dominic-cummings

Boris Johnson Loses to Democracy

The prime minister is effectively at war with the Parliament for which he once promised to “take back control.”

LONDON — Boris Johnson has begun with defeat.

Legislators voted last night to seize control of Parliament, alarmed by the prime minister’s insistence that he will take Britain out of the European Union on Oct. 31, even if no deal with the bloc has been reached. On Wednesday, opposition legislators and rebels from Mr. Johnson’s own party will try to pass a law mandating the prime minister to ask for an extension to the deadline if he still has no deal.

It promises to be a week of high political drama in Westminster — and the culmination of over two years of intricate tactical maneuvers and procedural minutiae that have marked British politics.

Time is so short because Mr. Johnson last Wednesday “prorogued” parliament, mothballing it for five weeks from next week: If the bill fails to become law by that point, it automatically falls. The unusual length of the suspension has already occasioned protests across Britain. Demonstrators called it a “coup,” and the speaker of the House of Commons called it a “constitutional outrage.”

Yet on Tuesday night, with Parliament having again flexed its long dormant democratic muscle, it was Mr. Johnson who looked isolated. Furious, he vowed to seek new elections, and stripped the whip from all his rebels — including prominent party grandees — effectively barring them from running again as Conservative candidates.

The conflict has laid bare deep tensions in Britain’s democracy — between the prime minister and Parliament, and between the people and the politics that claims to represent them.

Britain’s Parliament is anomalous. Having failed to sustain its 17th-century deposition of the monarchy, and having been the imperial power rather than the colonized one, Britain has never had a founding constitutional moment. Instead its democracy has evolved within an accreted mass of archaic institutions, including an unelected upper chamber that was until the late 20th century composed of hereditary aristocrats. This grandeur itself has sometimes been thought to be a powerful conservative influence: The Labour politician Nye Bevan once wrote it “lies like an Alp” on the mind of a new member of Parliament.

Under its ritual pomp, Parliament’s curious evolution has made it unusually powerful. A prime minister with a substantial majority has broad latitude to remake the country, as Margaret Thatcher and to a lesser extent Tony Blair did. But without a solid majority, Parliament has great power to resist even the most ambitious leader.

Legislators’ tactics this week are not entirely new: A similar procedure was used to take control and force Theresa May, Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, to seek an extension in April. But the complexity of the new bill — which intends to prescribe Mr. Johnson’s approach to the European Union in exacting detail — reflects the total breakdown in trust between executive and legislature.

April’s version of the bill passed partly because Mrs. May recognized she had lost; Mr. Johnson will use every means at his disposal to frustrate the new bill, including attempts to filibuster its progress in the unelected upper house. Promising a scorched earth, the prime minister is effectively at war with the Parliament for which he once promised to “take back control.”

Despite the throng of demonstrators outside Parliament — roared slogans and vast European Union flags are a daily backdrop to news broadcasts — the political progress of Brexit has been a markedly institutional affair, conducted through arcane procedural instruments and prominent court battles. The alien language of parliamentary procedure — “prorogation,” “humble addresses,” “paving motions” — is parsed for an unfamiliar public by constitutional experts who have rarely been in such demand.

The interviews with members of the public that dot the news vary from bafflement to outright loathing of politics; enthusiasm is a rare beast. According to Hansard Society research, civic trust is threadbare: Only a third of people trust politicians to act in the public interest, and just under half feel they have no influence at all on decision-making.

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union was always likely to be a vastly complex technical matter, and the bloc’s tendency to conduct politics through intricate sequencing lends itself to squabbles over procedural minutiae. But the cause of the proliferating conflict in British politics has always been domestic: Despite losing her majority in 2017, Mrs. May’s conduct of Brexit was distinguished by her autocratic instincts and determination to avoid parliamentary consultation.

The same highhanded conduct saw her first dragged to the Supreme Court to assert Parliament’s right of a “meaningful vote,” and then locked in a battle with Parliament over the disclosure of the attorney general’s legal advice. That battle saw her censured for “contempt of Parliament.” The phrase epitomizes her successor’s entire attitude.

One consequence of the prominence of procedural conflicts since the Brexit referendum has been to transfer the political questions which drove it into arguments about legal permissibility. Questions about

the kind of state the Britain wishes to be,

relations among its constituent nations, its

draconian attitudes to migrants, its

vexed history in Ireland,

how it makes domestic political choices and

how far it wishes economic integration with other European states —

all are folded into, and sometimes disappear in, conflicts over parliamentary rights and legal obligations.

It is then no wonder that apparently arid matters suddenly take on intense but displaced political energy — the kind that saw High Court judges branded “enemies of the people” on the front pages of the tabloid press and that turned usually pacific sections of society into ardent protesters.

The institutional confinement of the Brexit process has been seized on by Dominic Cummings, the former director of Vote Leave, now Mr. Johnson’s chief adviser and architect of his hard-line strategy. Mr. Cummings recognizes a fault line in Britain’s democratic structure: between an exercise conducted by plebiscite — the Brexit referendum — and the conventional, deliberative methods used to interpret and deliver the consequences of that vote.

By painting the referendum as the sole truly democratic exercise, with all subsequent debates and concerns over rights a matter of cynical pettifogging and anti-Brexit trickery, he believes he can deliver a reconfigured political landscape, straddled by Mr. Johnson as a flaxen-haired avatar of the popular will.

Perhaps Mr. Cummings has in mind that half the people surveyed by Hansard claimed they longed for a strong leader to “break the rules” of politics. Yet the strongman has feet of clay. If suspending Parliament was intended to demonstrate Mr. Johnson’s credentials as a champion of the people, it managed to unite only 27 percent of them. Further overreach as the prime minister attempts to break Parliament to his will is unlikely to improve that number.

Nobody doubts new elections are on the horizon, the central issues of which will be shaped in the next weeks. It will be an election that Mr. Johnson intends to fight on a narrow Brexit question. To beat him, the Labour Party, which has been as troubled by division between the two Brexit camps as the country as a whole, will not only need a clear message on Brexit but also some means of bridging its divide. Democracy could be a powerful theme: not just its defense in Parliament but its extension beyond Parliament’s feudal residues and monarchical hangovers, into Britain’s regions and its antiquated electoral system.

It is widely known that Mr. Johnson wants a “people versus politicians” election. Perhaps it is time for the opposition to push for “the country versus Boris Johnson.”

Britain’s Conservatives Are on the Brink of Civil War

LONDON — They have been dubbed the Conservative rebels, a group of renegade lawmakers willing to risk their careers to defy their newly chosen leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and hobble his leadership over their clashing views on Brexit.

But behind all the talk of revolutionary ardor and mutinous tactics is an unlikely group of insurrectionists — a band of starchy grandees of Tory politics that includes Winston Churchill’s grandson and a 45-year party veteran and ex-chancellor so colorless that he earned the nickname “Spreadsheet Phil.” Running the government only weeks ago, they now flout it from the sidelines.

They believe that Mr. Johnson, in his zeal for pulling Britain out of the European Union without a deal, is risking severe damage to the British economy. But they also believe that he is tearing the Conservatives apart, setting fire to their vision of a big-tent party with priorities beyond Brexit.

In setting aside their usual caution and threatening to rip the heart out of Mr. Johnson’s Brexit plans on Tuesday night, they are offering perhaps the clearest indication yet that the party, squabbling for decades over Europe, is on the brink of a civil war.

The lawmakers would be disobeying the strongest possible warning from their party to help opposition Labour lawmakers wrench control of the legislative business in Parliament from Mr. Johnson. That would clear the path for a law on Wednesday to stop Britain from leaving the European Union without a deal governing future relations.

Mr. Johnson sees such a law as so damaging to his negotiating strategy on getting Britain out of the bloc that his team has promised to call a snap general election if it passes.

As for the rebels, Mr. Johnson’s team has threatened to kick them out of the party and bar them from running in the next election if they vote against the government.

The conflict could, in an instant, hollow out the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Former insiders would be banished and pro-Brexit lawmakers — once on the fringes, and now at the heart of Mr. Johnson’s government — would tighten their grip on the party.

What remains, moderates fear, will be a narrow, more homogeneous party that sacrifices its long-term electoral prospects in pursuit of a hard split from Europe. A third of Conservative voters said in recent YouGov polling that leaving the European Union without a deal would be unacceptable.

“It’s not clear there’s a route back toward a more center-right party from here,” said Alan Wager, a research associate at The U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research institute.

Mr. Johnson is gambling that the party will instead win over new pro-Brexit voters from the Labour heartlands in the north of England. But his government is already holding on by a thread.

On Tuesday the party lost one Conservative lawmaker, Phillip Lee, who crossed the House of Commons to the benches opposite Mr. Johnson to join the Liberal Democrats, a centrist, anti-Brexit party.

The maneuvering on Tuesday reversed the two flanks of the Tory Party.

Mr. Johnson’s government is stocked with Brexiteers, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons. This group was playing the part of rebel when Theresa May was prime minister. They voted incessantly against Mrs. May’s proposed deal for Brexit and savaged her plans in public.

That changed in an instant when Mr. Johnson took power. Senior ministers in Mrs. May’s more moderate government, like Philip Hammond, the chancellor known as “Spreadsheet Phil,” took up the part of spoiler to Mr. Johnson.

CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Mr. Hammond was joined by Rory Stewart, a former international development secretary, and David Gauke, a former justice secretary, who were some of Mrs. May’s most loyal supporters.

“It’s quite extraordinary that we’ve had such a turnaround from the start of the year, when the rebels were the extreme Brexiteers,” said Nigel Fletcher, a teaching fellow in politics at King’s College London and a local councilor for the Conservatives.

“Those who are now the rebels are really the most establishment of figures,” Mr. Fletcher said. “People like Philip Hammond wouldn’t be considered a maverick at any other time. I think that’s something that has given people pause for thought, because these are not people who’ve made a career out of being provocative for its own sake.”

The rebel lawmakers seemed furious on Tuesday. In another era, they would have been the past and future of the Conservatives, with lawmakers like Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s 71-year-old grandson, standing alongside Mr. Stewart, a rising star among younger voters who walks the country filming his conversations with people.

But they said the party was now being set adrift by “entryists,” right-wing newcomers who have rushed into the Conservative fold to push it in a more extreme direction on Brexit. Mr. Hammond accused Dominic Cummings, Mr. Johnson’s most senior adviser, of not being a Conservative at all.

“This is my party — I’ve been a member of this party for 45 years,” Mr. Hammond said in a radio interview on Tuesday morning, brimming with anger. “I’m going to defend my party against incomers, entryists, who are trying to turn it from a broad church into a narrow faction.”

Mr. Lee, the lawmaker who defected to the Liberal Democrats, said he hardly recognized the Conservatives.

“Sadly, the Brexit process has helped to transform this once great party into something more akin to a narrow faction, where an individual’s ‘conservatism’ is measured by how recklessly one wishes to leave the European Union,” he wrote.

The Conservative rebels by and large support pulling Britain out of Europe, but with a deal to spell out and manage future relations. That alone has made some of them targets, with a rabid grass roots campaign of party members seeking to punish lawmakers not supportive of a no-deal Brexit.

For some of those members, Mr. Johnson’s threat to expel the rebels was long overdue.

“At some point, you have to draw a line in the sand,” said John Rawlins, a former Conservative member who backed an effort to expel Mr. Gauke, one of the rebels, from his seat. “As far as I’m concerned, anyone who actively works against the queen’s government, it’s treason.”

Despite the animosity, many moderate Conservative lawmakers were slow to back a rebellion against Mr. Johnson, wanting to give him a chance to strike a new deal. But they saw few signs of progress. And the mood swung when Mr. Johnson took the extraordinary step of suspending Parliament to push through his Brexit plans.

“Boris has now broken some of the rules,” Mr. Wager said. “That’s what gives someone like Nicholas Soames license to do it, because the unwritten rules of British politics are being rewritten by Boris, and that creates a counterreaction.”

Expelling Conservative rebels would be another draconian move by Mr. Johnson, one that was a step too far even for some of the grass roots Conservative members who support him, like John Strafford, a leading advocate for Conservative members. He said it was “totally wrong that so much power can be put in the hands of one person.”

Tuesday night’s vote was a sea change for a party that has been haggling over membership in the European Union for decades. Moderate lawmakers have tended to buckle in the past to the views of their more ardent, anti-Europe colleagues in the interest of holding the party together. They agreed, for instance, to hold a referendum in the first place. But no longer.

“For about 30 years, they’ve had these arguments about Europe, where each time these sort of moderate political figures have given in to the euroskeptics,” Mr. Wager said. “But to propose a no-deal shows the fight is permanently lost within the Conservative Party. There’s nothing else to lose.”