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!
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