Boris Johnson has ‘got Brexit done’ – and politics will now move on to be about ‘other things’

Everything in politics will look different from the other side of the exit door

The Brexit ship is now moving down the slipway. After three and a half years of wrangling in the House of Commons about leaving the EU, MPs have finally finished voting for the withdrawal legislation.

The bill will go to the House of Lords next week, and, while there may be a token last stand by Remainers in the upper house, it will pass. Peers will not stand against the will of the Commons, and especially not so soon after an election fought on the slogan, “Get Brexit done”. As Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, said, the upper house “is capable of acting with remarkable speed when it considers it is in the interests of democracy”.

So that, finally, is that. If Conservative Eurosceptics get their way and Big Ben is sounded on 31 January, just 22 days away, then on the first bong at 11pm the UK will cease to be an EU member state. Nothing else will change, in practical terms: we will enter a transition period in which we will be treated as a member state until the end of the year. People who come to the UK from other EU countries in the next 11 months will have exactly the same rights as those already here.

The big change will be psychological. Everything in politics will look different from the other side of the exit door. The word “Brexit” will be used less and less. The Brexit department will be abolished. The Liberal Democrats may have an agonised debate about whether to advocate rejoining, but no one else will care.

Already politics is filling up with the sort of thing we used to know before the Brexit debate blotted out everything: tension in the Middle East; underperforming railways; long NHS waits; the royal family.

Yes, there will be news stories about EU negotiations and 27-part Twitter threads from experts about what a “bare bones” free trade agreement might look like. But they will not dominate politics in the way they did.

The trade deal or deals that the UK negotiates with the EU are hugely important, and there is still the potential for high-stakes drama over the possible cliff edge of what would in effect be a no-deal Brexit on 31 December.

Boris Johnson seems blithely optimistic about the challenges of getting a trade deal done in such a short space of time. James Forsyth of The Spectator is already reporting that ministers say the UK will “walk away” from talks if the EU insists on negotiating things in the order it wants to negotiate them.

We will see about that. It is true that Johnson has the power to take the UK out of the transition period without a deal, and impose a tariff barrier between us and the EU, because he has a big majority in parliament. But that majority doesn’t make it a good idea, and it doesn’t give him leverage in negotiations apart from the threat to damage both sides, and the UK more than the EU.

However, public opinion and media organisations will be unable to keep up the levels of crisis-reporting they sustained more or less continuously since 23 June 2016.

There will be short periods of crisis, for example towards the end of June, which is the deadline set in the withdrawal agreement for the UK government to ask for an extension of the transition period. But these crises will not be fought out line by line and vote by vote in parliament.

We are back to an older style of politics, in which disagreements are resolved, mainly behind closed doors, within a government that commands a secure majority in the Commons. The rolling constitutional crisis of 2016-19, testing the limits of convention, is over.