On Sunday, Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers were summoned to a conference call for an update on his Brexit strategy. The EU had not yet indicated any shift in its position, he said, but that should in no way deter the government from its current course. He was confident, he told his cabinet, that if he stuck to his guns the EU would move eventually.
This, then, is the new government’s position. The Prime Minister told ministers that he does not think no deal is the most likely outcome — but if the government is not prepared for it, nothing will change.
Is he right? Will the EU blink first? Many in the EU are unwilling to give ground. They don’t think the UK can possibly get ready to leave the EU with no deal by 31 October. The UK will back down at the last minute, they assume. And until recently, they had a point. A few weeks ago, Steve Barclay, the Brexit Secretary, lamented that the government’s no-deal preparations had slipped since the Brexit extension was agreed and that the UK was less prepared now than it had been for 29 March. But the new Prime Minister is changing this: there are now daily no-deal prep meetings being chaired by Michael Gove and a new slimmed-down cabinet committee in charge of it. The UK will be considerably more ready for no deal on 31 October than it was on 29 March, though there are some aspects that it is almost impossible to prepare for.
It will soon be clear to Jean-Claude Juncker and the other main players on the EU side that the government really is taking take no-deal planning seriously in a way that it never has before. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond. Gove is the most effective departmental minister the Tories have produced since Ken Clarke.
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