BORIS SAVAGES THE SABOTEURS
PM accuses Hammond and Co of ‘gravely damaging’ Britain’s national interest
BORIS JOHNSON last night accused Philip Hammond of ‘ gravely damaging’ the national interest with his endless bids to frustrate Brexit, and warned that the former Chancellor would be responsible for a No Deal outcome.
The astonishing blast against Mr Johnson’s fellow Tory came in a letter seen by The Mail on Sunday savaging Mr Hammond for urging the Prime Minister to rule out a No Deal exit.
Mr Johnson said it was ‘plain as a pikestaff’ that Mr Hammond was undermining the UK in negotiations with Brussels and making it harder for Britain to get a new deal with the EU.
On Tuesday, Mr Hammond and 20 other Tory MPs wrote to Mr Johnson to warn they would use every parliamentary tool they could find to unpick his ‘do or die’ pledge to leave the EU
on October 31 with or without a deal. Mr Hammond added that he was ‘ very confident’ MPs and peers could block No Deal, hinting he would bring down Mr Johnson’s administration as a last resort.
But Mr Johnson has hit back, writing that ‘any such Parliamentary campaign, any tricks of procedure or alliance of factions designed to derail Brexit, gravely damages the chances of our securing a deal.’
In a letter sent t o Mr Hammond and his co-conspirators yesterday and leaked to this newspaper, Mr Johnson says: ‘ The EU can see the public debate among Parliamentarians and t hey have been told privately by some British politicians that Parliament will frustrate our exit on 31 October. Some of you have said publicly that you are determined to try to stop us leaving the EU on that date if we cannot secure a deal.’
He adds: ‘It is as plain as a pikestaff that Brussels – or the EU 27 – will simply not compromise as long as they believe there is the faintest possibility t hat Parliament can block Brexit on 31 October.’
And he warns ‘the so-called efforts to prevent No Deal are in fact making No Deal more likely’ as it was giving Brussels a false sense of hope that the UK will climb down.
The brutal warning came as Mr Johnson prepared to meet EU leaders for the first time since becoming Prime Minister. He will travel to Paris and Berlin ahead of next weekend’s G7 summit and meetings are scheduled on Wednesday and Thur s d a y wi t h P r e s i d e n t Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany.
However, l a s t n i g h t Mr J o hnson was not hopef ul of either l eader softening their position, after he demanded they drop the Irish border backstop before talks could begin.
He wi l l tell his fellow European leaders that ‘parliament will not, and cannot, cancel the referendum’ but the terms of exit offered in the Withdrawal Agreement are ‘totally unacceptable.’
Branding the backstop undemocratic, Mr Johnson is expected to point out ‘it would be harder for us to exit the new arrangement than it is to leave the EU itself.’ He will claim ‘no EU leader would sign up to a deal like this on behalf of their own country and the PM will not do so on behalf of the UK’.
However the PM believes there can be no breakthrough on Brexit until he has survived a confidence vote from MPs, expected to be held when the Commons returns on September 3, and other bids to stop No Deal have been squashed.
Instead Downing Street is eyeing a four-week window for a renegotiation between Parliament breaking up again on September 20 and the planned EU Council on October 17-18.
Last night a Downing Street source said: ‘Paris and Berlin have not engaged seriously with negotiations because they have told us people like Philip Hammond, Dominic Grieve and Tony Blair are telling them that Parliament will cancel the referendum in the first fortnight of September.
‘Until they see this is wrong, there is no reason to think they will talk seriously.’
Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland radio show yesterday, Mr Grieve said he was ready to act as a caretaker PM but added that ‘there are others more suitable for it than I am’.
Mr Johnson’s declaration of war on Tory rebels came as:
Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of seizing the keys to No 10 amid Brexit chaos were in tatters as Tory rebels and opposition parties distanced themselves from the Labour leader;
The rebels refused to rule out bringing down Mr Johnson as a last resort, meaning a confidence vote remains on a knife-edge;
‘Love Bombing’ efforts were launched on independent MPs, imploring them not to bring down the Government;
Mr J o h n s o n ’s enforcer Dominic Cummings warned aides that instability meant an Election could be imminent;
Home Secretary Priti Patel demanded that Britain’s borders be prepared for freedom of movement to end overnight on October 31;
Campaigners applied for legal aid to sue the Government over No Deal;
A diplomatic rift with Canada over the IS fighter ‘Jihadi Jack’ threatened to over shadow Mr Johnson’s first outing on the world stage.
It emerged Commons Speaker John Bercow was ‘working closely’ with anti-No Deal MPs ahead of the return of Parliament.
Insiders confirmed Mr Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds would not attend the G7 next week but will meet the Queen at Balmoral next month.
Tory whips fear as many as 17 Tory MPs could vote against the Government in a confidence motion, but last night the tide was going out on Mr Corbyn’s hopes of becoming a caretaker PM. Rebel ringleader Sir Oliver Letwin said he would not be able to support a bid to put the Labour leader in No 10, saying he did not think it was likely that a majority could be formed for the idea.
However he did not rule out supporting a no confidence motion to bring down the Government to prevent a No Deal – setting up a knife-edge showdown when t he Commons returns, as more than a dozen Tory MPs still will not rule out voting down Mr Johnson.
It’s understood that efforts have been launched to ‘ love bomb’ i ndependent former Tory and Labour MPs, hoping to encourage them to abstain from a confidence vote and dampen the pro-EU rebellion.
Sources said Ministers including Michael Gove were ‘working’ former Conservative MP Nick Boles and targeting Mr Corbyn’s harshest Commons critics, such as Ian Austin, John Woodcock and Frank Field.
Independents being love-bombed by Boris
THERE are few creatures more despised by the metropolitan elite than the Yellow Vest demonstrators who recently brought much of France to a standstill.
So it’s unlikely that our chattering classes will spend their summer break reading a new book by French author Christophe Guilluy, who first predicted the rise of the angry ‘ gilets j aunes’ and was proved horribly correct.
But they should. Guilluy’s new book, Twilight Of The Elites, tells how ordinary working people have been betrayed by those in power –and warns our complacent governing classes that they should now fear for their future.
No one should pay more attention than our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Because, while Mr Johnson has made a strong start with his determination to deliver Brexit, to fight crime and to put billions into the public services, even popular measures such as these will not be enough to restore faith in politicians, according to Mr Guilluy.
Ordinary people, particularly those side-lined by globalisation, want nothing short of a complete economic overhaul, with properly paid jobs and a real stake in the economy, he says.
Guilluy is right and I would go further still.
Britain’s poorest regions, particularly in the north, Wales and on the coast, need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan to bridge the everwidening divisions between London and the rest of the country it is supposed to serve.
Without this sort of drastic response, neither Mr Johnson nor the Conservative Party can expect to survive for long.
At the heart of Twilight Of The Elites are what Guilluy terms the ‘BoBos’, the bourgeois bohemians. These are the Left-leaning metropolitan types who say they are on the side of the many but then send their children to private school.
They celebrate the ‘openness’ of big cities while forgetting that our metropolises are among the most exclusive and expensive places on earth.
They preach about the wonders of ‘diversity’ as long as it doesn’t involve talking about the white working class.
SUCH people praise the wonders of the free market but never bother to address the fact that millions have been pushed to the periphery, battered by the forces of globalisation and multiculturalism, wondering where their country has gone.
Mr Guilluy talks passionately about ‘forgotten France’. Here in Britain, the people who feel forgotten are what the pollsters call the ‘ C2s’, the skilled and semiskilled workers.
Once described as ‘Essex Man’ by Margaret Thatcher, they are Britain’s aspirational, patriotic and hard-working plumbers, factory workers, mechanics, electricians and small-business owners.
They play by the rules and, in return, expect the system – and their politicians – to treat them with respect.
They are not worried that Brexit might mean fewer Tuscan holidays. Rather, they want their children to go a decent school, to have the same opportunity to climb up the ladder as kids elsewhere, and for their families not to be pun
ished because of where they choose to live. They are tired of being sneered at by the liberal middle classes and exhausted by a skewed economy that gives so much to the middle classes of London and the South East but so little to everybody else.
They are right to feel this way. The system is rigged. Over the past 40 years, the share of income going to the richest households in Britain has nearly tripled.
Twenty years a go, a verage pay for chief executives in our country’s top firms was 47 times higher than the salary of the average worker. Today, it is 145 times higher.
Meanwhile, the lowest-earning working households in Britain bring home little more pay than their counterparts did in the mid1990s. At the heart of this broken system is the striking inequality between our regions.
Mr Guilluy writes about ‘periphery France’, places that are cut adrift from the big cities. The same is true here.
Close to half our population live in regions that are poorer than the poorest American states of West Virginia and Mississippi – two states where Donald Trump romped home.
Half of our population live in regions where productivity (a proxy for economic prosperity) is no better than the poorest parts of the former East Germany. A recent study by Professor Philip McCann, at the University of Sheffield, showed Britain is one of the most unbalanced and unequal of 30 advanced countries. The only other EU state more unbalanced was Slovakia.
Household income in much of the Midlands, Northern England and Wales is equivalent to household income in the South East during the 1990s. Then we wonder why they wanted to overthrow the status quo through Brexit.
Why is it, then, that some of our communities lag decades behind others and how do we fix this? Three things need to happen. First, Boris needs to rebalance Britain’s economy so it is less obsessed with university degreeholders in London and works better for ordinary workers elsewhere. Take our coastal communities as one example. It’s not hard to figure out why these areas were so supportive of Brexit.
In 2017, half of the ten districts with the highest unemployment rates, and half of the 20 districts with the largest number of people in poor health, were on the coast.
Mr Farage’s Brexit Party is already trying to woo these areas by pledging to scrap business rates for new firms that start-up in these areas.
Boris should go further, offering a range of tax incentives for new firms to move in and workers to set up their own businesses.
He should also set- up a cross-White hall taskforce to fix Blackpool, one of our worst-performing coastal towns. If we can fix Blackpool, we can fix anywhere.
Second, it is vital we overcome the shameful inequalities of education that affect our children.
It is a gross injustice that children who go to school in London or the South East tend to receive a better education than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
The areas that voted for Brexit are more likely to have larger numbers of low-performing students, to have fewer experienced and qualified teachers, to suffer from higher rates of teacher turnover and to lag behind London and the South East on a whole range of other measures.
IN LONDON, nearly 70 per cent of available secondary school places are in what have been defined as ‘highquality’ schools. In towns like Blackpool or Hartlepool it is zero. Boris should give skilled teachers financial incentives to take jobs in these areas and persuade them to stay.
Third, Boris should deliver an ambitious programme of investment in technical and vocational education.
We spend too much on university graduates and too little on other routes to adulthood, including apprenticeships.
In 2016, more than 300,000 people got a first degree but only 6,000 completed a higher technical HND or HNC.
It’s not hard to see what’s going wrong. In the past 30 years the proportion of young people going to university surged from 15 to 50 per cent, but this is not sustainable.
Is it any wonder that our employers complain about skill shortages and hire cheap foreign workers?
It is essential that the Conservatives reach out to disenfranchised voters.
There were signs of improvement under Theresa May in the 2016 Election but it wasn’t enough. They only took a handful of blue-collar seats from Labour, places such as Mansfield and Stoke South.
Boris needs to work much harder to appeal to Britain’s struggling working class.
He should start by reading Twilight Of The Elites and offer Britain’s workers something that they have not been given for a long time: a real opportunity to climb up the ladder.
If he does this, then the prize could be enormous.
He could sweep through dozens of blue-collar constituencies, from Labour’s northern heartlands to Wales, where support for Jeremy Corbyn is crashing.
More importantly, he could heal our broken and divided country.
Britain’s aspirational, patriotic workers are tired of being sneered at by Left-leaning metropolitan types