Time Dublin got real on this deal
IT WAS a typically boisterous, confident and humorous display – but make no mistake, when Boris Johnson repeatedly says he wants a deal but is ready to take this country out of the European Union in just 25 days without one if he has to, he is utterly prepared to do so.
Johnson has been the darling of Conservative conferences down the years, with his tousled blond mop-top delighting the blue-rinse brigade of the Tory finest.
Somehow the usually prim and proper matrons from the shires, and their sports jacket-wearing husbands, who would normally tut-tut and seek to admonish the sort of extra-curricular bedroom activities of which our Prime Minister stands accused, are happy to pull a veil (or should that be duvet?) over such alleged racy goings on.
This was Johnson’s first conference as leader and down all the years I’ve been there and seen him attend when he’s been both in and out of favour and when he was the most powerful Tory in the land, in his role as London mayor.
While he is a man blessed with enormous self-belief, quick wit, a knowledge of how to work an audience and a spectacularly impressive thick hide, there’s an even more important part of the PM’S armoury.
He knows the public mood in a way no one else currently in the House of Commons can imagine. While the penny is starting to drop – most notably with Labour MPS in areas where they could be toppled by an angry Leave vote at any upcoming general election, such as Stephen Kinnock and Ruth Smeeth – there are still so many MPS who are as familiar with the sense of the nation as James Cracknell is with dancing.
From the taxi driver who picked me up at Manchester Piccadilly station to the waitress who served me afternoon coffee in the hotel and the woman who served me drinks while we waited at Stockport station on the way home, everyone was of the same opinion: “Just get the thing done.”
Many of the EU negotiating team, and possibly some European leaders as well, would have benefited from spending some time in Manchester. Or, in truth, in any part of the UK outside of Westminster, because if they did they might just tap into what ordinary folk are thinking.
So many of the mediocrities currently in office, who are so woefully misguided in their supposed championing of the people, have also been dragged along by this tawdry, time-consuming battle to prevent Brexit.
Why, oh why, couldn’t a fraction of the time they have spent on conniving in duplicitous meetings and dragging case after case through the law courts, have just been dedicated to ■
AS THE debate rages on as to whether runaway Jihadi bride Shamima Begum should be barred from returning to the country for good as Home Secretary Priti Patel indicated last week, her supporters implore us all to realise she was
“so young, and only 15 when she did this”. The implication clearly being she didn’t fully appreciate what she was doing.
But hang on a moment. There’s a 16-year-old girl who’s got everyone from the Pope to prime ministers, and some presidents, heralding her work and echoing her demand that the world effectively revolutionises its stance regarding the environment.
There’s just a matter of months separating Greta Thunberg’s age now from the Jihadi bride’s age at the time. Can anyone explain this disparity?
one thing: agreeing to call a general election. From the Irish government in Dublin to the EU team in Brussels, it now falls to them to make the next move. That the EU side has welcomed the all-island Ireland plan with words such as “progress” and “considered” has to be seen as a good sign, although touchy Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is unsurprisingly downbeat and gravely intoned that it fell short of what he was hoping for. Candidly, unless the plan was a complete reversal of the referendum result and promised free Guinness all round, you sense Mr Varadkar is always going to look as joyful as the consultant
giving you the diagnosis you never wanted to hear.
He needs to remember economic models show that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, it is Ireland that could suffer the most with the loss of jobs, a drop in GDP and even a sharp rise in the price of bread due to flour mills being the other side of the border in Northern Ireland.
It is reported that many European leaders are sick of the Brexit saga and, while they will miss the UK, they want it done. They need to know we are too.
Now is the time to realise a deal must be struck and not allow one member state in Dublin to drag its heels.
Last week he might have done gags from fish puns in Scotland to eating kangaroo’s testicles, but this time Boris is not joking.