Michael Gove’s push for no-deal Brexit is a bluff – he knows as well as everyone else it’s doomed

Editorial: Not only is there no majority in parliament for the plan, the EU is fully aware of it too

What is the difference between assuming that there will be a Brexit deal, but preparing for no deal; and assuming there will be no deal and making only perfunctory attempts to reach an agreement with the EU?

It’s a question we might well ask Michael Gove, whose job it now is to plan for the no-deal scenario he is so energetically talking up. The first scenario was the one he loyally followed under Theresa May for the past two years, voted for three times and, it was rumoured, felt too hard a Brexit for his tastes anyway. Long forgotten are the whispers that Mr Gove favoured a European Free Trade Association-style ultra-soft Brexit, as a departure lounge, until a comprehensive deal could be settled.

As the minister closest to the farmers, he knew the devastating impact a loss of key markets through tariffs and other barriers would bring. It would mean widespread rural poverty and the renaturing of the countryside, even if the Exchequer could support agriculture for a few years. It would be the worst farming slump in a century.

Now, though, Mr Gove has renounced his soft-Brexit beliefs and pledged fealty once again to Mr Johnson, like a medieval baron who once tried to usurp the king but has now been put firmly in his place, and is not perhaps entirely trusted.

Mr Gove may soon discover the practical difference between the policy he pursued under Ms May and his new one: many thousands of jobs lost; great export earners such as cars, pharmaceuticals, the City and aerospace will be decimated; the pound will crash; inflation will rise higher; the “fiscal headroom” will be used up, with no money for the brave new projects and tax cuts favoured by the prime minister. Soft Brexit would be a blow; hard Brexit would be an economic disaster, and a political one, too. As the SNP points out, Mr Johnson will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Of course Mr Gove’s big talk could be a bluff. By writing off attempts to reach a deal, taking the European Commission at its word that the withdrawal agreement is non-negotiable, he wants to be seen to be hanging tough, pretending that the UK needs Europe less than the EU needs the UK. It isn’t true, but as a negotiating tactic it might work, at least in theory. That surely is what the gamble in Whitehall must be – a game of chicken. In particular, there is the assumption that a hard Brexit means a hard border in Ireland anyway, and it is the EU that will have to impose it if Britain simply refuses to put checks in place to deal with tariffs. So the EU should come running to London, begging for a rethink.

Yet the EU has seen and heard it all before, and it knows that the British economy, and day-to-day life, would be wrecked under a no-deal Brexit. It is therefore an empty threat. All the machinery of the British state cannot prevent that. Mr Gove and his civil servants cannot make the EU agree not to impose tariffs. Nor can they stop the EU asking UK visitors to apply for visas to visit Europe. It can play dirty, too. Within a year, whole industries in Britain would be closing down; the Treasury would be unable to support public services and would find borrowing more costly; and, most important of all to the new Johnson administration, the Tories would be blamed by the public for the no-deal chaos. Sometime before 2022 they’d have to face the electors, and the Conservatives would be destroyed in a historic collapse, even if they saw off the Brexit Party. They’d deserve the punishment.

And the EU27 knows something else that is no secret: there is no majority in parliament for no deal. Philip Hammond and Sir Keir Starmer, among others, will find the opportunity to outlaw this deranged plan. The quiet voice of calm isn’t being heard much right now with Mr Johnson making so much noise. Yet the parliamentary arithmetic remains the same. So far from working on the assumption of no deal, ministers will soon enough find themselves back where they were under Ms May – working on the certainty of no deal being ruled out by their own MPs voting with the opposition.