Boris Johnson’s Trumpian tactics could still scupper an EU trade deal

The UK is unprepared for a no-deal outcome in EU trade negotiations – yet the prime minister still thinks the other side will yield, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson speaking in parliament (EPA-EFE)

Boris Johnson isn’t very like Donald Trump. As someone said this week, at the very least we know that Johnson reads books. But there is a superficial similarity in the way they conduct negotiations. 

Since Tuesday the president has refused to accept defeat, just as four years ago he refused to accept Hillary Clinton had won more votes than him, even though he had won the election. 

Trump cannot allow himself to say he has lost, or that the other candidate won more votes, because that would make him a loser, and as long as he says he’s a winner that makes it true. It makes some kind of sense at an emotional level and you can’t say it served him badly in his life because he got to be president. 

Just as you can call Johnson a liar, as Rory Stewart just did, in a review in the Times Literary Supplement of Tom Bower’s biography, which looks like the complaint of a different kind of sore loser, because Johnson got to be prime minister and Stewart did not. 

Not only did Johnson get to be prime minister, but he forced a paralysed parliament to give him an election, and he won it. He was in office, but the House of Commons was in power, and he made it give that power away. 

He did it by behaving a bit like Trump. He destabilised his opponents by making them think that he was prepared to break the law or junk the constitution. I remember Stewart at one point suggesting that John Bercow, the speaker, would have to summon the Commons to meet in Church House across the road from the Palace of Westminster. 

Indeed, Johnson pushed it so far that the Supreme Court ruled his prorogation of parliament to be unlawful – even though the prorogation achieved nothing because parliament had already passed the Benn Act, which ensured that the UK couldn’t leave the EU without a deal. It was all bluff and bluster, and yet it drove the prime minister’s opponents mad, and pushed them – in particular Jo Swinson, the inexperienced leader of the Liberal Democrats – into making mistakes. 

So here we are, to recap, because nothing has changed, with the EU trade negotiations, the other half of Brexit, still deadlocked by imaginary differences over fish and subsidies. Johnson has tried to destabilise Michel Barnier – and behind him Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron – by threatening to tear up the withdrawal agreement, and by pushing the talks close to the practical limit. 

This involves some rather unconvincing brinkpersonship, as drily pointed out by the National Audit Office in its report this morning. It says, in effect, that the UK is not ready to operate border checks if there is no trade deal. A normal reading of the report would suggest that the UK government has little bargaining power, because the other side – who can also read English – know that we are not ready for a no-deal outcome. 

And yet it has worked for Johnson before. The talks have been making solid progress, I am told, and there is no reason why a deal cannot be done if Johnson is prepared to make concessions that would be quite easy to sell at home as victories. Yet both sides are still fending each other off from the final embrace that signifies a deal about to be done. 

The British side is building lorry parks in Kent, while Barnier is advising Merkel and Macron to refuse face-to-face meetings with Johnson on the grounds that the gap between the two sides is too wide.  

I still think a deal will be done. But there will come a time for Boris Johnson when Trumpian methods won’t work. As Donald Lame-Duck has just discovered.