PM’s top aide tells Tories: Be cool just like The Fonz
BORIS JOHNSON’S powerful adviser Dominic Cummings has urged his army of Whitehall aides to hold their nerve and ‘be cool like Fonzie’ over the Prime Minister’s plan to ignore Parliament’s orders to seek an extension to EU membership.
If MPs again block a General Election tomorrow, the Downing Street enforcer warned Government special advisers to prepare for an extraordinary showdown. He said Mr Johnson would refuse to bend to the will of Parliament – and insisted there is a ‘alternative’ legal loophole.
Mr Cummings refused to share details with his henchmen, but said however ‘rough’ it got in the next five weeks, they would ultimately triumph and ‘trounce Corbyn’ – predicting that his political opponents would go into ‘meltdown’.
Mr Cummings confirmed that Parliament will be suspended immediately if MPs do not back going to the polls tomorrow and said: ‘They can spend the next four weeks complaining and trying to take us to court’.
He also sought to scotch growing rumours the Prime Minister could resign in a bid to break the deadlock sparked when Parliament passed the controversial Bill requiring Mr Johnson to get a deal with the EU or extend the Brexit negotiations. Mr Cummings told his team: ‘The [Westminster] Bubble doesn’t have a clue, we are not going to extend and we are not going to resign.’
He also warned that Mr Johnson’s pro Brussels critics ‘are going to go into meltdown and you are going to be cool’ in the face of growing outrage at the Government’s hardline position.
‘I need you to be like Fonzie, because Fonzie is cool,’ he added.
But the 47-year-old aide’s reference to Henry Winkler’s character in 1970s American sitcom Happy Days baffled many of the aides, who are in their 20s. A similar quote was used in Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster Pulp Fiction – but even that is 25 years old.
A source said: ‘About four people got the joke originally, but the point was very clear: hold your nerve, let them all freak out and don’t panic. Plus he has a trick up his sleeve.’
At their weekly Friday night gathering, Mr Cummings told Whitehall’s 120 political aides: ‘We will not be going to Brussels and asking for an extension.
‘MPs will have one more chance on Monday to do the right thing or we are going to send them home that evening and they can spend the next four weeks taking us to court and complaining. It will then be us going to the European Council next month and we will not be asking for an extension.’
Last night a senior Downing Street source confirmed the plan to The Mail on Sunday, launching a blistering assault on both the so-called ‘group think’ within the Westminster Bubble and Tory rebel ringleader Dominic Grieve, who masterminded the law to force Downing Street to delay Brexit in the case of No Deal. The source said: ‘The Bubble seems to think we are going to do what Grieve wants. We won’t.’
The cross-party Bill championed by Mr Grieve requires the PM to beg Brussels to delay Brexit until January unless a deal is agreed by October 19.
Downing Street sources say multiple QCs were being consulted about how the Government could get round the law, but the legal advice was being kept secret.
Mr Cummings’s suggestion on Friday that ‘we have a different interpretation of the legislation’ went further than the Prime Minister’s controversial comment that the Bill only obliged the Government to delay our EU departure ‘in theory’.
However, when probed by aides he said he was ‘not going to get into it now’ or explain what he thought the loophole was.
Mr Cummings is understood to be keeping this ‘different interpretation’ restricted to Mr Johnson and just a handful of Downing Street staff, who are meeting this weekend for crisis plotting.
But not everyone who attended Friday’s meeting was convinced Mr Cummings is in control of the situation, with one suggesting he was becoming increasingly ‘delusional’ about what the Government is up against. ‘He just kept saying, it’s going to be OK and we are going to trounce Corbyn,’ the source said. ‘He was very light on the details of how, though.’
Last night anti-No Deal MPs confirmed they would be hiring their own legal team to make sure Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings comply with Parliament’s demands.
One rebel told Sky News it was a ‘necessity’ because the Prime Minister had ‘no intention of complying with the law’.
Mr Johnson was also warned by one Tory MSP that he would have to resign if he wished to ignore the Brexit-delaying Bill.
Adam Tomkins, a former law professor, said ‘Irrespective of what we think about Brexit, or the PM, surely we can all agree on one fundamental principle: the Government is bound to obey the law.
‘If the law compels the PM to act in a certain way, and if the PM refuses so to act, he has only one option: to resign. It really is as simple as that.’
And Jeremy Corbyn hit out: ‘We need a clear statement from the Prime Minister that he is going to abide by that Act of Parliament.’
‘Our opponents will go into meltdown’