The clue was in the kipper. Boris Johnson brandished a packet of smoked fish on stage at a hustings event last week to illustrate an argument about business and Brexit. The frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest is famously articulate, yet the silent kipper was, in its own way, more eloquent. Johnson's fable turned out to be a fiction. He said it was “Brussels bureaucrats” who insisted that the processed fish make its way from plant to customer on “ice pillows”—a foreign imposition of “pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging ‘elf and safety’.”
But the fish bore different testimony (with a bit of translation assistance from the European Commission). “The case described by Mr Johnson falls outside the scope of EU legislation,” an official explained. Refrigeration was an act of obedience to domestic rules. But inconvenient facts do not disturb Britain's next prime minister. His career stands on an edifice of mangled facts and buried truths about the UK's relationship with the EU. As Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in the late 1980s he invented the journalistic genre of eurosceptic myth-mongery—concocting phantasmagorical applications of dull regulations and selling them to audiences back home as a conspiracy by wacky and wicked continentals against the British way of life. (Straightened bananas, prohibitions on prawn cocktail flavoured crisps, etc.)
It is a process Johnson once described as “chucking rocks over the garden wall” in order to relish the “amazing crash from the greenhouse next door in England.” The metaphor is doubly illuminating. It contains the assumption that vandalism is a kind of recreation and it admits that the real damage is ultimately being done on the UK side of the fence.
The kipper stunt represents Johnson going back to his propagandist roots. On the eve of fulfilling his lifelong ambition he retreats to a rhetorical comfort zone. The parable of the smoked fish is meant to transmit an ideological and economic message as well as a cultural one. It is about an idea of “Europe” as antithesis to free enterprise.
Johnson is not a man with many fixed principles, but there is a consistent libertarian thread that runs through his written and oratorical output. (It blends with a libertine streak in his personal life.) He finds rules of any kind burdensome. He is a flouter of car seatbelt laws as much as conventions of honesty in public service. His default presumption is that any such restrictions exist for the benefit of pettifogging pen-pushers and that freer, lusty spirits need not be bound by them. That outlook applies to his own behaviour and he projects it narcissistically onto the whole country. Britain, in the Johnsonian imagination, is a nation of Borises, who don't like being told what to do and find that their greatest commercial successes are achieved in transgression. It is not a great leap from that instinct to the eurosceptic ideology that anticipates rupture from the EU single market and customs union as the first step on a bold voyage towards a prosperous, buccaneering future on the high seas of global free trade.
"A Boris Brexit requires some token of disorder as the proof of its cultural virility"Setting aside the cost-benefit equation involved in that Brexit model, its appeal to Johnson on a cultural level helps to explain his approach to the question of a deal with Brussels—the single most urgent matter awaiting the next prime minister. Today, Johnson devoted his weekly Telegraph column—presumably the last for a while—to the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. He compared the extraordinary feat of safely landing men on the moon to the task of keeping the Northern Irish border open after Brexit. It is all, he says, a matter of technology and ingenuity. There will have to be checks—because the UK will be outside of the customs union – but they will have to be discreet, and located away from the actual geographical line between the North and the Republic. The conclusion:“There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.”
As with the kipper, this rhetorical performance is unintentionally revealing. Johnson believes that the impediment to a deal is deficient will, which in his mind is a satisfactory alternative to the application of rules. That is why he feels able so glibly to dismiss the “backstop” arrangement negotiated by Theresa May. The function of the backstop is to avoid a situation where the boundary between two jurisdictions—the EU and a post-Brexit United Kingdom—is wide open to smuggling, VAT-evasion and undercutting of standards and competition with an influx of cheap goods that do not meet the necessary legal requirements for import. The normal way to achieve that is customs inspection at the border, but restoring that kind of infrastructure on the island of Ireland would be an obvious affront to the peace process and act of sabotage to the Good Friday Agreement.
The backstop doesn't solve that problem, it simply defers it indefinitely by allowing for the UK's eventual slide into the EU customs union after a period of transition. Notionally that needn't happen if some alternative, technological mechanism can be found to resolve the border issue. No-one who has seriously engaged with the task imagines that such a mechanism is close to discovery. Hardline Brexiteers insist the job is easy, but if they really believed that they would be relaxed about the backstop—confident in the expectation that it would be temporary. Their hatred for it confirms that they know that, in reality, the combination of an invisible border and total separation of EU and UK jurisdictions is unavailable.
For May, that was not really a problem because she had no great ideological aversion to continental standards and regulations. Her stalwart commitment to Brexit is cultural and political: people voted for it, and therefore it must be done. Her personal EU-related policy fixation was immigration. If there had been a way to end the free movement of labour while staying in the single market, she probably would have taken it. But there wasn't.Johnson, on the other hand, is more liberal on the migration issue but doctrinaire on the matter of rules and standards. He must reject the backstop not just because it is the legacy of May's bungled handling of Brexit or because he relies on the support of Tory MPs who have a pathological loathing of the very word, but because it contains the seed of regulatory alignment with Brussels.
The backstop, in the Johnsonian world view, is an emblem of compliance with continentals. To accommodate its strictures amounts to a kind of moral cowardice and national debilitation. Its purpose in May's Brexit was to facilitate an orderly withdrawal, but a Boris Brexit requires some token of disorder as the proof of its cultural virility. With May in Downing Street, the objective was to avoid the reinstatement of a border. Perhaps under Johnson, that border must exist so it can be said that commercial freedom—emancipation from the bureaucrats of Brussels – has been established on one side of it. Whether that is a viable political goal or an economically rational one is beside the point. It must be done because otherwise it wouldn't be Brexit. The kipper has spoken.
