Is there a pause button on the infernal Brexit machine?

The latest opinion poll — taken after, not before,Boris Johnson’s unhappy performances both in the Commons and with his MPs last week — show that it would be huge risk for the Prime Minister to rush headstrong into an election. CON: 31% (-); LAB: 27% (-); LDEM: 20% (+4); BREX: 13% (-3), GRN: 3% (-1).   (Com Res 4 – 6 September)

The opposition parties may be doing him a favour by refusing to vote for a dissolution of Parliament. In most other democracies, it would be seen as wholly improper for a prime minister to call an election to suit his political convenience. The UK, rightly or wrongly, legislated for five-year parliamentary terms in 2011. Presidents Trump and Macron, and other democracies where the parliamentary term is fixed by law, cannot just ignore that law to try and catch a passing opinion poll.

Another opinion poll from end August showed a 50-40 split, with a clear majority now thinking the vote for Brexit was the wrong decision in June 2016. Other than in fundamentalist pro-Brexit circles, reflected in the pages of the offshore-owned press, especially the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, the belief that amputating Britain from Europe will benefit the country and its people has all but evaporated.

This has not been replaced by any enthusiasm for the EU. The country is bored, sullen, annoyed that it is in this pickle and just wishes simultaneously that Brexit would go away and that it should never have happened.

If there was a pause button somewhere on the infernal machine called “Brexit” every finger would be on it. No-one believes a new general election will produce a majority, let alone a solution, and every piece of political intelligence suggests yet another early election would maintain a hung Parliament with no overall majority.

This has been the worst decade for British MPs in centuries. It began with the expenses scandal, where the Commons simply covered up the mass larceny of many MPs, as so many were in the Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet and could not be sanctioned, while coming down hard, quite correctly, on a handful of miscreants to make an example of — me included.

But at the grassroots, voters are well aware of what their MPs did, just as they know of Nigel Farage’s 2009 boast that he made £2 million in expenses as an MEP. At national and European elections people still have to vote for someone. Even if all MPs and MEPs are seen as rascals,voters simply hold their noses and vote for the one who best corresponds to their wishes or needs.

If Europe is on the ballot paper, then since 2009 that has meant, for many, voting Farage. But when he sought to be an MP in seven parliamentary elections, he was rejected by voters every time. Voters opt for his UKIP and Brexit parties in order to register a dislike of immigrants and Brussels, but would never dream of entrusting Farage and his oddball MEPs with national responsibilities.

It is unclear if Dominic Cummings understands this. He has run two easy-to-win populist plebiscites — against setting up a north-east regional government in 2004 and against foreigners living and working in Britain in 2016. He has no experience, though plenty of blogs on running a party political, parliamentary, or election campaign. He may be an electoral genius or he may be the Emperor in the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers and shaping headlines for the gullible press, but not producing real results.

The EU is keeping out of this. Johnson’s attempts to blame the EU for no-deal are not convincing. It is a UK-UK problem, not Europe’s. To be sure there is a murmur from Paris about the need to hurry things along. But the word from Berlin and EU capitals is that no-one is going to push Britain out.

Brexit is an irritation, but the UK continues to pays its full EU dues, obeys all laws, buys what the EU produces, and employs millions of EU citizens. Why turn a problem into a crisis that will reverberate around the world?Johnson no-deal or hard Brexit will oblige the UK to become a colony of Donald Trump’s America.

Instead, once past the Tory Party conference early in October — up to which point he has to please the party faithful — Johnson’s hands are free. Then he has to make a fateful decision. Does he want to be the pure revolutionary, the Robespierre of Brexit, and ignore the iron law that revolutions devour their children? Or does he now proclaim his new belief in “statecraft” and the primacy of the British national interest?

Does Boris Johnson want to risk becoming the shortest-lived PrimeMinister in history? Or find a pause button on the infernal Brexit machine and start focusing on ways of keeping Tory MPs in and Jeremy Corbyn out by rejecting both Mrs May’s deal and no-deal in order to explore other versions of Brexit?