Cut the rhetoric and fight for this deal

IT’S no accident that Boris Johnson chose Blyth Valley as his venue for yesterday’s effusive speech about the ‘wonderful’ prospect of leaving the EU without a deal.

This former coal- mining area of Northumberland is a quintessential ‘Red Wall’ Tory seat. After a decisive Leave vote in the 2016 referendum, it followed up last year by returning a Conservative MP for the first time in its history.

Eurosceptic Northern working- class constituencies like Blyth Valley have ‘lent’ Mr Johnson their votes. If he fails to ‘get Brexit done’, or gets it done in such a way that we remain supplicant to Brussels, they may just as quickly take them back.

Little wonder then that he’s talking tough. It was now ‘very, very likely’, he said, that we would leave the bloc without an agreement. This would mean that from January 1, ‘we’d be able to do exactly what we want’.

This apparently gung-ho attitude to No Deal may of course be brinkmanship.

Mr Johnson knows the ways of Brussels well, having been a newspaper correspondent there in the 1980s and 1990s. He knows its negotiators will play hard-ball until the very last minute, hoping to wring as much as possible from the other side before offering any concessions.

But they must understand they are no longer dealing with Theresa May and her ‘zombie’ parliament. This time Boris has an 80-seat majority. And he’s not bluffing.

Equally though, Mr Johnson must come clean about the consequences of No Deal. Yes, several EU member states (notably Ireland) would suffer grievous damage. But the UK would also be deeply scarred.

Chaos at ports and airports, possible shortages, a cut in growth and big job losses are not phantoms conjured up by Project Fear. They are very real prospects.

It will be a tragic indictment of two advanced Western entities with so much in common if they can’t strike a deal. Both sides must tone down the rhetoric and show the agility, imagination and pragmatism to find a way through.

For Brussels this means accepting that Britain is a sovereign nation, not one of its client states. Trying to strong-arm us into staying tied to future EU laws and subject to the European Court simply won’t work. This country has always reacted badly to being bullied.

On his part, Mr Johnson must be prepared to look again at fishing rights and perhaps seek an acceptable form of independent mediation over any ‘level playing field’ disagreements.

Politically, commercially, fraternally, even genetically, Britain will always be inextricably linked with Europe. The only question is how amicable our relationship will be.

A deal is still there to be done, but it will need hard work, resolve and mutual understanding. No more hubris. No more grandstanding