Boris Johnson has been lucky with Lord Geidt’s resignation

The twist in Lord Geidt’s tale was that it was a threat to break international law that finally pushed him over the edge. The prime minister’s adviser on ministerial standards said in his letter of resignation that he could just about live with Boris Johnson breaking domestic criminal law.

“I believed that it was possible to continue credibly as [an] independent adviser, albeit by a very small margin,” Lord Geidt said, after the prime minister explained that he thought it was all right for him to be fined for breaking coronavirus law.

But then on Monday, the prime minister asked him to advise on “potential future decisions” about protecting the British steel industry by continuing to apply tariffs that “might be seen to conflict with our obligations under the World Trade Organisation”, as Johnson put it in his reply to Geidt’s letter. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is set up by treaties, which means that its rules are international law.

Geidt said this went too far. If the prime minister went ahead with these tariffs, or if he even had “an intention to do so”, it “would make a mockery” of the ministerial code. Presumably, Johnson had made clear to Geidt that this was indeed his intention, because Geidt quit saying: “I can have no part in this.”

It seems strange that Geidt was prepared to live with the prime minister breaking lockdown law, for which most voters think he should resign, but could have no part in Johnson merely intending to break an international law, which most voters would probably support if it meant saving the British steel industry.

That is why Geidt’s resignation will be survivable for the prime minister. Before we knew what it was about, Dame Diana Johnson, a Labour MP, asked an excellent pointed question in the Commons: “What is it about the prime minister that causes him to have such rotten luck in retaining ethics and anti-corruption advisers?”

But now that we know it was about steel tariffs, that puts Labour in an awkward position, because it can hardly afford to take the purist free trade line of arguing that cheap Chinese steel ought to be allowed to undercut British production.

In fact, after a week of the prime minister’s critics working themselves into a state of high dudgeon about his willingness to break international law, Geidt’s resignation confirms that this may be less of a problem for Boris Johnson than it seems.

The important thing about international law is that it is not usually as clear-cut as a guilty verdict from a court, or even a fixed penalty notice issued by the police. We ought to be wise by now to Johnson’s international law-breaking bark being louder than his bite.

He has published a bill which would give ministers the power to override the Northern Ireland protocol, which is part of a treaty and therefore part of international law, but he doesn’t want to do it. The bill is a negotiating tactic, designed to put pressure on the EU to give him a deal that he can sell to the Democratic Unionist Party. Johnson needs the DUP to cooperate in restoring devolved government in Northern Ireland, which is a far from ignoble aim, although the prime minister’s critics seem to think he wants to tear up the protocol for the sake of it.

Equally, Johnson also said this week that “it very well may be” necessary for the UK to reject the authority of the European Court of Human Rights after its injunction against sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. “All these options are under constant review,” he said. But he and his spokespeople were unwilling to say whether these options included repudiating the European Convention altogether.

The most that Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, was prepared to say was that he was looking at the possibility of not enforcing the European court’s injunctions if the British courts had already considered the matter. In this case, both the UK Supreme Court and the European court considered injunctions under the convention and came to opposite conclusions within a few hours of each other.

Johnson was being nothing but factual when he said that the options are under constant review. I remember when Theresa May, then home secretary, said in 2013: “All options, including leaving the ECHR altogether, should be on the table.”

Johnson’s reputation as an international law-breaker was partly created by Dominic Cummings, his former chief adviser, when they were trying to break the Brexit deadlock. But he hasn’t actually broken international law.

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We have been round this course before. Tony Blair stalled for time when the European court ordered him in 2005 to allow British prisoners to vote. David Cameron finally got round to publishing a draft bill in 2012 setting out some options for giving the vote to prisoners serving shorter sentences. Nothing actually happened until 2017, when the Council of Europe, the court’s supervisory body, agreed a compromise with Theresa May’s government, granting the right to prisoners on temporary licence.

The same sort of thing happened the last time there was a fuss about the government “breaking international law”, when Johnson threatened to do so in a “limited and specific” way at the time of the EU trade negotiations in late 2020. Jonathan Jones, head of the government legal service, resigned in protest. But the trivial and pointless dispute was over the need for exit summary declarations on goods leaving Northern Ireland for the rest of the UK. In the end, the EU agreed to scrap them.

Much the same is likely to happen after the latest kerfuffle about Northern Ireland trade, as well as over the other potential breaches of international law – over asylum cases and steel tariffs. These will end in compromise agreements and Johnson will sail on, looking for a new adviser on ministerial standards.