Boris Johnson’s threat to walk out of Brexit talks is his Suez Canal moment

Boris Johnson’s reported threat to walk out of Brexit talks with 27 sovereign states unless they surrender to his demands could turn out to be his Suez moment.

Anthony Eden, another old Etonian prime minister, believed in 1956 that the nation and the world would rally around his decision to go to war with Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to take the Suez Canal into public ownership.

Johnson appears to believe that the British nation and global public opinion will support his breaking off talks with Europe if Britain is not awarded a special status by June and he opts for a no-deal crash-out instead.

He may be right and he will have the support of the Daily Express and The Sun, but he may have misjudged how far Britain wants to go into a war with 450 million Europeans.

Unlike the finest hour of 1940, when there was a real threat to Britain, all that the rest of the EU27 wants to do is keep frontiers open, welcome British business and allow Britons to keep living, working or retiring in the warmer regions of Europe.

Johnson may attempt to dress himself in Churchill’s boiler suit, just as Eden believed that by attacking Egypt he was defending core Western interests against a mad dictator in Cairo.

But the world watched with horror. The American president, Dwight Eisenhower, phoned up Eden, saying: “Anthony, are you mad?” and cut off financial support and access to US oil supplies. Tory MPs, beyond the usual lumpen loyalists and knee-jerk Nasser-bashers, then went very quiet.

Johnson should pay heed to Steve Baker, head of the European Research Group (ERG), a pressure group of anti-EU MPs that did all the organising and coordinating to make Theresa May’s life impossible and replace her with Johnson.

Baker stood down this week as leader of the ERG because he says Brexit has happened – thus, mission accomplished. He is not an intellectual or a political theorist, but he is cunning and fluent, and he held the group together.

He is being replaced by Mark Francois, whose election campaigning consists of walking around his constituency with a Union Jack coat on his bulldog, and denouncing to all and sundry the presence of immigrants in Britain.

In 2007, William Hague chose Francois to be shadow minister of state for Europe as a way of pandering to the growing Ukip tendency in the Conservative Party.

In 2010, when Hague became foreign secretary, he shunted Francois into a minor post in the Whips’ Office as it would have been too embarrassing to send the boorish Europhobe to represent the UK in European capitals.

Francois can be expected to parrot Johnson’s anti-EU lines, but there is an internal contradiction between Baker’s belief that Brexit has happened and any future statement by Johnson that this is not the case and that the UK has to go for a full-on rupture by walking out of talks.

In a world fearful of the coronavirus and uncertain about Trump’s isolationist and protectionist tendencies, rejecting all cooperation and patient dialogue with Europe will seem badly misjudged.

The Tories will have to raise taxes or massively increase government borrowing, which Sajid Javid warned against in his resignation speech. The government will soon have to make decisions soon will annoy a lot of people and upset business.

The proposal by some ministers to open UK supermarket shelves to food produced by corrupt American food and agro giants, which operate under much lower safety standards, has been denounced by Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union, as “immoral and insane”. This should be heeded as a warning shot.

Tory shire MPs are very close to farmers, and “red wall” Tory MPs must be uneasy when they hear the CEO of Nissan’s European operations saying that losing existing market access would lead to the closure of the Sunderland plant.

So is this where Tory MPs want to be? With Johnson threatening to walk out, implying that Brexit has not been done, and the fight against Europe going on and on?

Or is this Suez-style bluster and briefing merely tactical? Can he move from out-and-out anti-Europeanism to something more sensible, calm and less dramatic?

Steve Baker insists that Brexit has happened and is over, but Johnson’s plan to walk out might mean that the Brexit battle has only just begun.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of state for Europe. His latest book is Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain, published by IB Tauris