Who would have guessed? When push came to shove it turned out that a bad deal was better than no deal after all. The first deal in history to put more barriers in the way of free trade than the one that preceded it. A 1,200-page treaty and 80-page bill that was granted a mere four and a half hours of what passed for scrutiny in a recalled House of Commons to allow it to become law before the end of the year. In most countries this would be called a farce: here in the UK we call it a return of parliamentary sovereignty. At least that’s the way Boris Johnson was selling the deal to his eager backbenchers, who were all desperate to applaud his negotiating skills and brinkmanship, as he opened the debate. Such as it was. The sense of anticlimax was almost tangible. Almost as if the Tories were also having to kid themselves that the deal was the one they had always wanted.
But this was Boris’s big day out, and he was determined to milk it for all he could. It’s not often he can just about claim to have delivered on a promise, even if much of what was in the promise bore little similarity to the earlier promises he had made. Then the truth has always been a moving target for Johnson. There was certainly nothing about an extra £350m for the NHS each week. But then that bus left years ago. The prime minister began with the good stuff on no trade tariffs or quotas and rather skated over all the potential downsides. There was certainly nothing on Brexit levelling up the UK economy: it seems to have slowly dawned on Boris that it had been 10 years of Tory governments and not the EU that had widened the equality gap in the country. Rather Johnson tried to sell the deal as doing a favour not just to the UK but to the EU as well, because it would mean that we stopped behaving like a country that was unhappy in the relationship and kept having affairs. It’s not you, darling, it’s me. So now we would be moving on to a more open marriage where a bit of infidelity was tolerated. You got the feeling he’s used this line plenty of times in the past. To round it off, he concluded by saying that no one loved Europe more than him and to think of Brexit as a resolution rather than a rupture. Which hardly squared with Boris’s years of anti-European rhetoric. But then consistency has never been his strongest suit. In reply, Keir Starmer first declared that Labour would be supporting the bill as the alternative of a no-deal Brexit would cause even more disruption and put more companies out of business. But having played the national interest card, the Labour leader did a quick recap of some of Johnson’s lies – only last week he had given a speech claiming there would be no non-tariff barriers when the reality was a bureaucratic pile-on – before moving on to the deal’s limitations. Starting with the complete absence of detail for the service sector, especially financial services. The Tories had just bargained away 80% of the economy to secure the headline trade deal: the French and the Germans were laughing all the way to the bank. Then there was the lack of access to European criminal databases along with a lack of recognition for UK professional qualifications. He could go on. This was the thinnest of deals, one that had only been reached through the UK’s desperation to leave the EU before the end of the year. Though she pledged to back the bill, Theresa May was lukewarm in her support, pointing out that she had had a much better deal on the table that would have passed if Labour had been prepared to back it. She had a point. To no one’s surprise, the SNP leader in the Commons, Ian Blackford, said his party would not be supporting the bill as Scotland had voted to remain in the EU and Johnson’s deal offered them next to nothing. He, too, had a point. As the debate progressed, it became clear that Johnson had at least managed to achieve something no Tory leader had managed in decades. He had united his party – if only temporarily – over Europe. So it was job done for Boris, as Brexit had mainly only been about divisions within his own party. It was just a shame he had had to remove all the talent from the benches and replace them with yes men and women in the process. Even the Brexit headbangers of the European Research Group rolled over like pussycats. In years gone by William Cash had been prepared to defend the British fishing industry and the integrity of Northern Ireland within the the UK. Now he was happily prepared to sacrifice both. Northern Ireland could become a colony of the EU and who gave a shit about fish anyway? Cash compared Johnson to Pericles and Alexander the Great. The rest of the Commons compared Cash to a man without conscience or qualities. David Davis meanwhile proved equally absurd, insisting that a worse deal with the EU was in reality a better deal than one where we retained the same benefits. Go figure. Liam Fox claimed that the union would be stronger due to Brexit. It hadn’t sounded that way. Kevin Brennan was the first Labour MP to break with the party line by saying he would not be voting for the deal. His logic that parliament should be allowed more time for scrutiny by extending the transition period was impeccable. Up until the point you remembered that Johnson was a career psychopath and would have taken the UK out of the EU on 31 December with no deal if he didn’t get his own way. Which was pretty much the point that Rachel Reeves made in her closing speech as she reiterated Labour’s support for what was a crap deal, pointing out the seven amendments it had tried to table in the process, as the lesser of two evils. Closing for the government, Michael Gove was his usual insufferable self. Smug, graceless, short of self-awareness – he somehow believes extra bureaucracy will make businesses “match fit” – and still prioritising point scoring over trying to bring the country back together. The session ended with a whimper as the bill raced through its second, committee and third readings at breakneck speed by a large majority. But anyone who imagined that was the last we would hear of Brexit had rather missed the point. The lack of detail in the trade bill and the methods of conflict resolution promised a whole new world of pain. Months and years down the line, Tory MPs might not be so easily bought off if the economy flatlines. Boris had better watch his back.