Might there be a Brexit deal after all?

Parliament has not yet returned from its summer break but we are already in a bitter constitutional battle, with the Prime Minister pitted against the Speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition parties. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament is a deliberate attempt to raise the stakes. He wants to deny time to any effort by MPs to pass a law forcing him to request a Brexit extension. His message to them: bring me down or let me get on with Brexit.

When parliament returns on Tuesday for a two-week session, MPs will have to decide how to respond to Johnson’s move. Opposition MPs had previously agreed to try to use legislative means to compel the government to seek an extension, as they did before the last Brexit deadline with Yvette Cooper’s bill. But Johnson’s actions show that such an effect is unlikely to succeed; he won’t play by the same rules that Theresa May did.

If proroguing isn’t enough to stop these legislative sallies, then the government has other devices to neuter them. As a new Policy Exchange paper from the Oxford law professor Richard Ekins shows, making these efforts watertight is more difficult than MPs might think. Just look at how Boris Johnson has got around the bar on prorogation that Dominic Grieve’s amendments to the Northern Ireland executive formation bill supposedly created.

What would the Commons do if Boris Johnson fulfilled the legal requirement to request an extension but did so in a manner that made it almost certain that the EU would reject it? This would not be hard for him; he would just have to promise to be as disruptive a member as possible. In these circumstances, at least one of the EU 27 would veto the request.