According to Dominic Cummings, the prime minister is either stupid or dishonest

The more Dominic Cummings calls Boris Johnson stupid, the clearer it becomes who has outwitted whom. The prime minister’s former chief adviser had another go at telling the world how useless his former boss is on Twitter last night. This predictably sent much of the website into meltdown, because the one person very online Remainers hate more than Johnson is Cummings. Yet Cummings attacks the prime minister with such extravagant venom, and from a position of such insider authority, that they cannot help but thrill to the takedown.

Johnson “never had a scoobydoo what the deal he signed meant”, Cummings said, claiming that “we” agreed to a Brexit deal with no intention of sticking to it. “We wriggled through with best option we could and intended to get the [shopping trolley – his name for Johnson] to ditch bits we didn’t like after whacking Corbyn,” wrote Cummings.

Later in the Twitter thread, the “we” becomes “I”, when someone pointed out that Lord Frost, the Brexit minister who negotiated the deal, said the government intended to implement the Northern Ireland protocol, despite its concerns when signing it. “He has to say that! It was never my intention,” said Cummings. “I always intended an internal market bill after we won a majority, to tidy things up. The trolley obviously never understood what was going on at any stage. He didn’t even understand what the customs union was until November 2020.”

This is all most enjoyable for those Remainers who want to see their enemies being rude about each other. Never mind that Cummings held the title of most hated person in Britain for several months in 2020 after he fled to Durham and took a day trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown: my enemy’s enemy must be right because he tells me what I want to hear.

What a lot of people want to hear is that Boris Johnson is a uniquely dishonest politician who has made a mess of Brexit, and they don’t care who tells them, because they agree that the prime minister is like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel zigzagging all over the place – even though that metaphor was originally coined by Johnson himself in a brief mood of self-deprecation as he tried to make up his mind about Brexit in February 2016.

But there are problems with Cummings’s story, the most obvious of which is that Johnson is in Downing Street with a majority of 81 while his former chief adviser is on Twitter, ranting. If the prime minister is dumb, he is dumb like a fox, as George W Bush’s mother described the two-term president of the US.

So, no, I don’t believe that Johnson had no idea what he was signing, and I think he understood what the customs union was when he resigned from Theresa May’s government over it in 2018.

That of course poses the opposite problem for the prime minister, which is that he was therefore like Cummings in that he “wriggled through” with a deal he knew was defective, intending to sort out the problems later, after he had got Britain out of the EU. In the Cummings cosmology, Johnson has to be either stupid or dishonest.

Except that there is a third way, which I think is closest to the truth, which is that Johnson is an effective politician. He knew that the Brexit deal wasn’t perfect, but he thought it was good enough and that the problems genuinely could be sorted out later. I assume that is what David Frost, Johnson’s negotiator, thought too.

They were vindicated in this view when it came to the customs declaration forms that Johnson told Northern Irish business people to throw “in the bin” during the 2019 election campaign. At the time he said it, the EU would have been entitled to insist that such forms be completed for goods going from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK, but Johnson gambled that the EU could be persuaded that such pointless bureaucracy wouldn’t be needed. In the end, it was persuaded, although it took a bit of Johnson/Cummings creative chaos to get there: those were the checks that would have been the subject of the “limited and specific” breach of international law threatened by the UK government before the EU trade deal was signed last year.

Similarly, Johnson and Frost seem to have got their way on sausages, on which the British position seems reasonable to me – that British chilled meats intended for sale in Northern Irish supermarkets should not have to be frozen as if they were arriving in the EU internal market from outside. I think the prime minister was entitled to assume that a pragmatic solution could be found by agreement in the joint committee that supervises the implementation of the protocol.

That is why I think the protocol can work, and the proposals tabled by the EU side today show a lot of the flexibility needed to make it work. Lord Frost’s demand that the treaty be rewritten to exclude a role for the European Court is either a negotiating ploy or an attempt to appease anti-protocol sentiment among Northern Irish unionists, or both, but it doesn’t prevent sensible compromises being found.

I would bet that Johnson and Frost are more likely to succeed pursuing their present course than if the Conservative Party took the advice of Dominic Cummings to “ditch significant bits” of the protocol, for which, as he said, it “will need a new prime minister”.