BORIS JOHNSON: To finally get Brexit done we had to BLUFF

Day by day the pressure was building. As a new PM in 2019, I had no majority; I had no proper democratic mandate; I was unable to win a single vote in Parliament; and it was obvious that I was clinging ever more tenuously to the rain-slicked window sill of office.

The Tory Party had hired me to get Brexit done and it was now only three short months until we were meant to leave, on October 31, 2019.

If we failed yet again, if we delayed again – then I would look ridiculous, nothing but Theresa May in a blond wig – and I would be swept aside in a torrent of public indignation.

Some people on the opposite side were already starting to claim that the 2016 referendum was losing its valence.

It was more than three years ago. Many of those elderly Brexiteers were probably now pushing up the daisies, they said. The whole thing should be rerun. It was time for a ‘People’s Vote’, they said, as though the People had not been consulted the first time.

As for the Leavers – the 52 per cent – this kind of talk was just infuriating.

They had been told that this was a once-in-a-lifetime decision and that their votes really mattered. Now, yet again, it looked as though their wishes were about to be ignored.

I had to get the EU to give us a new exit deal and then I had to get ­Parliament to vote for whatever they gave us and, frankly, I wasn’t sure I could secure the first objective, let alone both.

By the third week of August 2019, we were getting nowhere. The UK now had a new chief negotiator in David Frost, a former don and diplomat, an aesthete and expert on medieval German poetry.

On Brexit, on what it meant and what it could mean, he was and is one of my closest allies. He saw very clearly what we needed to do and how Brexit was nothing unless we truly took back control.

Frosty presented his case to the EU with clarity and logic; and, yes, he got a frosty reception.

The EU chief negotiator was Michel Barnier, the former French finance minister, and the Brussels view was that the British had already signed up to a withdrawal agreement, under Theresa May, and that we should jolly well stick with what we were given.

As Barnier continually told Frosty, he had no mandate to change the agreement, and there was nothing he could do. So by August 21, we had decided that it was time to stop talking to the monkeys and start on the organ-grinders.

The EU is ultimately the creation of the Franco-German axis. I went first to Angela Merkel. We sat on her roof terrace with flutes of crémant d’Alsace, looking out over Berlin.

I told her we had to change the withdrawal agreement. She needed to give the orders to the Commission, I said.

‘I can control my parliament,’ she said, gesturing at the twinkling glass dome of the Bundestag. ‘Can you control yours?’

She had a point.

Oh well, I thought: never mind. Let’s try Macron.

I love France, and the French. My beloved grandmother, known as ‘Grannybutter’, was French, and I am trying to read ten pages of a novel in French every day.

I also liked (and like) Emmanuel Macron. For two solid years I tried to ingratiate myself with the young French leader and to build a new post-Brexit Anglo-French partnership. I have to be honest with you – I was rejected at more or less every turn.

On this visit it was swelteringly hot, and we sat for ages in the garden of the Elysee Palace trying to cook up new plans for Anglo-French unity.

I suggested all kinds of wheezes: a second fixed link across the Channel, a new hydrogen-fuelled Concorde aircraft, a new nuclear pact. Macron was warm. But I could sense his deep reserve.

He had been working in London for Rothschild when I was mayor, and I knew he felt that Brexit was a terrible snub to the EU and to his view of the world.

He had been on record many times already, to the effect that Brexit could not be a success – politically or economically.

The British, said Macron, had to be seen to be penalised for their decision – if only pour encourager les autres*. Why should he help Johnson, menteur** and tricheur extraordinaire***?

I drank more white wine and the perspiration trickled down the brows of Macron’s military advisers, in full braid and epaulettes, as I extemporised more plans for cross-Channel co-operation. It was no use. It was clear that we were stuck until Brexit was fixed.

Eventually, Emmanuel and I went inside for a tete-a-tete. He showed me a curious steel stool in the shape of an African drum.

To test how heavy it was I lifted my foot and briefly rested it on the stool, a moment that was unfortunately captured by the cameras.

Emmanuel was leaning forwards as if peering at my foot, and I was leaning back. It looked as though I was inviting him to shine my shoes, which was emphatically not the message we were trying to convey.

If anything, we were trying to lick his boots, not the other way round. By the time we got back to London, it was clear that we were no further forwards. The EU was not moving.

I knew from long experience that the Franco-German motor drives the EU. And if the French and the Germans are united on something, they tend to get what they want. In this case, they wanted to make us sweat.

They wanted to rope-a-dope us, to see how long I could last. They were in an immensely strong position, and they knew it.

I really, truly, deeply did not want a no-deal exit from the EU. But, as you know if you have conducted ANY type of negotiation, you simply have to be able to walk away.

I could see that there was only one way to persuade Merkel and Macron to give us a better exit deal, only one way to burst out of the slavery of Theresa May’s exit deal, and thereby get an agreement that would actually pass through the House of Commons.

We had to be able to bluff, to show that we were at least willing to do a no-deal Brexit. I had a curious advantage, as PMs go, in that our partners thought that I might actually be mad enough to do it.

They listened to my ‘do or die’ rhetoric. They saw the proroguing of Parliament – and they heard the crazed revving of a man who might really be prepared to drive the car off the cliff.

In reality, I wasn’t going to do any such thing. But I needed them to believe that I might.

Finally, we did it. By January 2020 we had bashed our way free. I had prorogued parliament, dewhipped a record number of Tory MPs, won a record majority in the December election.

We had junked Theresa May’s vassal-state approach, and taken back complete control of our money, our borders and our laws. We were once again an independent country.

There was just one problem.

It was one of Theresa’s biggest goofs that she had naively agreed to the EU timetable - first the exit deal, then the new trading arrangements.

Now we had to negotiate the great free trade agreement - the one my opponents said was impossible. We had less than a year to do it.

One of the most contentious issues was fish. Time and again, during the Leave campaign or the 2019 election, I had been to some fish market in Grimsby or Peterhead, picked up some huge, cold, slimy monster of the deep and pointed its gaping fat lips at the camera; and I had promised that we would take back control of our fish.

We needed full legal control of British waters, and Emmanuel Macron of France was determined to stop us. His fishing communities had been trawling UK waters since the Middle Ages; he needed their votes.

He wanted some way of ensuring that, even after we had restored full control of UK territorial waters, he could force us to comply with French demands. He wanted the right, backed by treaty, to impose tariffs on anything and everything unless the UK agreed that French trawlers would still have their quota of British fish.

It had to be in the treaty, he told the EU president, Ursula von der Leyen. There had to be an instant and immediate way of punishing the UK if we refused to give France what it wanted. She called it ‘the Hammer’. ‘I must have the Hammer,’ she would say.

I said it was absurd: there was no way the UK could accept a treaty that allowed UK car manufacturers, or UK financial services, to be suddenly and arbitrarily punished because of a dispute with France over fish.

Unless she dropped the Hammer clause, I said, we wouldn’t have a deal at all. ‘Kein Hammer, kein Hummer,’ I said – no hammer and no lobster, either.

The discussion ended in total deadlock. We were miles apart.

As the end of 2020 approached, I noted that people in No 10 were starting to get really rattled. By January 2021, the ‘transition period’ would be over. Unless we did that free trade deal, we were warned, we faced economic catastrophe.

Trusted aides stuck their heads round the door of my office and sidled in.

‘We’ve got to do a deal,’ said James Slack, the Government’s chief spokesman, and Allegra Stratton, another key adviser, seemed concerned by my attitude. ‘We have to compromise, PM,’ she said. ‘It’s time for statesmanship.’

As the deadline ticked closer, the business voices on the Today programme got ever more apocalyptic. We put the Royal Navy on standby – four warships – to guard UK waters against the incursion of the French fishing fleet. I did not see how we could give in.

Our negotiators in Brussels, though they sometimes betrayed signs of exhaustion, were as implacable as I was. After all we had done, all the grind of the past three years – we couldn’t settle for anything less than full economic and legal control of our country.

I was not only calm about our prospects. I was also completely – and perhaps, in retrospect, excessively – confident that we would prevail.

Yes, I could see that Macron wanted to use Brexit as a punishment beating. But I felt instinctively that the EU wanted a deal. It was still fundamentally true that the EU had a big trade surplus with us.

I sensed that, after all the nightmare and dislocation of Covid, they didn’t want any more hassle from Brexit. Indeed, we all felt – on both sides of the negotiating table – that Covid had been so horrific that it made Brexit feel relatively trivial; and that gave me a sort of zen calm.

Above all, I had found a way to crack the biggest problem of all - the EU’s ruthless manipulation of the question of Northern Ireland.

Their trick was to claim that in order to avoid a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and Ireland, Northern Ireland had to remain effectively in the EU single market, a manoeuvre that in turn put pressure on the whole of the UK to remain in the single market, the tail wagging the dog, because otherwise we would have to accept barriers to trade between GB and NI.

The trouble with Theresa May’s Northern Ireland protocol – even the improved version that I eventually signed in 2019 – was that it gave the European Commission far too much control over whether or not to have barriers to trade within the United Kingdom.

Beneath the paint and plaster, I am afraid, was the hard reality of EU power. How could I have signed it?

I did that exit deal in 2019 because it was far better than before, in that we – the whole UK, Northern Ireland included – were legally out of the EU; I did it because we were out of time; we were out of Tory MPs, in the sense that Theresa had blown our majority; and I did it because I didn’t believe that the European Commission would be so foolish and so pettifogging as to block trade WITHIN the UK.

I also signed because I calculated that if I could get an exit deal, I had a good chance of forcing and winning a general election, and winning a working majority; and that if the EU was still causing difficulties we would ultimately be able to use the might of primary UK legislation to fix the problem because we would be OUT, a free, sovereign and independent country, and it would be up to us to decide what happened in our own borders.

As 2020 went on it became clear, sadly, that the EU was determined to be unreasonable and to leverage their powers under the protocol, with no regard for the actual objectives of the agreement.

‘Not a kilo of butter will go to Northern Ireland,’ said one EU negotiator – and they had the power to stop it.

Bacon could no longer get through. Same for Cornish pasties. Same for Marks & Spencer biscuits. It was vicious, and bullying, and totally unnecessary. They didn’t need these checks. There was no difference between English bacon and Irish bacon.

It was about power, about showing who was boss. The EU was reminding Britain of the cost of a no-deal Brexit and that under the existing withdrawal agreement they had the right – if Britain diverged from the EU – to exercise a growing economic control over a part of the UK.

It was another piece of leverage, like the level playing field clauses, like the fisheries ‘Hammer’, designed to keep us aligned and in our place.

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Well, I thought, we can’t be having this, and so was born the UK Internal Market Bill, or UKIM, which we had introduced into the House of Commons on September 7, 2020. It was, and remains, an essential piece of legislation.

The UK Internal Market Bill did exactly what we needed. With splendid clarity, it asserted the logic – previously implicit in EU membership – that the UK is one indivisible economic unit; and it gave back to the UK government powers that the EU had taken over state aids and regional funding.

Seldom have I been more convinced that a legal measure was necessary, proportionate and right, and that conviction only grew as my opponents freaked out.

Senior civil servants resigned. Five previous UK prime ministers denounced me as a renegade. The Financial Times went spare, and Amal Clooney, wife of coffee ad man George, decided that she could no longer continue to serve as the UK government’s envoy for media freedom. Why?

Because the UKIM Bill checkmated the EU. Under clauses 40–45, it gave a minister of the Crown the power to ensure that goods could move freely from GB to NI, and vice versa, and by effectively overriding the Northern Ireland protocol I was said to be in breach of international law.

I thought the whole fuss was ridiculous, and said so. We didn’t want to break international law. If the EU was going to abuse the protocol, so as to create an unnecessary border WITHIN our own country, we needed to be able to fight back.

We needed to show the EU that we could prevent them from controlling that border in a way that was unreasonable or offensive to those who cherished the union between Britain and Northern Ireland.

In other words, what we were doing was extremely modest and sensible, and no more than any other self-respecting country would do. We were simply asserting the primacy, within the UK, of UK law.

I mean, seriously: can you imagine France, the US or any other country, large or small, allowing a foreign jurisdiction to manage trade between different regions of their own territory? Of course not.

The hysteria was yet another manifestation of the deep, ingrained and defeatist belief of the liberal establishment that Britain is somehow uniquely incompetent to run its own affairs. I loved that UKIM Bill, and it also had strong and widespread support from businesses – even from the CBI – because of the certainty it provided.

It sailed through the Commons, and the EU could see we had a hammer of our own.

And that, in conclusion, is how we did the deal. In the end, we both disarmed. The EU got rid of its ludicrous level playing field clauses, so that we had free and unfettered access to EU markets AND the perfect right to diverge from EU law in whatever way we chose.

They also dropped the fisheries hammer, so that by the middle of 2025 every sprat and mackerel in British waters would be His Majesty’s Fish, with deep-blue UK passports for ever.

In return, we toned down the UK Internal Market Bill, in the hope that the EU would in future be sensible about trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Dictionary corner

*Pour encourager les autres: As an example to others

**Menteur: Habitual liar

***Tricheur extraordinaire: Terrific trickster

Adapted from Unleashed by Boris Johnson (William Collins, £30), to be published on October 10. © Boris Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £25.50 (offer valid until October 12, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to or call 020 3176 2937.

Boris Johnson will be in conversation with Gyles Brandreth at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on October 12.