The real outrage is the antics of the Remainers

Those who doubted that Boris Johnson would have the gumption to follow through on his pledge to see Brexit done by October 31, come what may, have been proved spectacularly wrong. Indeed, to call his decision to ask the Queen to suspend Parliament an audacious gamble would be something of an understatement. After three years of backsliding, compromise and humiliating defeat under Theresa May, the country has a Prime Minister who is evidently willing to do whatever it takes to carry out the people’s will.

Not that the suspension should have come as a huge surprise. The idea of proroguing Parliament, so as to prevent anti-brexit MPS from tying the Prime Minister’s hands as they did Mrs May’s, has been a matter of debate for many months. While Mr Johnson refused to rule out such a course of action during the Conservative Party leadership contest, his then rival Dominic Raab, now the Foreign Secretary, insisted that it should be an option open to the Government, much to the fury of Remainers in the Tory party.

The stakes had been raised further this week by the shameless plotting of anti-brexit forces in Westminster. Leaders from the Greens, the

Lib Dems, Labour and the Nationalist parties held a meeting on Tuesday and concluded that when Parliament returns from recess next week, they would use every legislative measure available to them to prevent the country’s exit from the EU without a deal. So Mr Johnson chose to act and Parliament will be suspended for a period of several weeks prior to a Queen’s Speech. The amount of parliamentary time available to antibrexit MPS to complete their anti-democratic manoeuvring has been drastically curtailed.

Hardline Remainers are calling it a constitutional outrage. There will be readers who, while not sharing this precise sentiment, are understandably uneasy about the use of constitutional procedure in an attempt to achieve the political aim of disarming Remainer politicians. It is a supreme irony that, in order to secure Brexit, whose stated purpose is the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty, the Government has felt the need to circumvent Parliament.

Nevertheless, the real outrage in this saga is not the suspension of Parliament, but the behaviour of parliamentary Remainers. Many of them have spent the past three years reassuring the public that they respect the decision the voters made at the EU referendum. A majority of MPS solemnly promised to enact that same decision, with 85 per cent standing for election in 2017 on manifestos that committed them to Brexit. They voted in overwhelming numbers to trigger Article 50.

A principled few were honest enough to admit that they had no intention of honouring the referendum result. Many were never that candid. When the negotiations with the EU began, they lobbied Michel Barnier to press on the UK terms that they must have known the nation could never acquiesce to. And when MPS rejected Mrs May’s appalling agreement, instead of accepting the no-deal Brexit we were told was the alternative to a bad deal, through unprecedented parliamentary machinations they forced an extension of Article 50. They claimed that it was all in the name of avoiding the “catastrophe” of the UK “crashing out”, but as the furious reaction of voters at the European elections attests, that was a thinly veiled excuse for tactics that seemed likely to make any form of Brexit impossible.

In any case, it is false to assert that the Commons has been offered no chance to have its say over our exit from the EU. John Bercow, the Speaker, whose hysterical rage at the Prime Minister yesterday stuck out in a crowded field, has hardly been unwilling to give backbench MPS parliamentary time to debate alternative strategies. The indicative votes process failed to find any consensus.

The Prime Minister, in short, is faced with opponents who have been willing to use the tools of democracy in order to subvert a democratic vote. That surely puts his decision yesterday into context. In any case, Mr Johnson chose as his mechanism the perfectly normal business of asking the monarch for a prorogation in advance of a Queen’s Speech. This is no alien innovation but what governments do every time a parliamentary session comes to a close. This session is already the longest since the English Civil War. There is nothing improper about a prime minister requesting that it be brought to an end. Remainer MPS now spitting tacks are doing so for political reasons, not constitutional ones.

Where will this end? Mr Johnson’s gamble is that this will stymie the Remainers’ efforts to prevent no deal and see the Government through to the middle of October, when a Queen’s Speech will be followed rapidly by an EU summit. There is an argument that Brussels will be more likely to offer an improved deal if it knows the anti-no dealers in Parliament have been routed. But it is a great risk. There is no certainty that this will restrain the Remainers. The expected resignation of the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, once a rising star, suggests the next few weeks will be chaotic. Rebel Tories may even decide that the time has come to vote against the Government in a confidence motion.

But the die has been cast.

Mr Johnson has acted boldly and resolutely, within the bounds of the constitution, to ensure that the Brexit vote is honoured.