Interviewing Boris Johnson is like staring long and hard into an expressionist painting: there are pyrotechnics, the shape of commitments and policies, but it might all be mirage.
After I spoke with him on Wednesday for my show, my abiding sense was that he would dearly love a root-and-branch renegotiation of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, but that his famous optimism is not the same as naïveté. He knows replacing the Withdrawal Agreement at this late juncture is a million-to-one chance – and so leaving without a deal may be the only way to meet his deadline of Brexit by 31 October.
That is why, for example, he was so gung-ho for a war-time style public information campaign, asking small businesses what government can do for them, and vice versa, to help make the UK no-deal ready. “Let us go forward together” Johnson almost said, nodding at his hero Churchill, with the Chancellor barking in the background “reverse now, away from the cliff edge!”
The unspoken truth of a Johnson premiership is that he expected to be the no-deal PM. So
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