What are the chances of Boris Johnson completing Brexit with an EU trade deal? Not as bad as you’d think

Johnson’s big election win has enabled politics to slot back into its old majority-government ways – and such normality could help, writes Mary Dejevsky

The prime minister has more freedom over Brexit than it might appear (EPA)

The ravages of coronavirus, crashing stock markets and Rishi Sunak’s massive giveaway Budget have between them banished Brexit comprehensively from the headlines. But this media pause does not mean that nothing is going on.

It has, though, left space for some of the players in this national drama to look back over what convulsed the UK for the best part of three years and look forward to where Brexit Britain is heading now.

They have been speaking at a clutch of Brexit-related gatherings over the past week, which – aside from reviving what already seem distant memories – also served to highlight how sharply the mood and the power relations in UK politics have changed in recent months, especially across the pro- and anti-Brexit right.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a sour mood among those who hoped against hope that Brexit would not in the end happen. A couple of hours spent with the German pro-EU Adenauer Foundation and its partner, the UK-based Federal Trust, showed a pervasive despondency – Brexit has, after all, come to pass. Formally, the UK has left the EU.

There were echoes here of the sort of warnings about economic damage (“self-harm”) sent out by the Remain campaign both before the referendum and during the parliamentary stalemate that followed. Securing a trade agreement by the end-of-year deadline, they cautioned, would be much harder than the government seemed to believe. As for Boris Johnson’s unilaterally set crunch point of June, to judge whether progress was feasible at all, well, that was pure grandstanding.

The underlying assumption was of failure and mutual UK-EU mistrust. How far this reflected wishful thinking on the part of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Remainers that Brexit could still, even now, fall apart, and how far it reflected rather an ingrained condescension towards Johnson was hard to tell. It would be fair to say that a very few found the often scornful tone needlessly – and maybe wrongly – negative. A broader conclusion might be that by no means all centrist Remainers are reconciled either to the complexion of the new government or to the new political reality.

A large part of that reality, of course, stems from Johnson’s sweeping election victory and the disarray currently prevailing in the main opposition parties, which are still licking their wounds and choosing new leaders. The Conservatives got their leadership election in early and are now at an advantage. The scale of Johnson’s victory would also seem to have given him an enviable freedom of manoeuvre. But how much freedom does he really have?

More than a few clues came from this year’s annual gathering of the arch-Eurosceptic Bruges Group. Named in honour of the speech where Margaret Thatcher famously said that “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”, the group has been a safe haven for diehard Brexiteers, such as Sir Bill Cash, a group of profoundly Eurosceptic economists, and latterly the Conservative attack-dog, Mark Francois.

At their gathering just over a year ago, Bruges Group supporters were rabid. They feared that their referendum victory was being traduced by a Remainer establishment of MPs, civil servants and others. Every reference to the then prime minister, Theresa May, was greeted by loud boos; she was condemned as a turncoat and a traitor.

While still assertively Brexiteering, this year’s gathering was a more benign affair altogether. The name of Theresa May still drew boos, but the boos for the LibDems were far louder. Two other big changes stood out. The first was the warm enthusiasm for Boris Johnson (not present, but applauded at every mention) and the degree of trust he enjoys. They had never trusted May, who was suspected of closet Remainer tendencies.

The second was the extent to which the battle for Brexit was treated as over, to the point where it is acquiring its own mythology. The so-called “Spartans” – the 28 Tory MPs who voted against Theresa May’s “deal” in all the “meaningful votes” – are revered as the true heroes of the Brexit struggle. Without them, it is agreed, the fight could have been lost – as the margin of May’s defeats narrowed and narrowed. As the political landscape was then, the glorious 28 risked everything – reputation, promotion, their career prospects – to keep the faith. The victory was theirs.

Bruges Group supporters reminded themselves constantly through the day that “We won”, and “the victory was deserved”. But some could still scarcely believe their success: “We didn’t imagine, when we started, that we would really leave the EU.”

Others still fear that an eventual trade agreement will err on the “soft” side – producing the dreaded “Brexit in Name Only”. So a section of the Bruges Group will be watching its progress like hawks – and have set up a “Brexitwatch” website to do so. Sir Bill Cash, still the warrior, also boasted that he had managed to have two clauses inserted into the Brexit Bill to ensure that the talks with the EU would be subject to UK parliamentary scrutiny at every stage.

But how much of a threat, either to Johnson or to an eventual agreement could “hard” Brexiteer qualms really be? Probably not nearly as much as Sir Bill and his allies might like to think. Ever since 31 January, when Brexiteers from all over the country gathered on London’s Parliament Square to celebrate the UK’s departure from the European Union, it seemed that much of the venom had already gone from their cause. That gathering was jubilant, but benign. They had won a great victory; the UK was “out” and that was enough. After counting down the seconds and singing the national anthem, they dispersed, quietly, into the night.

So while some will be taking their magnifying glasses to the small print of any document agreed by Johnson’s negotiators, there are unlikely to be enough of them, with enough passion, to make any serious problems for the prime minister. They see him as their man; he has their trust, and at the back of their mind is the worry that, from now on, any alternative could be worse. My betting is on the prime minister meeting his deadline and “selling” his deal to what remains of his awkward squad.

This week’s Commons vote on an amendment designed to halt cooperation with Huawei offered Johnson something of a dry run. Many arch-Brexiteers are also among the fiercest opponents of the Chinese telecoms giant having a role in the development of the UK’s 5G capability. The Conservative revolt made a big dent in Johnson’s 80-strong majority, but the government still won by a comfortable margin of 24. That could well be as serious as any MPs’ revolt will get.

Another gathering, organised by UK in a Changing Europe, a London-based independent research group, only confirmed how thoroughly the political scene has changed. Less than a year ago, the UK seemed mired in a many-layered constitutional crisis. Traditional party boundaries were dissolving, with both main parties beset by internal divisions. Conservative MPs were at odds with their own government; a majority of MPs were Remainers, while the referendum produced a victory for Leave, pitting representative against popular democracy. The judiciary was at odds with the executive, having ruled unanimously against the prime minister’s decision to prorogue parliament.

With all these clashes essentially unresolved, voters should be clamouring for thorough reform of the whole political system. Johnson’s landslide victory in December, however, stopped all that overnight. For the time being at least, it is almost as though those travails had never been. With a majority government, politics has slotted back into its old ways and will not be causing Johnson serious trouble very soon.

The future of the United Kingdom might be another matter. But, again, for the time being there is calm, and it looks likely that any momentum for change could now come less from dissatisfaction with Brexit directly than from processes bubbling away across the island of Ireland. As for a new independence referendum in Scotland, that looks further away than it seemed in the year after Scots voted convincingly for Remain.

None of these contentious issues has gone away. But Johnson – by virtue of risking, and handsomely winning, an election – has enabled politics to slot back into its old majority-government ways. For those of us who hoped that the constitutional mayhem brought about by Brexit might result in necessary, modernising reforms – a move to proportional voting, for a start – this return to “normality” is disappointing. For everyone else, including our friends across the Channel, it is probably a relief.