Nick Cohen

For those who claimed Boris Johnson would be Donald Trump’s poodle, the past month has been corrective. Far from bowing before American power, he is defying it. Johnson is considering rejecting America’s demand to ban Huawei from supplying parts of a new UK 5G network. His government is willing to override Trump’s objections and ensure the US tech giants pay more tax. Meanwhile the usually voluble Johnson has noticeably failed to offer loud support to Trump’s destruction of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, preferring to ally with France and Germany instead. Johnson is not only showing that his left-wing critics failed to understand him, but honouring the promise he made to millions of supporters of Brexit.

As Soviet communism fell in 1989, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote a defence of the art of possible that deserves to endure. Terrible regimes aren’t always toppled by romantic revolutionaries, who reject everything they stand for, he wrote in The Heroes of the Retreat. ‘In the past few decades, a more significant protagonist has stepped forward: a hero of a new kind, representing not victory, conquest and triumph, but renunciation, reduction and dismantling.’ Only insiders, who are complicit in the regime’s crimes, have the access to power needed to destroy them. Only they had enough credibility with enough of the regime’s supporters to limit resistance from the old guard. Keir Starmer looks as if he will be Labour’s hero of retreat.

This election is a war between disgust and fear: disgust at the miserable inadequates who represent 'your side'; fear of what your enemies may do to you. It looks as if fear is winning. No country can fight two extremist movements at once. Fear of one side drives voters into the arms of the other, however much it disgusts them. Boris Johnson’s dismal approval ratings reflect the widespread belief that he lies to everyone from the Queen downwards, and doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to lead the country or smallest concern about where he is taking it.

An allegedly racist party protesting its innocence has many strategies open to it. The best is to admit its guilt and reform. Labour cannot because Labour’s leader and his supporters are so contaminated by racial prejudice they lack the moral capacity to change, or even admit to themselves the need to change. Labour might try to meet specific Jewish fears and begin by accepting that they are genuine. It is not just that Jewish people and their allies would not like prime minister Corbyn to take power as a result, one assumes, of some tartan-Stalin pact between Labour and the SNP. Our biased electoral system ensures that most voters don’t like any and every administration. It has taken the modern Labour party to produce an emotion closer to dread than mere dislike.

At times, it can be hard to avoid the preachy style of reviewing that talks to readers in the tone of a teacher ordering you to eat your greens. This, I’m afraid, is one of them. If you know what’s good for you, watch Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History on BBC iPlayer and wonder, not only at the quality of the journalism, but about what Brexit will do to Ireland and Britain. It is an education and not just for the ignorant. For me and those like me who thought they knew a little Irish history, it shows we knew next to nothing. The 30-year war and the cynicism and viciousness of its main players is played out. A counter at the bottom of the screen ticks up over 3,000 as it records the rising death toll.

Anyone who doubts that the far left is more interested in winning the faction fight within the Labour party than a general election, should look at how it has treated Sally Gimson, the Labour candidate in Bassetlaw. At least she was the Labour candidate until yesterday when Jon Lansman, a director of Momentum (it is a company, so the anti-capitalist campaigners can retain corporate control) and two other members of Labour’s National Executive Committee, Andi Fox from the transport union TSSA and Sarah Owen from the GMB, deselected her. Lansman and his comrades did not have the courtesy to explain to the world why. Indeed, we will see that every courtesy and every element of due process has been absent in the Gimson case.

Last night’s report in the Financial Times that Nigel Farage is considering a pact with Boris Johnson has terrified what remains of the ‘Remain’ movement. Their statisticians believe it could guarantee a Tory majority, and maybe a huge majority. The smart thing to say about this election is that nobody knows anything and any outcome is possible. For what it is worth, I still believe that. Nevertheless it is worth looking at the fears of intelligent Remainers because they show how a biased electoral system and the appalling leadership of the left could change British history. The FT reports that Farage is considering whether to pull the Brexit party out of hundreds of seats. No decision has been made – perhaps he will tell us what is on his mind today.

Allow me to introduce Dominic Slack-Oxley. Never heard of him, I hear you cry. Oh but you have. You hear from him every time you pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV news. Slack-Oxley is everywhere. More than Facebook or Vladimir Putin, he is the most reliable source of fake news in Britain. When you read about ‘Downing Street sources’ saying with absolute authority that Boris Johnson would never send a letter to Brussels to extend the Article 50 deadline, only for him to do just that, Slack-Oxley is to blame.

Sympathetic journalists covering the Remain movement are stuck by how far away it is from the ugliness of politics. Its activists are, to use a word that damns with faint praise, 'nice'. It is better to be nice than vicious, of course. It is better to be nice than mendacious and unscrupulous and so criminally irresponsible you would burn down the whole country rather than admit to a mistake. But, we liberal reporters flinch at the sight of all the niceness. The nice never win a war, we think. Nice gets you nowhere in modern Britain. When we ask how they will deal with thugs and manipulators of the calibre of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, they quote Michelle Obama and say, 'When they go low, we go high'.

In a judgment that will ring down the centuries, the Supreme Court unanimously finds that a Conservative prime minister had unlawfully suspended Parliament, and press ganged the Queen into being his accomplice. A Conservative prime minister, I should emphasise: the leader of a party that once lectured us on the need to defend the British constitution and rule of law from socialist extremists. Now it is reduced to being led by a jobbing journo, whose word few have believed since the early 1990s, and a thuggish clique of advisers, of the type who give student politics a bad name. They have driven genuine conservatives from their own party, and possibly millions of voters with them.

Boris Johnson is using the conventions of British public life to destroy the British constitution. He is relying on the old understanding that good chaps don't 'go too far' while 'going all the way' himself. He is counting on the judges being frightened of challenging him, while showing no fear as he tramps over and tramps down the lines that once marked the separation of powers. Johnson breaks the rules while insisting that everyone else must obey them. He’s like a criminal who cries with outrage when the police do not follow their procedure to the letter, and the judges should find the courage to treat him as such.

Both main British parties are now characterised by intolerance of dissent, leader worship and racism. You can take a historical view and see the rise of extremism as a reaction to the great crash of 2008 and the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars – a country that suffers the economics of the 1930s, cannot expect to escape thirties’ politics. But the peculiar hypocrisies of British public life are as much to blame as great shifts in the world economy. Britain was meant to be immune from the fanaticism that excited foreigners.

As a rule, it is naïve to hope that the thuggery of our masters will rebound and the wicked will suffer for their misdeeds. The good don’t end happily and the bad unhappily in modern Westminster. Still, as the Brexit crisis intensifies I am happy to tell you there are a few hopeful signs that the wages of sin are, if not political death, then at least political torture. In a report of the highest significance this morning, Peter Foster of the Daily Telegraph showed that all Boris Johnson’s blustering that giving him a free hand was the only way to get a deal out of the EU was so much bull. (I know, I know, I was shocked too.

What George Orwell said of left-wing intellectuals now applies to Boris Johnson and his ministers: so much of what they propose is a ‘playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot’. They may suspend Parliament and crash us out of the EU on 31 October or crash us out in the middle of an election campaign. Understandably, all the talk is of the threat to the conventions of democratic life. Yet if Johnson does not buckle, the autumn will not just bring a constitutional crisis but an economic and social crisis. No one knows how bad crashing out will be because no country has been stupid enough to tear up its main trading relationships without having an alternative in place.

If Labour were serious about stopping the most right-wing Conservative government within living memory, it would revolutionise its approach to politics. Clearly, it would have to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Ideally, Corbyn would remove himself. He would not allow the struggle to force him out to waste precious time. He would look at his leadership ratings, ask himself why Labour was not 20 or 30 points ahead of a dire government, and conclude that, in the interests of the party and country, it was time to retire with dignity. With their leader duly patted on the back and sent on his way, Labour MPs would then game the system to avoid a second venomous round of faction fighting. There is not enough time for a leadership contest between now and an autumn general election.

Boris Johnson is taking over the Conservative party like a gangster taking over a crime syndicate. Don’t let ideological labels mystify you. “Remainer,” “Leaver”,” “no dealer” – these are just words to confuse the credulous and stop them seeing their country clearly. Power is the only word that need concern you. Power, rather than ideology, is what runs together resignations and sackings, which have seen at least a dozen ministers go – a number that makes Harold Macmillan’s 'Night of the Long Knives' look restrained.