Boris will get a deal, but voters will take longer to forget the damage

Economic reality always trumps ideology, but our rational democracy will never be the same again

I’m pretty sure I know what’s going to happen now. There is going to be a deal – or something that can plausibly be presented as one – by the end of October. This would have been much easier to accomplish without the extraordinary seizure of government by the Remain faction in Parliament, whose actual intention, of course, was not to prevent no deal but to prevent Brexit itself. By undermining the Prime Minister’s bargaining position, the Speaker and his friends have done their very best to persuade the EU that there is no point in negotiating with him, and that they can just wait it out, since the possibility of no deal has been outlawed.

But mercifully, there are indications that Brussels and the DUP find this too risky a bet. So the threat of no deal remains in play and everybody is having to come to terms with this, despite the antics in Westminster and the various courts that have been drafted into the game – whose contradictory conclusions are only adding to distrust of the Remainers’ confident assurances to their friends in Brussels that they have paralysed the Government and put an end to Brexit.

In the midst of all the noise and bluster, and the desperate waves of face-saving disinformation, there is one simple truth: economic reality trumps ideology. (At least in democratic societies – totalitarian ones can starve as many people as they like in the name of a utopian goal.) And the economic reality is that, for all the hyperbole about the dangers of no deal for the UK, the consequences for the other parties would come at a horrendously bad time.

Ireland’s economy would tank. Germany, already planning to print more money in spite of the appalling historical associations, would go into a real recession, not just a technical one. The Mediterranean regions that now have 40 per cent youth unemployment would fall even further behind the dominant member states.

Recovering from these problems would be peculiarly difficult set against the background of a global trade war between China and the US, especially as the EU is a declining protectionist bloc whose mechanisms are not good at flexible adaptation. This damage would be especially unforgivable by the electorates of the countries badly affected because it would seem to be gratuitous. They will ask the obvious question: why couldn’t reasonable adults have reached an agreement that might have saved us from this? The governing class of more than one member country would suffer, perhaps irreparably, bringing a much greater risk of civil disorder than Britain’s streets are ever likely to see.

So there has to be a deal. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of reason whispering behind the curtains while motormouth official spokesmen dominate the stage. In Ulster and the Irish Republic, sense and proportion seem to be emerging from the shadows. New rumours of possible concessions from the DUP are surfacing almost daily. Those anonymous EU sources who had been swearing blithely that the UK was offering no new suggestions at all and should just go away until it had something useful to say, are being subtly corrected by Michel Barnier who is now requesting “concrete” proposals “in writing”, which his negotiators will deign to consider. (This sounds to me like the sort of pompous pedantry that precedes a climbdown.)

Most significantly, there seems to be a possibility that a deal that met such revised conditions could pass in the Commons with the votes of a tranche of Labour MPs, even if some Tory Brexiteers held out against it. There may be some subtle distinctions to be blurred between what constitutes an actual new deal, a tarted-up old one and a “managed” (in effect, negotiated) no-deal exit – but what there will not be is an acrimonious, unmitigated no deal with maximum recrimination and no diplomatic possibility of rapprochement. Nobody’s vanity is worth that much.

So remember that, at least in terms of the public address system on all sides, this isn’t chess – it’s poker. Most of what you hear is claptrap designed to show that everybody is confident and nobody is going to blink.

And some of it is having the opposite effect of what was presumably intended. The release of the Yellowhammer paper, with its supposedly horrifying threats of Armageddon in the event of no deal, actually serves two very useful purposes from Downing Street’s point of view. By raising so much alarm about no deal, it damages the electoral appeal of the Brexit party. Nigel Farage has painted himself into a corner by declaring that he will accept nothing less than no deal as being a true Brexit, and he cannot reverse that stand now. And the European Research Group purists in Parliament might also find it harder to hold out against what looks like a reasonable agreement if the public are genuinely alarmed by the threat of a new deal. So, all told, the publishing of Yellowhammer will almost certainly help Boris sell his deal to Parliament and the public, as well as to see off some of the Brexit vote threat in a general election.

But even if the Leave case wins through, the damage that has been done to British political life is horrendous. We seem to have imported two of the worst features of the American tradition. First there is gridlock. In the US, this occurs when one party has the presidency and the other controls Congress, thus making government inoperable. This should not be possible in the British system since the executive is comprised of the majority, or a functioning minority, in Parliament. But the Speaker and Continuity Remain have found a way to abolish the principle of democratic consent that once accepted this arrangement.

Then there is the US predilection for a losing side to try to sue its way to victory with continuous vexatious litigation. This is alien not only to our customs but to our national understanding of the role of politics and the function of the law.

The assumptions that once made our mature democracy so civil and rational have been trashed. The public see this for what it is. It will be a long time before they forget it.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of reason whispering behind the curtains while motormouth official spokesmen dominate the stage