Boris’s blast may yet help PM on Brexit

WHATEVER they may think of his private life, many of our readers will agree wholeheartedly with Boris Johnson’s article in today’s Mail on Sunday. It is bold, uncompromising, patriotic and adventurous, all of the things we associate with this outsize figure in our national life.

And there is of course something very refreshing about such direct language, after the snail-like, bureaucratic slow dance of the Brussels negotiations and the intricate checks and balances of the Prime Minister’s Chequers compromise.

This is what millions wanted when they voted to leave the EU – a sharp sword slicing through the clotted cobwebs of EU restriction, an immediate sense of new freedom to govern ourselves, control our borders and free our trade.

And they still do. What is more, they are still very much entitled to insist that the Government obeys the democratic will of the British people.

Yet the question is more complicated than that. In politics, as in life, what leaders want to do is often constrained by what in fact they can do. Clean breaks are rare. Like the rest of us, those in high politics may be so deeply entangled that a swift, uncompromising withdrawal might damage them.

And, as the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, argues, also in an article for this newspaper, we are at a delicate point in our talks with the EU and in our own domestic politics. He points out how much of what Leave voters wanted, and of what Boris Johnson wants, is actually provided for in the Chequers plan: Britain out of the Single Market and the Customs Union, sovereign control over borders, an end to free movement, the end of future payments into the EU Budget, withdrawal from the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy.

And this has been achieved by the Prime Minister despite constant attempts to undermine her by hardliners in her own party and elsewhere.

Mrs May’s admirable coolness and persistence have done much to bring most of her party round to the need to leave. But it is necessary to remember that Mr Hunt himself was once a Remainer and is now firmly committed to departure.

Because Mrs May is so calm and collected, Mr Johnson’s robust and graphic language may actually be helpful to her, though this morning she probably thinks she could have managed without it.

The EU’s negotiators need to know she is under at least as much pressure from firm Brexiteers as she is from Brussels and that they will achieve nothing by trying to soften the Chequers compromise. Mr Johnson has made that abundantly clear.