Government spending might help? However]...More money in these areas is to be welcomed, but this is a pre-election bribe for voters, rather than a strategy to rebuild a state brought low by 10 years of austerity.

Any hope of avoiding the calamity of a no-deal Brexit rests on the decisions of Conservative moderates and the Labour leadership..[But even here, the dastardly blusterer has a cunning plan]...Johnson will position the Tories as the no-deal party and treat any general election as a quasi-referendum. It’s a high-risk strategy: he is gambling that any seats he loses to the Liberal Democrats – who have been admirably, and consistently, clear on the issue of Brexit – will be more than compensated for by attracting voters that might otherwise be tempted by the Brexit party. What will ensure his bet pays off is if Labour continues to equivocate.

Our future prosperity is now at the whim of a group of ideologues who don’t represent Britain but are nevertheless running the country.

I love that 'now'.

The strange ideological unity of the Remainers -- vol 26

The Observer today leads with news of yet another coup:

Even before Boris Johnson had been to Buckingham Palace on Wednesday afternoon to accept the Queen’s invitation to form a government, some very senior Conservative colleagues with whom he had once sat in the same cabinet were already plotting with Labour’s high command on how to stop the new prime minister taking the UK out of the European Union without a deal....Philip Hammond met Labour’s Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer...For some time, Starmer had been in talks with other senior Tories, including former ministers Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, on how to prevent the UK crashing out without an agreement on 31 October, [still 'crashingout'even after those months after March and Johnson's acceleration of contingency planning] ...The Observer understands that Starmer, Hammond, Letwin and Grieve will form a core group planning the next moves. But they are expected to work with others including Greg Clark and David Gauke, who both also quit the cabinet before Johnson could fire them, and the Labour benches by the likes of Yvette Cooper.

They are planning several ruses:

The first is to try to build parliamentary majorities behind plans to amend Brexit-related bills that are passing through parliament, introducing clauses into them that would mandate the prime minister to seek an extension beyond 31 October if a Brexit deal had not been agreed before then....A second option being considered is to try again to seize control of the parliamentary timetable and pass a private member’s bill that would also oblige the prime minister to seek an extension, if a deal with the EU had not been reached. Starmer travelled to Brussels last week and spoke to EU officials who suggested that, if requested, another extension would be agreed if for a specific purpose, such as a general election or another referendum....[so they are now also openly plotting with Brussels]...The third option that is being discussed is that of backing a motion of no confidence in the government that would be put down by Labour if a no deal looked on the cards. Hammond and other Tories, including Kenneth Clarke, have already indicated they could support such a vote, though it would be a last resort....If a no-confidence vote were to be passed and to lead to a general election, there are now increasing calls from Remainers in all parties to go much further than just co-operating over parliamentary votes. Plenty of MPs would like to see some form of Remain alliance.

The frankness and the complicity is staggering! These are suicide notes for their Parliamentary careers. I still demand to know why on earth they would sacrifice all those local, party, national partisan values to embrace this over-riding partisan value 'Europe'. Vulgar Marxism seems right -- they never held these local values in the first place and are now reproducing the values of modern global capitalism with increasing explicitness.

Incredibly, N Cohen sees only the opposite sort of ideological straitjacket:

[Johnson's] is Nigel Farage’s government in spirit. His florid face and restless malice haunt its every meeting. Brexit party propagandists know its ministers are Farage’s proteges....It will be Farage’s government in fact one day. Either Johnson will succeed in crashing Britain out of the EU, in which case there will be no reason not to merge the Conservative and Brexit parties. Or he will fail, in which case Farage will announce that Brexit has been betrayed and the Brexit party will replace the Conservative party.

Will Cohen ask why Brexit is still a matter of policy that will engage a voting majority? He already knows -- the majority needs to be re-elected. Prissy abuse remains [sic]:

It is a helping-police-with-their-inquiries government, whose small army of politicians and advisers from the Vote Leave campaign may include among their number persons of interest to a criminal investigation by the Met into alleged breaches of electoral law in the 2016 referendum...It is a nepotism government. It so treats the affairs of state as a family affair that Johnson can make his brother Jo business minister, with no one in our decaying democracy finding the strength in their facial muscles to raise a quizzical eyebrow...[it] is a phoney government, which pretends its priority is advancing Brexit when its first duty is protecting Johnson’s damaged ego...a yes-man government: a team of sycophants rather than of rivals....It’s not merely that Morgan, (Jo) Johnson, Rudd and Hancock have taken jobs in (Boris) Johnson’s government – they sold out their country when they sold their souls by agreeing to make the Faragist pledge to support Britain leaving without a deal if that was what their master demanded.

Cohen's small c conservatism is now clear:

The supposed party of economic competence is going far further and envisaging an option that could break Britain by playing with a crash-out. The supposed party of national security would hammer defence industries with a no-deal Brexit. The supposed party of law and order has produced a government for organised crime by pulling Britain out of EU efforts to control international gangs through border, policing and criminal justice co-operation...a jeering, neurotic government without humility or class...a Faragist rather than a Conservative government. A government of nepotists, chancers, fools, flunkeys, flatterers, hypocrites, braggarts and whiners

Dear me!

If only we had had Moore of this earlier...

An interesting meditation by S Moore of the Grsaun today, with the Owl of Minerva definitely detectable on the horizon:

It is common now to gather online with those who think as you do. Social media is said to be responsible for this extreme polarisation of views. Here, you can hang out with those who will reinforce your worldview by adding their own frisson of outrage, even if that view is that the world is flat. Don’t @ me, by the way, because I will block you. That is my prerogative. This mode of being has moved from online to the real world: many people behave as though they can block their fellow citizens.

Trump says racist things, yet parts of the media are too cowardly to call them racist. Johnson lies, yet his mendacity is compared to clowning. Liberals may despair – to each other – but these are the same liberals who discuss the “white working class” and won’t see the working class as multi-ethnic; they are the same liberals who didn’t see Brexit coming, the same liberals who promised to leave Westminster more but never do. So, forgive me if I don’t pay them much attention, for I know I am part of that bubble... the bubble machine creates a politics of purity...those who blather on about being “woke” do so in ever smaller circles. Echo chambers thrive on constant denunciation of those with impure thoughts...Political purity has lead to an unholy mess. One tiny prick – our soon-to-be prime minister – will burst the biggest bubble of all.

A hint of some social issues too:

[A report has found that] “white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity”. The most politically intolerant area in the US appeared to be Suffolk county in Massachusetts, which includes Boston: urban, educated, with few “cross-cutting relationships”.

Then a bit of backsliding as the Owl wanders off for a bit, and she rescues the piece for Guran readers:

This is the lesson of Brexit, which has brought about a maniacal state of affairs in which anecdotes have replaced data and dishonesty is not merely tolerated but applauded.

Only the old paper quality press can be guranteed to offer data and honesty.

Lyrical Johnson abuse

F. O'Toole who is Irish and a Remainer, and therefore must write entirely lyrical prose has a piece central to Gru comment today:

[Johnson] speaks fluent falsehood as his native language. But he deceives no one. Everybody knows.[Lyrically witty or what?]...They don’t believe him – they just wilfully suspend their disbelief. They cannot say they were taken in by a plausible charlatan – they choose to applaud the obviously implausible, to crown the man they know to be the Great Pretender. They go along with the fiction that Johnson is a Prince Hal who will metamorphose into the hero to lead England to a new Agincourt, while knowing damn well that he will always be a Falstaff for whom honour is just “a word”.[Lyrically Shakespearean now -- we are in the presence of a bard] 

Then some clever bits:

Johnson’s fictions have always had a kind of postmodern quality – everybody knows they are fictions... [not exactly a general scepticism toward metanarratives --  that would include O'Toole's own]...there is no more deception than there is at a pantomime. The point is not to make a claim about reality. It is to draw the audience into a knowingly comic complicity with unreality...he could never be found out because his mendacity was never hidden. Just three months before the Brexit referendum, Johnson was publicly and forensically exposed as a liar by his own party colleague Andrew Tyrie, who cross-examined him before the House of Commons Treasury committee and showed his claims about various EU regulations to be grossly distorted [ie rhetorical? political? --just 'lies' for the upholder of Truth]

There are no vestiges of solemn dignity to drape the nakedness of his mendacity and fecklessness...[it would be more acceptable if Johnson had so draped his views?]  The usual arc of a premiership runs from illusion to disillusion, from great expectations to more or less bitter disappointments [really? ]...Johnson cannot disillusion anyone, for no one is under any illusion that he is truthful or trustworthy, honourable or earnest...the product of three decades of performances of the show called Boris Being Boris, an artful rearrangement of the standards of truthfulness and competence to which those who aspired to a public life had to at least pretend.[so pretence is somehow better?]

However, I doubt if anyone would really be able to pin down exactly what those apparently normal and widespread 'standards of truthfulness and competence'  actually were. We have had the Blair/Campbell years after all. For most of us 'Yes Minister' blew the gaffe forever,not to mention the Gru's own knowing debunking 'postmodern' stances. . O'Toole has to exaggerate as usual, to make grey areas black, rhetoric into lies:

Insofar as he has a strategy, Johnson’s plan is all based on the power of a lie, or to use the polite term, a bluff. [very reductionist view of language for an Irish lyrical writer]. The bluff is a no-deal Brexit.

O'Toole might be right to say:

But bluffing only works if you do not already have a reputation as one of the world’s biggest bluffers...Everybody knows that Johnson is the lying captain of a very leaky boat. Nobody in Europe is about to climb aboard.

We shall see. It might all be an even more dastardly double bluff or a plot to make the EC kick us out?

J Freedland reverts to the usual virtue-signalling and hypocrisy:

[Johnson's] lies and insults have led the US president himself to hail him as the British Trump? [cosmo conspiracy theory]. The complexion of his first cabinet suggests victory for [this version of Johnson --the other was the nice liberal Mayor of London whom the Gru quite liked]...Start with his brutal purge of more than a dozen cabinet ministers, most of them former remainers. That was the handiwork of the Brexiteer-in-chief...suggesting Johnson has a mafia don’s view of disloyalty ... In comes Dominic Cummings, the maverick, anarchic mastermind behind Vote Leave – hired despite being found to be in contempt of parliament for refusing to appear before MPs. [Cummings' own blog has an interesting account of that episode -- he wanted all evidence to be given on oath for example,but they refused]. Along with Cummings arrive several other veterans of the red bus campaign, a neat reminder of Johnson’s complicity in the £350m-a-week lie and countless other Vote Leave deceits.[Still hurts]

After that it gets even sillier, suggesting that Johnson's pledge to do Brexit then get on with social reform indicates not a process but a contradiction: 'The great intellectual colossus touted by his supporters had not managed to shape this list into a coherent argument'. And there is the prissy belief after all in sensible Thatcherite housekeeping: 'shaking the magic money tree as if piling up the deficit was no longer taboo.'   

The clincher?

[Johnson wants to be] both the Brexiter rabble-rouser of 2016, brutal in the pursuit of his goals, and the zipwire ringmaster of London 2012, provider of spectacle and amusement. The trouble, however, is that those two things will often collide. To take one example, Johnson said this sentence in his speech: “Let’s promote the welfare of animals that has always been so close to the hearts of the British people and yes, let’s start now on those free trade deals.” But what if one of those free trade deals involves the US, whose animal welfare standards so many British consumers find repellent?  

The same British consumers who endured the UK BSE crisis, the horsemeat in beef pies, the outbreaks of salmonella in chicken and eggs. Why do so many cosmos think they will somehow be forced to eat US produce?

Freedland might be beginning to have doubts though:

Brussels will not easily offer a new deal, and parliament will not easily accept a no deal....[sounds like backtracking already] In which case, what we saw on day one of the Johnson era was the warm-up to an early election, with stubborn, vindictive Europeans cast as the villains and a new, hard-right, 100% Johnsonian cabinet, purged of dissent, lined up as the campaign team. Will it work? No one can yet know. But it’s worth remembering that Mayor Johnson and Vote Leave Johnson have one thing in common: when they faced the voters, they won.

Johnson for PM -- the entire Graun mourns and is in the denial stage

They did their best, but he got the most votes of the Tory Party members and will be installed (or whatever the Queen does) today. The Graun  starts its tirade by reporting as news the comments of European spokespersons and Grun-like journals.

Journals first:  

Arrival of ‘clown who wanted to be king’ at No 10 is greeted with scepticism in Europe 

“The Queen’s jester,”... “He’ll start breaking his promises tomorrow,”...“known for his eccentricity, his elastic positions, his narcissism and his lies”

And so on. The tragedy for people like me is that we probably agrees with all of those --but still want him to do well so he can drive Brexit over the line at last. After that he can disappear. It's a dreadful position to be in but there it is. The left-wing case continues to thrive, in blogs like Briefings for Brexit and the Full Brexit  but the agenda has shrunk horribly to Hunt vs Johnson vs May. 

Johnson has one other redeeming characteristic, noted by Q Letts in the Times -- he doesn't do robotic corporate speak combined with hypocritical liberal moralising, unlike all recent . politicians -- his most unforgivable characteristic for the woke virtue-signaller.

 Then rather encouraging EC hostility with some useful idiocy too, in this 'report':

Boris Johnson’s claims that crashing out of the EU with no deal would be less painful because of a series of “side deals” that the UK has already done with Brussels have been dismissed as “rubbish” by the EU....Pauline Bastidon, the head of global and European policy at the Freight Transport Association, said: “There is a huge difference between a mini-deal or a side deal and a contingency plan. If it were a deal it would imply they have reached an agreement and are equally bound by an agreement. I’m afraid there is no such agreement....While everyone expects the proposal to on planes to be rolled over, there is concern that the others may not, especially if talks with Johnson go badly and elements of the agreement on the Irish border, the divorce bill and EU citizens are dumped.

Finally,a Grun panel (described in the subhead as 'Guardian Columnists'] are left to vent their collective views. They are confined to 'opinion' pieces, but the Grun has long abandoned the distinction with news and focuses much of its attention here:

M Gill, starts with quite a cool assessment:

What of policy? Johnson should ignore any calls to come up with immediate policy programmes that look beyond Brexit: that is missing the point. Under his plans the country risks a disastrous no deal in October – the consequences of which will affect all domestic policy and kill any plans a prime minister had for it. Instead Johnson should prioritise preparing for no deal – we have a lot to do here if we wish to catch up with our European counterparts. 

G Younge, after noticing the continued importance of social class over meritocracy says:

His ascent is, of course, a catastrophe for the country. Whether he’s sucking up to Donald Trump, lying about kippers or insulting allies and enemies alike, he is a liability...There is nothing to celebrate in this moment but the symmetry. The leave campaign had no more plans for leaving the European Union than a dog chasing a car has to drive it. Now its most prominent spokesman is in charge of making it happen. For the past three years they have been able to claim that only if a true believer were in charge everything would be different. With Johnson in charge they are running out of people to blame for the situation they created. 

I Hardman disagrees with her colleague Gill:

Johnson should also have learned from May’s failure to introduce the domestic reforms she claimed to care about the most. You cannot wait for quieter, easier times to work on these changes....Johnson demanded cross-party talks to find a solution to the social care crisis. He not only needs to set these up immediately but also lock all the parties in to the policy they eventually develop so that there is not a repeat of previous collapses in talks. He is also about to appoint a new housing secretary, and must choose someone experienced with an ability to deliver tough reforms. He has been worryingly quiet on his support for the domestic abuse bill

Of course,it will be both -- some sort of Brexit and then bread and circuses to win an election . T Kibasi (director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice., so not really a reporter,but a kind of ideological bedfellow) goes back to Leaver-bashing:

he has lashed himself so tightly to the European Research Group (ERG) fanatics that they will carry him, and all of us, over the cliff edge just to feel the wind in their hair on the way down....So the UK can either negotiate a deal while still inside the bloc or from a weaker position outside of it. No matter what, there will be an eternal return to the question of the Irish border. Even if the UK were to exit without a deal, agreeing to the backstop and paying the financial settlement will be preconditions of any trade talks.

So a failure to understand confrontation, as usual, and reporting what the EC wants as unalterable facts -- same old same old. Then another bedfellow B Laffan (director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and director of the global governance programme, both at the European University Institute, Florence):

Boris Johnson will have no time to savour his victory. During the campaign Johnson sent mixed signals when he pledged to take the UK out of the EU with or without a deal on 31 October – while also saying he wanted a deal.  [usual literalism and inability to detect subjunctives,and EC views are law stuff]...Bonhomie and bluster will count for little.

Meanwhile, the Grun team has another misunderstanding. It notes that I have read more than 6 articles in the last month, assumes this means I agree with them, and uses this to repeat its request for funding! 

Meanwhile,enough of this balance.HJ Parkinson, sounds the true notes of the affronted petit-bourgeoisie:

Boris Johnson: the clown is crowned as the country burns in hell 

['Hell' because the heatwave -- geddit? London is really hot!] 

Someone who could easily be rejected as a Guess Who character for looking too ridiculous is now to lead the country. A man whose DNA profile is the exact same as a Bernard Manning joke...Elected by a staggering 0.2% of the nation, we can’t say it isn’t the will of the people....Johnson’s speech wasn’t so much circuitous as re-routed entirely around the North Circular. In the most excruciating moment, he mentioned that “Deliver, Unite, Defeat” was not the greatest campaign slogan he might have chosen, because it spelled out “DUD”. You just know that he came up with that campaign slogan purely so that he could make this quip, which wasn’t even good. He then added an extra letter, E, for “energise”, saying: “DUDE, we are going to energise this country!”...I have never, ever wanted to DIE more. How about a different brand, Boris? I’m thinking more: “Dithering, Idiot, Clown, Klutz.” :

Then some masterly ( sorry personaly)  comments based on photos  at hte meetig yesterday.Routine stuff --anyone with amotor drive cantakephotos of peoplelookingabsurd in mid-movement, but this is Graun-style interpretations of body-language. Johnson and Hunt  initially missed each others' hands as they tried to shake,read as 'You see, Johnson can’t even negotiate with his own hands to clap properly, let alone with an entire European bloc' ]. Skilledreadingof other photos ensue:

 

he looks like he’s stumbled, wasted, off a party catamaran moored off Magaluf, drinking WKD from a hat with straws...And this, being caught on tiptoes, like a child who adds a fraction to their age when asked. An unbelievably humiliating way to start your tenure, aside from just being Boris Johnson in the first place...Rachel Johnson and Amber Rudd’s unveiling as a couple....And this incredible side-eye from Hunt’s wife, Lucia, as Johnson was named the winner, which speaks for us all...I don’t understand how a man can lie his way about bananas and condoms to high office. I don’t understand how a man whose entire prep for anything seems to consist of drawing a cock and balls – but in Latin! – on a sheet of paper, ends up in high office.

I don’t understand how a man can be recorded offering to facilitate the assault of a journalist and reach high office. I don’t understand how a man can be fired twice for cavalierly making stuff up and reach high office. I don’t understand how a man whose entire personality is a job-lot sold off from a closing down joke shop can reach high office. A racist, an inveterate liar, a man who makes Machiavelli look misunderstood and Pinocchio button-nosed.

Personally, I hope he does make Machiavelli look misunderstood.

Incidentally, 'Hannah Jane Parkinson is a Guardian columnist who writes on pop culture, music, tech, football, politics and mental health'.

 

Her photo shows an ageing middle class poseuese, anxiously signalling her interests, desperate to be liked. [I write in the subjunctive piss-taking, of course]. These seem to be combined in a typical flakey way as in this quote from a Staggers piece: 'Brexit, Trump, Windrush, fascist leaders and lying politicians, the news is so bleak I, like many of us, am struggling'. Another piece has : 'I am bleeding from the wrists in a toilet cubicle of the building I have therapy in, with my junior doctor psychiatrist peering over the top of the door, her lanyards clanking against the lock. Her shift finished half an hour earlier.' She was turned down at Oxford entrance (weren't we all) but continued to go to FE in Oxford, no doubt hoping to be able to bluff later. She was sucessful in getting a job with the Graun. She is an LGBT activist.  End of subjunctive -- I won't go on -- it's too easy to shoot Guardian fish in a barrel.

EC runs through playbook while Graubn journos indulge themselves

Y Varoufakis, in his book about the workings of the EC during his struggle to stave off Greek austerity, mentions some classic EC tactics in negotiation,including claiming the other side have no realistic proposals, and saying they mean one thing in public and another in private, while doing exactly that themselves.

Guess what. Both of those are to the fore in a Gran piece on EC likely reactions to a Johnson premiership:

we really need to know [what he wants] [said 'a senior EU source] . The only thing we have seen are his public statements.” EU negotiators have had no contact with the teams of Boris Johnson – the widely presumed winner – or his rival, Jeremy Hunt.... three EU sources said [demand to remove the backstop] was a rehash of debates from the negotiation period, rather than fresh ideas. “It’s all quite ancient” and “not something that we are considering at all”, an official said....Another favourite Tory idea, a time limit on the backstop, also appears to be based on bar-room conversations that took place more than a year ago rather than new proposals. 

Officials believe they could work on similar guarantees [not to use the backstop unless it was necessary] , but are not convinced this will help Johnson win a majority. “People say that he is better at selling things than Madame May,” said the senior source. “It’s not a huge hope.” ... the EU is trying to figure out whether Johnson is serious about his “do or die” rhetoric, or will attempt the political backflip of selling a rebranded version of May’s deal. “The next British prime minister has to choose whether they want to ruin their career on Brexit or move on,” an EU diplomat said....Some are still trying to figure our his true views on the EU.[well fair enough -- we all are]

The assumption is that the withdrawal agreement is inevitable, the only reasonable proposal, that objections to it are in vain, and that the problem is to 'sell it'. UK spokespersons describe our institutions in the same way, to make abolition or reform  unthinkable. 

S Jenkins makes a similar point, likening Johnson's demands to remove the backstop to Trump's attempts to build a wall with Mexico:

There is no majority anywhere, except in Johnson’s scrambled brain [usual abuse] , for a no-deal Brexit. As Whitehall officials – if not men in white coats – gather round him in the coming weeks, they will tell him a brutal truth, political as much as administrative. He needs a deal badly, and the only route to that deal is through Dublin.

 A bureaucratic mountain of technology may withdraw the border some miles back, but somewhere there must be tariffs, payments, forms, regulation and inspection. A 40% tariff on a shipment of lamb is a barrier, wherever it gets levied. A chlorinated chicken inspection is a wall, wherever it is done.... [Project Fear examples] ...No deal will mean anarchy, or state-sponsored banditry [well --which? Will the anarchists take on the state bandits?]  Johnson continues to claim he can avoid a “hard Irish border”. But he still wants a hard border with the EU [does he?] , so where is it to be? It can only be down the Irish Sea. Bang goes whatever is left of Johnson’s commons majority.

Trade is not about control but about power. The UK has little power against its bigger neighbour. If it wanted power it should have stayed in the EU [!], or at the very least in Thatcher’s single market [was that on offer?]. Johnson sacrificed such power to outflank his rivals for the leadership. He must now pay the price for that chicanery. An awful awakening beckons. If Johnson cannot get a Northern Ireland deal he faces parliamentary armageddon. 

Well, a few things there. The Irish also seem desperate for a deal and have approached Johnson, according to the Times,together with several other European leaders.The game of bluff and confrontation (which the Grau and its writers have never understood) might not be exhausted, with the Times today reporting the offer of a multibillion Euro rescue package for the Irish economy should it all get nasty -- that should be popular with the Italians who have been told not to develop Sate spending on their economy. Politically, the forces that used to fight over the border are exhausted now anyway? Would a 'bureaucratic mountain' attract the same passion? Finally, if we were offered a Thatcher-type common market,that would be quite popular with the UK -- but not the EU? In many ways, a new Johnson-type FTA would be rather like an old common market?

I forgot the bit about journo indulgence. The headline reveals all in a piece by M d'Ancona.It's one of those 'in a very real sense, we are all to blame' liberal pieces that accepts criticism while claiming some superior moral virtue all at the same time. D'Ancona wants to explain away his earlier supportive pieces on Johnson

Boris Johnson, the prime minister? I’m sorry to say that I’m partly to blame 

I’d love to exempt myself from this audit of blame, but I can’t – at least not entirely. Though I was never a member of Team Boris in the press corps – those who believed, once he became an MP, that he should rise to the very top – the two of us maintained a civil acquaintance as fellow members of the media-industrial complex for two decades....When I succeeded him at the Spectator in 2006, he was impeccably helpful and supportive. I commissioned articles from him and ran them on the cover. Did this skew my judgment of him as a political creature? That’s for others to judge. Certainly, he can’t stand what I’m writing about him these days. But I can’t rule out the possibility that, in the past, I pulled my punches from time to time.

There is a useful insight. D'Ancona refers to 

the colonisation of politics by the entertainment industry.... by show business and its tropes....While the rest of Westminster operated within the structures of 20th-century political discourse, Johnson worked on his material like a standup...All of which converged neatly with the plummeting trust in institutions that has marked the first quarter of this century

Odd that a Graun journalist had never noticed the same trends with his own colleagues, right under his nose, though

Your coups tonight

The Sunday Times carries a story suggesting the threat of no deal might be working:
  

Five nations in contact with Johnson’s team as Irish deputy PM says: ‘Let’s avert catastrophe’ 

The same article also carries news of a plethora of Remainer coups being planned:

Up to six Tory MPs are in talks with the Liberal Democrats about defecting and leaving Johnson with no majority... Senior Tories are also discussing creating a government of national unity under Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer or Philip Hammond, the outgoing chancellor...

They are likely to be fuelled by this:

Whitehall sources say the presumptive prime minister was left “visibly shaken” after being briefed by civil servants to expect civil unrest if he goes through with his threat...A senior government source revealed that importing fresh food through Dover would be only the third highest priority in the event of no-deal, with clean water only fifth. [maybe because there are no predicted shortages?] Top of the list are life-saving drugs, followed by medical devices and fresh food. Nuclear power plant parts are then given priority over the import of chemicals to purify drinking water [sounds very sensible] ...Contingency planning provides for 8,500 troops to be deployed to deal with transport blockages and possible [downgraded here]  civil unrest and the Ministry of Defence is training staff to deploy to ports to deal with traffic jams.

This is scary stuff! Much worse than the usual liberal bleats? And it hasn't even got on to cheap local strawberries!
 
The Observer/Guardian prefers just the old bovine favourite and older scare stories:

Cross-party move to foil ‘disastrous exit’ comes as economic forecasts pile pressure on next PM 

At the moment this seems to be a move to enlist Tory rebels into some Labour-led effort but there is a clue in that the key mover appears to be Sir K Starmer. He is suggested as the new PM of a GNU by the Sunday Times. Funny how he and D Grieve, both former Attorneys General, seem so keen on Parliamentary coups

“On Tuesday morning some ministers will sit around the cabinet table for the last time,” Starmer says. “They know very well the dangers of no deal. They will have been briefed about what it would mean for jobs, the economy, our public services and the union. They will have seen the advice and read the evidence....Last week the government’s independent forecasting body, the Office for Budget Responsibility, said a no-deal Brexit would plunge Britain into a recession that would shrink the economy by 2%, push unemployment above 5%, and send house prices tumbling by around 10%. It said the result would be a year-long downturn that would increase borrowing by £30bn a year.

The dangers, always the dangers. I haven't read the OBR's material, but it is interesting to see the implications for borrowing seem to the fore as a cost. These are dangers if we accept the neo-lib 'balancing the books' stuff of the Tories for the last 15 years, itself a response to having to bail out the banks with Government loans that had to look firmly based on proper housekeeping. EC policy too, of course. Why liberals should worry about increasing public borrowing is less clear. Both Johnson and Hunt have said they would increase it -- in their cases to engineer a pre-election mini-boom, of course

There is a unwitting suggestion already about how that £30bn could be 'saved':

Johnson will also come under intense pressure over whether or not to press ahead with the proposed HS2 rail project after it was reported that the costs could surpass the current budget of £56bn by almost £30bn....Johnson has said during Tory leadership hustings that he wants a review of the costs of the project.

For some reason, Labour supports HS2 -- so does the Observer, it seems.

Starmer is given more space to spell out his views elsewhere in the Observer, with confident (or cynical) appeals to the 'national interest' (GNU dog whistling?):

There is no such thing as a “managed” no deal. There will be chaos and legal uncertainty. It won’t be Johnson paying the price of a no deal; it will be working people, their families, and communities across the county. Manufacturing and farming will be hard hit, crucial medicines will be unavailable [they are freely available now, of course] and EU citizens living in the UK will be left in limbo [so that's his constituency?].

The government’s own economic watchdog has warned that crashing out of the EU would tip the economy into recession...[businesses he has talked to] have warned me about the dangers of rupturing our trading relationship with the EU overnight...The consequences for Northern Ireland are unthinkable, too.

Loud wildebeest calling with this:

Parliament must be put on a war footing to stop a no-deal Brexit...Every tool in our armoury must be deployed: amending legislation, forcing emergency debates and triggering no-confidence votes. The majority in parliament must act – and that will involve coordinated work across all political parties... I will want to work with all those former ministers who, like me, want to ensure that parliament can stop a disastrous and chaotic exit from the EU....The national interest will lie in stopping no deal, not defending a reckless and irresponsible prime minister. The majority in parliament share a common goal: to block a disastrous no-deal scenario. I urge that majority to work together – and together we can take a stand that could change the fate of our country.

Rather redundantly,the Observer editorial weighs in with the same old same old:

It’s hard to think of a senior Conservative MP less qualified to assume the premiership in such times.  

There is a link with the current problems in the Gulf:

The clash with Iran highlights the wider dilemma Britain will face after Brexit. Isolated from our European allies, the danger is that we simply become a lesser satellite of American foreign policy, buffeted by global events and too weak to resist the pressure to do the bidding of Donald Trump.[ a developing theme that we have been tricked by Trump into sabre-rattling]...And Johnson has a dreadful record as foreign secretary. He is best known for jeopardising the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe,

 [There is] a long line of occasions [charted just above -- same old stuff] where Johnson has played fast and loose with the truth....Johnson has form when it comes to wilfully misleading the public. His 2016 claim that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS led to the head of Britain’s statistics watchdog chastising him for “a clear misuse of official statistics” [the only politician ever so criticised? Still hurts then?]... Last month, he erroneously claimed that if Britain crashed out of the EU without a deal, we could avoid paying any tariffs on European imports. Rather than correct himself, he has doubled down – despite the fact that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility last week published its forecast that a no-deal Brexit would shrink the economy by 2% in 2020. [so OBR forecasts are just 'facts']

 The only remaining hope lies with parliament. [suitbaly modified Parliament of course]. We can take heart in the fact that the small number of remaining Tory moderates voted with the opposition last week to take action that would prevent a future prime minister proroguing parliament in the run-up to 31 October. Even if the only route to preventing no deal in the autumn is a no-confidence vote that triggers a general election, they must seize it. Otherwise the process of appeasement of the militant Tory Eurosceptics, which started with David Cameron and continued under Theresa May, will end up not only destroying the Conservative party, but taking the country down with it too.

 How liberals do love a bit of armchair aggression.

Coup on track?

The BBC programme wasn't too bad,although readings will vary, no doubt.Quite shocking to hear from Selmayr that May had never even threatened a no deal. Interesting to see some of the dark artery involved -- Barnier always greeted Davis standing at a lectern looking authoritative,and staged the stunt where they sat down with the EC side provided with sheaves of prop documents while the UK side had none. The UK got its own back by making Davis learn his script while Barnier was given a dossier to cope with live -- with both sitting. Quite informative overall and damning about May and her team (O Robbins frequently shown in the background). There was a tendency for the usual ruling class preference for showing inexplicable incompetence rather than a deliberate attempt to undermine Brexit [surely blown by the KitKat tapes] . N  Robinson tried to restore some Remainer ground by patronisingly smarming at the end that it all showed that Brexit was not as easy as those silly Brexiteers had thought, and predicting it would not be easy for Johnson either.

Quite why the BBC and others are so happy that the EC might turn out to be impossible to leave whatever people want is unclear..

Couldn't find any report of the prog in the Graun today -- might have missed it if they tucked it away somewhere. Instead they talked up the latest coup, a vote in Parliament insisting Parliament meets to report on progress on restoring local rule to N Ireland (which would mean there would be an opportunity to pass an emergency amendment preventing no deal, and making prorogation more difficult).

MPs have given Boris Johnson a brutal preview of the scale of the challenge facing his premiership, as Conservative rebels voted to block any attempt to suspend parliament in order to force through a no-deal Brexit...The new measure was passed by a hefty 41-vote majority,[and voting included]...the resignation of one minister and abstentions from four rebellious cabinet ministers, who will soon be on the backbenches, as well as half a dozen others.

The Graun approved of ' the ingenuity of backbench rebels in thwarting his Brexit plans.' There was also some criticism:

“Their disruptive amendments are cynical and corrosive but they don’t change the underlying legal realities one jot: we are leaving on 31 October with or without a deal.” [said a Brexiteer MP]...No 10 has said it opposed the amendments being tacked on to the Northern Ireland bill because they were an inappropriate use of a technical measure....May’s spokesman said: “In the light of the ongoing talks to restore the executive, our view is that forcing a report and debate every two weeks on the progress of those talks risks being counter-productive to this overarching aim.”

The Times' political sketch put it differently:

Penrose is a minister in the Northern Ireland office..[who]...is normally no firmer than whisked egg-white but he finally found some fight. “Voters’ tolerance is running out,” he cried. “This is a stitch-up. It pretends to care about democracy but in reality it is trying to prevent a democratic decision that has already been taken.”...Mr Benn (Lab, Leeds C) [who actually signed the amendment, although everyone knows it was a D Grieve stunt] claimed to be motivated solely by his Christian desire to protect the people of Northern Ireland from the ordeal of their MPs not sitting for a week or so.