Brexit is going to damage Boris Johnson in 2022 – but not in the way you might expect

It is not the issue of trade that could pose a threat to the prime minister, writes John Rentoul, but something fundamental to the idea of self-determination

Boris Johnson striding into the new year (PA Wire)

Brexit and, to a lesser extent, Covid-19 are two of the things that Boris Johnson might have thought he “got done” 12 months ago, and yet here we are at the beginning of another year likely to be dominated by both.

A year ago yesterday, Bill Cash, the longest standing Eurosceptic Conservative MP, hailed the prime minister’s triumph in negotiating a trade deal with the EU. “Like Alexander the Great, Boris has cut the Gordian knot. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher would have been deeply proud of his achievements, and so are we,” he said in the Commons debate on the EU (Future Relationship) Bill, which became law a year ago tomorrow. “Regaining our right to govern ourselves is a true turning point in our great history. In peacetime, it compares only with the restoration by Monck in 1660.”

A comparison worth discussing in an A-level history paper, but however towering the achievement, it was not the end of Brexit – as Johnson and David Frost, his former Brexit negotiator, spent much of last year trying to renegotiate parts of the original withdrawal agreement.

Nor were the vaccines – a year ago Margaret Keenan had just become the first person in the world to be vaccinated – the end of the coronavirus story.

One of the lessons of the past two years is that you cannot separate political predictions from anything else. So if we are to speculate about what might happen in politics in 2022 we have to be epidemiologists first and students of politics second.

Predicting what will happen to coronavirus is hard, and the easier option is to confuse what we hope will happen with what is likely. So I pay attention to the evidence that the Omicron variant is less dangerous – which seems to be turning out to be true – and listen to scientists who say the virus will end up being a recurring cold-like infection. This may also end up being true, but there seems to be a hazardous zone between now and then when things could take a turn for the worse again. New variants, even faster spreading or even more vaccine-resistant, but probably not more deadly, may cause new waves and therefore new political pressures.

So the 101 Conservative MPs who defied the government whip over the relatively minor restrictions before Christmas will probably be back for more. That will be a problem for Johnson but it is unlikely to be a terminal one. The ideological divide and the habit of rebellion are storing up trouble for the more distant future than the end of this coming year.

Brexit, on the other hand, could pose a more fundamental threat to the prime minister. And not for the reasons that many Remainers expect. Too many of them sound gleeful in pointing out the problems with paperwork at the ports. New customs checks come into effect tomorrow, part of a phasing-in of the normal controls on trade between the EU and a non-member. More controls come into effect on 1 July, and we are not ready for them either.

But Remainers who think this proves them right are missing the point. This is odd, since some of them are sympathetic to Scottish independence, and ought to know that the arguments for separatism are impervious to the knowledge that Scottish residents would be poorer in the short term.

Indeed, the costs of Scottish independence would be far higher than those of Brexit, because the Scottish economy is more integrated with the rest of the UK’s, and because Scotland benefits from the sharing of UK revenues, whereas the UK was a net contributor to the EU.

Support for Brexit is not going to be significantly eroded by the additional costs of trading with the EU – especially not when there are so many other ways in which living standards are coming under pressure this year, from higher labour and energy costs to higher taxes. The motivation for Brexit (as for Scottish independence) was not primarily economic: it was national pride and self-determination. It is no use Remainers pointing to opinion polls suggesting that a majority think leaving the EU was the wrong decision, or that it has been handled badly. The same polls suggest that if the referendum were rerun it would produce the same result as in 2016.

However, I do think that Brexit will damage Johnson this year. It will do so not because of the economic cost, but precisely because it will fail to deliver national pride and self-determination. One of the most important forms of self-determination is the power to decide who has the right to settle in the country. Taking back control of immigration policy was important to most Leave voters – indeed it matters to a lot of Remainers; it is just that for many of them it was outweighed by the economic argument for free movement of people within the EU.

That is why the small boats crossing the Channel matter so much. And it is why Johnson and Priti Patel’s failure to stop them could be the big story of the coming year. What the government, the voters and many potential refugees are beginning to realise is that there is little that can be done under existing law to prevent the arrivals. The main deterrent is the risk of drowning, not the risk of being sent back.

Brexiteers are going to begin demanding an Australian-style policy of detaining arrivals indefinitely while their asylum applications are assessed, which would probably require Britain to repudiate the European Convention on Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention. That would be difficult and controversial, conjuring into existence a different but possibly overlapping rebellion among Tory MPs – one from which Labour will not save the prime minister.

We saw in 2021 how the issue of coronavirus restrictions divided Brexit Tories. The Channel boats issue is about to do that again, only more so, and on a central principle of Brexit. Boris Johnson can survive most things – but not the failure of his single most important policy.