Boris Johnson’s increasingly desperate tactics suggest he has lost the Brexit argument

Editorial: It seems that the prime minister’s latest plan is to launch a campaign to disrupt EU institutions in the hope of getting the UK expelled

The latest cunning plan from the strategic geniuses of Downing Street is for the British government to make life so difficult for the other members of the European Union that they decide to expel the United Kingdom.

“We will turn the pressure on to the EU to show how difficult it will be for them if the UK is still hanging around,” we report a No 10 official as saying. “If they won’t negotiate a deal, it would be ideal if they would kick us out.”

From the arrogant tacticians who briefed journalists that the prime minister might advise the Queen to refuse royal assent to a bill he found inconvenient, and then that, if the bill did become law, he might disobey it, this is further desperate stuff.

How could the prime minister of a democracy allow it to be suggested on his behalf that he might break the law? How could the leader of a proud and respected nation threaten a campaign of disruption in an attempt to get his way?

We could understand it if what the prime minister in public calls “our European friends” decided they had had enough of the troublesome British. But fortunately the ideal of European unity is strong, and there is no sign that other EU leaders want to take a decision about our EU membership that we are not prepared to take for ourselves.

The prime minister has already stretched the British constitution as far as it will go in an attempt to curtail debate in parliament – an unsuccessful one, as it turned out. These are the tactics of someone who has lost the argument; of someone who has to resort to procedural tricks in an attempt to get his way against the majority in our democratically elected House of Commons.

We realise, of course, that Boris Johnson is frustrated to discover that, when a majority of MPs said they opposed a no-deal Brexit, they meant it. He is entitled to claim to be acting on the instruction of the British people in the referendum of 2016, but he knows as well as anyone that this instruction was ambiguous, and that the passage of time has muffled it further rather than clarified it.

We understand, therefore, the prime minister’s desire to go back to the people in a general election in order to seek clarity. But there is no guarantee that a general election would be decisive. The last time a prime minister fought an election to try to win a mandate for her Brexit policy, it resulted in further confusion and delay.

If Mr Johnson wants to clarify the mandate of the people from the 2016 referendum, the best way to do that would be not a general election but a new referendum. That is the right and democratic way out of the prime minister’s entirely self-inflicted difficulty: put a simple choice between defined options to the British people in a Final Say referendum.