Why Boris Johnson needs an election to deliver Brexit

What more-or-less all Tory MPs seem to have missed is that Philip Hammond, the ex-chancellor who has become the anti-no-deal Sandinista, agrees with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings on the big thing that matters.

Hammond loudly – and Johnson, with his consigliere Cummings sotto voce – all accept that EU leaders and negotiators do not see ANY way of negotiating a new Brexit deal on the basis of what Britain’s new Prime Minister says he wants. As one Brussels official confirmed to me, even if EU leaders – and especially Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar – were prepared to do as Johnson asks and rip up the backstop, which they most definitely are not, they could not do so unless Johnson offered a detailed proposal for what would replace the backstop. And he says both that he can’t and won’t.

‘When David Frost [Johnson’s Brexit negotiator] came to see us, we asked what would replace the backstop’ said an official.