Forget about Brexit

At last, Boris Johnson is working with men and women who know their stuff. The anti-expert faction in government, headed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, has been quietly put at the back of the room. National interest not factional ideology is now at the top of the agenda.

And so it follows that a total Brexit by the end of June — most likely a no-deal crash-out — will be quietly put in the pending file.

It was always absurd to have 25,000 of the best and brightest in Whitehall working day and night on Brexit when every policy and administrative brain in Whitehall should be focused on steering the nation through the coronavirus crisis. It would be as if Churchill had told the civil service to prioritise keeping India in the Empire over the fight against German fascism.

The UK has left the EU Treaty and is no longer legally a member of the European Union. But, carried away by his handsome majority, Johnson refused to be satisfied with simply leaving the EU. He wanted overnight to create a new Britain, totally apart from, and fully disconnected from Europe. Coronavirus has put a stop to those ambitions.

The rest of Europe is puzzled by the Johnson obsession. I spoke to Michel Barnier three weeks ago over coffee in Brussels. He was elected to the national assembly aged 27, before Johnson went to Eton. He is a Gaullist and had just taken his sons and son-in-law on a pilgrimage to Colombey-les-deux Eglises, the village where General de Gaulle resided.

Barnier has always been clear that the idea of the nation is at the heart of the EU. The coronavirus crisis has reaffirmed this. Far from Brussels dictating to EU capitals what they should do or a federal super-state taking charge, we have seen national capitals closing frontiers, ignoring state aid and EU deficit rules, and deciding what is best for their citizens with little reference to other EU governments, let alone the Brussels institutions.

Suddenly Europe looks a whole lot more like the Europe long desired by Tory Eurosceptics. To invest state resources in a project that could compound the economic shock of coronavirus by limiting access to the European market for British goods and financial and other services now seems all the more damaging.

The negotiating meetings of 200 EU and UK functionaries breathing into each others’ faces cannot go ahead. Under discussion is a 900 page text of complex legal points covering eleven areas of extreme sensitivity — it’s not all about trade — and the two sides are still miles apart.

These negotiations can’t be done by Skype or video conference call. When you do international negotiations, the wordsmiths have to go off in their huddles to find formulae, go back to principals to get sign-off or to shelve difficult points for another time at a higher level. But even so, no one anywhere in Europe has paid the slightest attention to Brexit since the beginning of the month.

Michael Gove says 50,000 new bureaucrats need to be hired to do paperwork for the new customs controls if the UK insists on a hard Brexit. Can this expense be justified right now or even later in the year? Now the word is out via the Daily Telegraph’s Brexit editor, Peter Foster — the most respected of the newspaper correspondents covering Brexit full-time — that No.10 is preparing another U-turn and accepts the need for an extension to keep the Brexit talks going into 2021.

Most businesses in the UK will heave a sigh of relief. The coronavirus crisis rightly has priority. A Brexit crash-out crisis cannot be justified. Labour’s self-isolation under Jeremy Corbyn with no chance of a new leader making any impact until the coronavirus crisis is over, plus the suspension of key big city elections, means that Johnson will face no challenge other than perhaps from Tory anti-European war-horses like David Davis and Bill Cash. He can delay Brexit without any political penalty.