Johnson raises UK election speculation
LONDON — With Britain’s departure from the European Union due in less than 100 days, new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a man in a hurry. But he’s not rushing off to Brussels. The U.K. leader has no meetings scheduled with EU officials. Instead, he was in central England on Friday, talking about his promise to recruit 20,000 more police officers. In the coming days he’ll speak on other aspects of a packed domestic agenda that looks much like an election platform.
Britain’s next scheduled election is three years away, but signs suggest Johnson may be preparing for a snap poll within weeks or months to break the Brexit impasse that defeated his predecessor, Theresa May. She resigned after failing, three times, to get Parliament’s backing for her divorce deal with the EU.
Johnson won a contest to replace her as Conservative leader and prime minister by promising that the U.K. will leave the 28-nation bloc on the scheduled date of Oct. 31, with or without a divorce deal.
But Tim Durrant, senior researcher at the Institute for Government, an independent think-tank, said Johnson “has exactly the same parliamentary arithmetic to deal with as May” — no overall House of Commons majority and a set of lawmakers who so far have rejected all attempts to leave the EU either with or without a divorce deal.
“He is clearly positioning himself as the person to get Brexit done, and the way to change the parliamentary arithmetic is to have an election,” Durrant said.
In the House of Commons on Thursday, Johnson said Britons had had multiple chances to vote recently, with two elections and an EU membership referendum in the past four years.
“The people of this country have voted in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and what they want to see is this Parliament delivering on the mandate that they gave us” to leave the EU, he said.
Laying out his priorities in his first Commons statement as prime minister, Johnson said he wanted Britain to leave the EU with a deal. But he also insisted the EU make major changes to May’s spurned withdrawal agreement, including scrapping an insurance policy for the Irish border that has been rejected by U.K. lawmakers.
The EU, which has long said it will not change the agreement, called Johnson’s stance combative and unhelpful.
Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney said Friday that Johnson was putting himself on a “collision course” with the bloc.
“The approach that the British prime minister seems to now be taking is not going to be the basis of an agreement,” he said. “And that’s worrying for everybody.
“From a Brexit negotiating perspective, it was a very bad day yesterday.”
From a British political perspective, however, there’s a logic to Johnson’s moves. University of Nottingham politics professor Steven Fielding said the prime minister was preparing to blame Brussels if the Brexit talks fail.
“The most likely scenario is Boris goes off to Brussels, Brussels says no, Boris says ‘Brussels is dictating to us. We want to do a deal but they won’t let us do a deal,’” Fielding said. “Ramping all of that up and then saying, ‘Come and support me on the road to our glorious Brexit’ — and call an election.”
British election campaigns last five weeks, so Johnson would have to act in September if he seeks a vote before Oct. 31.
A snap election needs to be backed by twothirds of lawmakers in the House of Commons — a threshold that would likely be reached, since opposition parties are eager for one.