NO majority yet for Johnson’s deal. No backing for No Deal. The Benn Act activated.

In a parallel universe, Saturday’s House of Commons session might have been a triumph for the Prime Minister – at least on his own political terms. Boris Johnson had reasonable hopes of doing what Theresa May found she could not do. With the backing of the ERG and the lion’s share of Tory rebels, helped by a few useful idiots on the Labour side, Johnson might have landed his Brexit deal yesterday with a slim but serviceable Commons majority. The impossible, achieved. An end in sight. Brexit delivered. On yesterday’s arithmetic, he may well still win one – in time.

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But the PM was denied his fait accompli yesterday, mostly by the No-Deal rebels he was persuaded to boot out of his party. While most of these doubters actually support Johnson’s bad Brexit deal – damaging as it appears, economically untested as it remains – they weren’t going to give this PM the PR triumph he craves, or the wriggle room to transmute his deal into an even harder Brexit through backtracking and chicanery down the line.

By 322 votes to 306, MPs decided to give themselves more time to scrutinise the detail of the Government’s proposals. Final consent to the deal has been withheld until the legislation to give effect to it has been safely passed. Sometimes there are consequences for lies and the liars who tell them.

Johnson’s first reaction to his seventh defeat in the Commons was characteristically bullish, and characteristically incompatible with his legal undertakings. “I wish the House to know that I am not daunted or dismayed by this particular result,” he said. “I will not negotiate a delay with the EU, and neither does the law compel me to do so.” Let’s see, Prime Minister. The Court of Session is watching with interest.

While the UK isn’t scheduled to crash out of the EU until Hallowe’en, in domestic law, this sceptical parliament has shackled the Johnson administration to a tighter timetable. Under the Benn Act, his deal – or a No-Deal departure from the EU – had to win a majority in the Commons before 11.00pm yesterday to throw the Benn Act into abeyance. Johnson’s deal has not passed. Leaving without a deal won no Commons majority. So the Benn Act now imposes two duties on the PM.

First, he has to seek an extension of the UK’s EU membership until the end of January 2020. If the European Council consents to such an extension, the law binds him over to accept it immediately. If they come up with some other date, he has just two days’ grace before accepting that too. Such is the mistrust MPs have for this Prime Minister, they’ve even dictated the text of his letter for him. All he needs to do is remember how to sign his name, find a convenient first-class stamp, and he will have begun to do his legal duty.

But Johnson can’t fudge it, or do it with crossed fingers, or frustrate the obligations imposed on him by non-co-operation. In bad grace, reluctantly, under protest – so be it – he must seek an extension from the EU. They can always say no. But if he had not despatched that letter by midnight last night, Johnson will be at odds not only with the letter of the law but the undertakings he gave to the Court of Session. His administration will be skirting contempt.

The Court of Session stands ready to meet on Monday morning “if there is demonstrable unlawfulness which it requires to address and to correct”. That judicial vigilance will continue to apply to any subsequent attempts to circumvent the legislation. Like everyone else who has brushed against this government and its apparently infinite capacity for betrayal, the Court of Session is keeping a weather eye on the PM.

Others are slowly learning the lesson. I’ll give you precisely one guess: who made the following solemn declaration at the DUP conference in Belfast as recently as November last year? “We would be damaging the fabric of the Union,” they said, “with regulatory checks and even customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea envisaged by the Withdrawal Agreement. No British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

So who’s pander was this? Perhaps it was clanking old Theresa, aiming to keep her democratic unionist allies on side? Was it muscle-man Dominic Raab, during his five-month stint as the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union? Or maybe it was Arlene Foster, planting a shot across the bows of her trusted friends and allies in the Tory party?

With boring inevitability, you already know precisely who said this. You can already picture his dandelion head, bobbling over a lectern reading “standing strong for Northern Ireland”. You can see him, lapping up the loyalist applause. The speaker was none other than the Right Honourable Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, formerly Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, then just an ordinary backbencher, and today the British Conservative Prime Minister who has signed up to precisely such an arrangement.

Reading the speech back, it is crammed with the usual incontinent Borisisms. But in the light of hindsight, there are some particular ironies in its content. Johnson began by bigging up Wrightbus, the Ballymena company who facilitated one of his vanity projects as London mayor by constructing expensive, retro buses to replace what Johnson described as the “German made bendy-buses” ploughing their trade on the streets of the imperial capital. Johnson characterised these vehicles as “the United Kingdom on wheels”. He was more prescient than he knew. Wrightbus went into administration less than 12 months later, putting 1300 jobs in jeopardy.

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Having nearly exhausted his public transport related material, Johnson thanked “our friends in the DUP” for supplying “the essential components – the fuel, the wheels, you pick your vehicular metaphor – without which the government of our United Kingdom could not have been carried on”. “Without you,” he gushed, “it is likely that the mighty engine of the UK economy would have stuttered and stalled”. “Without you,” he said, “there is a risk that the union itself would have been placed in jeopardy”. Johnson was cheered to the echo by the DUPers for rejecting a Brexit deal which would leave Northern Ireland “an economic semi-colony” of the European Union. Breaking news: liar liar lies. More lies when we have them.

A capacity for selective amnesia seems like an indispensable facility of the modern politician, but the mutability of the Conservative Party under this most mutable of leaders is truly a wonder to behold. Under his revised protocol, while Northern Ireland will be part of the UK customs territory, 34 pages worth of EU regulations will continue to apply to the province, touching on everything from agriculture to food standards.

Three times Theresa May brought her Brexit deal back to the Commons, and three times a coalition of the DUP and European Research Group Tory rebels threw it back. Digging through Hansard, their objections were pungently expressed, and completely forgotten yesterday.

The backstop was a “trap”, they said, an “instrument of pain”. One complained it would leave Britain “indefinitely shackled” to the EU, arguing that it represented “capitulation” to Brussels. The Tory rebels were, they said, “defending our democracy against servitude”. Dominic Raab complained the backstop and “regulation without representation” was undemocratic and “a threat” to our precious Union™. With his customary command of the detail, the foreign secretary denounced May’s deal as “wracked with self-doubt, defeatism and fear” to be rejected by any soul who wanted Britain to demonstrate “the temerity to regain mastery of our own destiny”.

Triassic Tory Brexiteer Bill Cash said the “Democratic Unionist Party will vote against the Withdrawal Agreement today – because it puts the Union at risk”. Outside the Commons, the language was similarly salty. In November last year, Jacob Rees-Mogg rejected “the separation between Northern Ireland and Great Britain” the deal would entail, arguing that Theresa May hadn’t “so much struck a deal as surrendered to Brussels and given in to everything they want and tried to frustrate Brexit that it’s not so much a vassal state anymore as a slave state”.

And yesterday, on this most un-super of Super Saturdays, where were the ERG? Where were their stubborn concerns about our divided union, the isolation of Northern Ireland and the real possibility of its terminal alignment with the “EUSSR”? These forgetful souls were to be found skipping loyally through the government lobby, their cares and anxieties about Theresa May’s Brexit deal and “our friends in the DUP” quite forgotten. Given the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for buses, it seems appropriate his fair-weather friends in the DUP find themselves nudged under one. When Johnson talked about “the United Kingdom on wheels”, Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds never appreciated they’d be the ones the wheels would be rolling over.