Boris's Brexit trap

In the old days, it was said that “An Englishman’s word is his bond.” This maxim is being dropped as British diplomats now try and undo the word of the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson brought about the deal that allowed the UK to leave the EU Treaty in January. This allowed him to cruise to his December election win as the man who “got Brexit done.”

In truth, the agent of that great Tory victory was Michel Barnier. He, like every other EU leader, had got thoroughly fed up with Theresa May’s inability to find any kind of Commons majority for any kind of deal.

No-one in Europe likes Brexit, but all accept the primacy of a democratic choice. France and the Netherlands had stopped the proposed EU constitution in its tracks in 2005 when referendums said No to the proposal. I was often asked by senior French politicians about the chances of a second referendum in Britain. My reply was “about the same as France holding a second referendum on the 2005 decision”.

Michel Barnier is a politician to his finger-tips. He was first elected to the French parliament before Boris Johnson had gone to Eton. He has held several top ministerial posts and been a European commissioner. He breathes politics from every pore.

He tells how Johnson came to see him and said: “I need a deal. So I gave him a deal.” That was the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration of October, which the prime minister brought back to the Commons waving the paper as if it was the biggest diplomatic triumph in British history.

In a sense it was. It allowed him to call the December election after Jo Swinson and Jeremy Corbyn in one of the more suicidal moves in recent political history gave him the election green light.

No-one much bothers with the text of diplomatic agreements. The Prime Minister may know the Latin tag Pacta sunt servanda — “agreements have to be honoured”. A Treaty — the Withdrawal Agreement — is a legal instrument put into British law by a statutory instrument in Parliament. An agreement which engages the honour of Britain is not law but it is normally observed.

Article 184 of Withdrawal Agreement now in UK law states that: “The Union and the United Kingdom shall use their best endeavours… to take the necessary steps to negotiate expeditiously the agreements governing their future relationship referred to in the Political Declaration of 17 October 2019”.

Now it seems that the prime minister and David Frost, the former ambassador to Denmark, who now negotiates with the EU for Britain, no longer want to honour the words contained in the Political Declaration and regard what Britain said as being just words without legal weight.

This is what is at the heart of the present impasse. For the EU27 it is about the UK honouring its engagement. For Mr Johnson the political declaration has no more weight than one of his newspaper articles.

Finding a way out of this will not be easy.