Failing, flailing, and doing surprisingly well in the polls

Ces institutions périssent par leurs victoires. [These institutions perish by their victories.]

is a very well known quote whose origin I cannot for the life of me recall at this moment. And maybe that sums up the situation perfectly. 🙂

Provided Boris and the rest do not imitate Niall-a-quote-for-every-occasion-Kilmartin and forget something just at the crucial moment, then we should not only win but win far better than if the establishment had never decided to undo a vote they’d promised to respect. if PM Boris had been appointed in 2016, he’d have been hemmed in by an unreconstructed not-very-conservative party – and a lot of what we disliked in the EU would have been preserved, or diminished only slightly and slowly.

Instead, parliament has spent this year making my joke poem’s lines

Too statist to say, even at their most livid,
“Take back control? Look at us, to whom you’ll give it!”,

seem more prescient than I expected when I wrote it. 🙂 All the experts, the ‘great and good’, the ‘we know best’ crowd, suffer with every decline in respect for parliament – and especial, of this parliament, where they are so obviously a faction independent of party.

Even the widespread cynicism that will be applied to Boris as to his foes empowers him relative to them: it is basic political theory that such cynicism weakens the polity as a whole but relatively empowers the executive against the legislature. Every time they ‘win’ by refusing an election, they lose twice. Firstly, SW1 chatter and cunning about precisely why they are refusing does not penetrate to the voters beyond, where “they don’t want an election” leads instantly to “they think they’ll lose an election”. Secondly, when ordinary voters can’t be bothered with details and all seems just one sly maneouvre against another, speaker Bercow’s well-acted fury over some technical irregularity in whatever mechanism Boris will use (to evade the intent of the act and/or secure an election) will be assumed to be phoney but will also be assumed to be unimportant. There will be ordinary voters who don’t read Guido, let alone this blog, who will not know of Major’s prorogations or Blair’s withholding of the royal assent and so will lack any argument against Bercow’s claims – but they deeply, deeply will not care. And the more the establishment’s SW1-thinking campaign managers focus on such issues, the more they will lose.

This is not in every way an ideal situation. But the establishment made it and own it. And I am confident that we on this blog, who do know of Major’s and Blair’s antics, will be able to see that, like ‘catastrophic’ global warming, what the public don’t care about is not happening anyway.

I wonder. What if Theresa May had put BRINO on a confidence motion?

Oh hang about! She would have needed the support of the DUP who I am pretty sure were always against it.

Yeah. Scrap it. Bizarre piece of legislation.