Johnson’s breathtaking gamble is still on course for success

Despite last night’s defeat, the PM will eventually get his election and he will be well-placed to win it

The Tory party is dead; long live the Tory party. The seismic realignment that was supposed to take place in 2016 is finally upon us, and a tougher, rougher, non-deferential conservatism is making its explosive debut. Ruthlessly focused on the public’s priorities, its ideology is complex. In some ways, it will be more procapitalist and pro-freedom: especially on tax, motoring and the nanny state. It will be more conservative on law and order, defence and immigration. In yet other areas, such as health and overall public spending, it will back a larger government, as we saw in a Spending Review that increased overall expenditure by 0.5 per cent of GDP over two years.

But the biggest difference, of course, is that 31 years after Margaret Thatcher launched the modern Eurosceptic movement with her Bruges speech, her side has finally triumphed. Following the expulsion of the 21 most committed Remainers, Eurosceptics are in almost full control of the Tory party for the first time since the Fifties. If Boris Johnson’s massive, historic bet pays off – by no means certain – he will win the

general election by scooping up a fresh demographic attracted by his domestic and European policies. He will then engineer a real Brexit, ensuring the period between 1973 and 2019 is remembered as a historical curiosity, an aberrant era during which the UK was conned into giving up its self-government.

As such, Remainers’ triumphalism these past two days is misplaced. Their hatred of Boris Johnson and his adviser Dominic Cummings, their inability to look outside of the Westminster bubble and their obsession with the minutiae of process is blinding them to the true state of play. The Remainers may still win in the end, of course, but only if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister, laying waste to everything else many of them believe in.

Right now, Johnson and Cummings are still on a path to success, even if they have had to recalibrate their journey several times as obstacles have emerged. The situation is tense, the PM is feeling the pressure and much of the Cabinet is in a state of shock. But Boris hasn’t been “humiliated”. He hasn’t been “wrong-footed”.

The semi-prorogation didn’t “backfire”: it flushed out his hardcore opponents and allowed him to expel them. He knew he would have to do something drastic at some stage and there was no way that those committed to derailing his plans would ever have been allowed to stand under Tory colours at the election. His party was already split de facto, if not de jure; he was always leading a minority government in all but name. The sackings merely formalised this.

Part of the misunderstanding is that Remainers still see themselves as members of the natural governing class, with the Brexiteers as insolent interlopers. Such ultra-remainers are so blinded by credentialism, by their hero worship of the likes of Kenneth Clarke – who, as chancellor, helped John Major gift power to Tony Blair – that they cannot understand why their removal actually helps Johnson.

They see the purge of their favourite Tories as a terrible loss of talent, a cataclysmic blow to the credibility of the party, its final death even; yet to Leave voters, losing anti-brexit irreconcilables, especially overrated establishment figures, is a huge step in the right direction and proof of Boris’s seriousness.

In any case, the Prime Minister needs a party with a single message: every candidate will have to sign up to his plans. This will be the only way that he can fight off the Brexit Party. If he wins, perhaps with a slender majority, Johnson will need to be able to count on every one of his MPS.

In the first few hours after Johnson called for an election, when it became clear that MPS would seize control of Parliament, Remainers were elated: they thought they had crippled their enemy.

But they are now realising, to their horror, that their victory may be ephemeral. The MPS’ vote may not really matter; the PM is ready for an election, and he has in fact guaranteed one by making it clear that he doesn’t have a technical majority any longer. Paradoxically, weakness is strength for Boris. He might have preferred to go to the polls after Brexit, but the present path comes with its own advantages.

Hence Labour’s dithering, and the too-clever-by-half plan by some to try to outfox Johnson by delaying any vote until November or December. Combined with Parliament’s power grab, this could theoretically prevent Brexit on October 31, force Johnson to break his promise and ensure his destruction, with the help of a resurgent Brexit Party.

It won’t work: Labour will be forced to blink first. Such scheming implies Corbyn believes Johnson would win on October 15 – not a good look, as they say on Twitter. Delaying the election for months will prolong the life of a useless, unworkable, anarchical Parliament. The Government would relentlessly tell voters that Labour and the

Lib Dems are blocking any progress and have decided to pay MPS not to work, reinforcing the Boris vs the establishment narrative.

Johnson may not get the blame for delaying Brexit either. Tory supporters and Leave voters increasingly hold his opponents responsible for the chaos, and that is even before he spends months repeating his mantra that Corbyn is a coward for refusing to face the electorate. The PM’S description of the Leader of the Opposition as a “chlorinated chicken” is a harbinger of things to come. Labour can’t go on refusing an election for much longer.

Last but not least, engineering a delay in Brexit would simply encourage the Government to go for broke. If they were to back a no-deal Brexit, Nigel Farage would step aside and the Leave vote would unite. I am sure those in No 10 genuinely and rightly want a deal. But they may not have a choice if furious voters begin to turn to the Brexit Party again. Do the Remainers really want to goad Downing Street in this way?

Johnson’s gamble was breathtaking in its ambition: he would take over a fatally divided Tory party with no majority, forcibly reform it in his image and gain a pro-brexit majority. For all of the madness of the past few days, I’m still predicting that he will pull it off.