Boris Johnson is shameless but not stupid. Which is why I think he will fold to get a deal

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the government really is as stupid as it looks. Maybe it is, in the words of Laura Kuenssberg’s morning dispatch, now ready to “unplug” the UK economy from its biggest trading partner with no ameliorative arrangements in place, because of a determination to stick to its “principles.” And maybe an economy already on lockdown life support will imminently have to deal with not only the convulsion of new border rules and checks, but also with tariffs that would soon still every car factory in the famous “red wall” and beyond, and empty every last English and Welsh hillside of sheep.

But I doubt it. Clown though he may be, I don’t think Boris Johnson has got where he is by being an idiot. I think it’s much more likely that he is playing the rest of us for fools. If you doubt it, recall the extraordinary lengths he went to last year to present himself as a Kamikaze dunce. He closed parliament, got rapped over the knuckles by Lady Hale and the Supreme Court and booted out dozens of his own MPs, sending his own parliamentary majority deep into negative territory.

Why? Because he was hell bent on looking hell bent on the hardest of Brexits whatever the consequences, causing excitable journalists and anguished Remainers to wail that he was preparing to drive the whole country off a cliff. But what did he do in the end? Took tea with the Irish PM, and under the cover of all the Light Brigade bugling that he had whipped up, quietly agreed to a new border in the Irish Sea. Both he and his predecessor had previously insisted that this was something that would be unthinkable for any prime minister to agree to. No matter. The withdrawal agreement was unlocked, an election was forced, and Johnson was back with an 80-seat majority.

Looking back, we can surely see that he was shameless but not stupid. All the businessmen and women who are currently chomping on their nails as they wait to find out whether they will still have any chance of trading with the continent in three weeks’ time can draw comfort from the fact that one thing that hasn’t changed in the intervening 14 months is the prime ministerial character.

Those inclined to what, in the Johnson lexicon, might be called doomsterism can point to a few differences between now and back then, when the issue was the “divorce terms” of leaving the club, rather than the trading regime that will apply when the old club rules finally cease to apply. With Britain no longer “in the room” and instead haggling with the EU as a third party, the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is particularly constrained in her ability to make concessions: truculence from any one member state could scupper a compromise. And where the EU’s institutions really did want to secure Britain’s final budget contributions for themselves last year, this year the economic damage for Europe of no deal is—though real—diffuse, and not quite so clear and present for the EU chiefs. There is nothing to suggest that the EU is bluffing.

But nor, in the end, was the EU bluffing last year. It didn’t have to. Because Johnson—with posturing and panic his only cover—signed up to what had long before been the Union’s opening offer, of keeping the Single Market intact by taking Northern Ireland out of Britain’s internal market. (The fact that he has since used legislation to threaten to renege on this deal before backing down over the inflammatory “law-breaking” clauses is only more evidence that the whole performance is about presentation and nothing else.)

How could he get away with such a capitulation? Essentially because nobody outside the province understood or cared. This shouldn’t have been surprising if we were thinking about the all-important English politics. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a real person (as opposed to a grandstanding politician) on the mainland who would really claim to have any special belief in the union with Northern Ireland.

And here’s the comforting thought for these seemingly dangerous days: genuine belief in the sacred principles on which Johnson now stands is almost as rare. Fish? Almost anyone with a brain knows that shared rules over a shared resource are likely a good idea, and even those few who struggle with that thought can understand that an industry that represents roughly tuppence in every £100 of GDP can be bought off. Absolute sovereignty in case of disputes? It’s never been a serious issue in decades of membership of the WTO, Nato or come to mention it the UN, which could all be described as requiring some compromise on this count.

And then what of the dangers of so-called “dynamic alignment” with European standards, a threat so appalling that—Johnson told MPs yesterday—no British prime minister could countenance it. This is the only one that gives me pause, since there is a Tory faction which sees the point of Brexit as to cut “red tape.” But we already know that the “no British prime minister could ever…” claim is one Johnson himself devalued only months ago. And since Theresa May cheerfully conceded something very close to “dynamic alignment” to “respect the result” Labour MPs at one stage without anybody batting an eyelid, I imagine that Johnson will ultimately calculate that he can—once again—get away with fiddling with the words and folding on the substance.

The other big parallel with last year is that the narrative of doom is not only the creation of No 10 spin. Johnson’s most entrenched enemies again want to believe he is a dangerous ideologue rather than merely a self-serving political playboy, and the idea that he will wilfully crash the economy fits with that. At the same time, journalists then—as now, as always—are addicted to the drama of the possible worst-case scenario.

Pundits, meanwhile, can enjoy sounding wise while offering the non-falsifiable “prediction” that the chances of success are 50-50. Well, I’m not doing that, and we’ll see soon enough whether I’m right to predict that Johnson will find some sort of pretext on which to fold. If I’m wrong about that, I’ll have to take the consequences on the chin—but so too, and more to the point, will Boris Johnson. Which is why I can’t see him doing it.