The famous Python debate about the Judean
People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea was supposed to be a joke, but
like many of the best jokes, it as rooted in a degree of shrewd observation
about the way that schisms can and do occur between factions of extreme
viewpoints. Life imitates art more often
than many imagine, and this week we had Farage claiming
that the new PM’s consiglieri, Dominic Cummings (who was widely regarded
as the evil mastermind behind Vote Leave) is not a ‘true believer’ after all. He’s not terribly sure about Johnson either,
apparently.
In a sense, this is actually good news, of
a sort, because he has said categorically that ‘there would be no pact between
his party and the Conservatives as long as the former Vote Leave head remained
in charge of strategy’. With such a pact
in the now inevitable early general election, then given the shambles to which
Corbyn has reduced the Labour Party and the vagaries of a First Past The Post
electoral system, it is entirely possible that around 40% of the vote split
between the Conservatives and Nigel Farage plc would return a landslide
majority in parliament for a no deal Brexit, even if the other 60% of those
voting rejected such an outcome. Without
such a deal, Johnson’s main hope of such a victory depends on crushing the Nigel
Farage plc party almost out of existence, a much harder challenge as things
look at present.
Whether it is, as I suggest, good news or
not depends on one critical factor however: whether anything Farage says can be
taken on trust. Maybe not such good news
after all.
But assuming, for the moment, that there
is no electoral pact between Johnson and Farage, it is still just about
possible that Johnson could achieve a narrow overall majority with around 30-35%
of the vote, because of the way votes are distributed under our far from
proportional system. But whether such a
majority would enable him to push through no-deal (which is the common
assumption) is not quite so clear. That
would depend on him either managing to get any anti-no-dealers deselected in
advance of the election to be replaced by his own variety of true believers, or
else on any anti-no-deal Tories returned to parliament being willing to fall in
behind his no-deal policy. I wonder
whether either of those things are as likely as is generally assumed. Mass deselection of candidates is not a process of which the party has any experience, and those currently holding out against no deal don't seem likely to simply change their mind overnight. An election - even if it results in a nominal narrow majority for the Tories - might not make any real change to the parliamentary arithmetic after all.