Boris Johnson’s tactics have all blown up in his face

The House of Commons has been sitting for only five days since Boris Johnson became prime minister six weeks ago – and in the last four of those days, last week and today, all the prime minister’s plans have been torn up and thrown back in his face.

He saw his opponents coming and tried to foil them. But he couldn’t suspend parliament altogether and, by restricting the number of days it could sit, he succeeded only in injecting a sense of urgency into the Conservative MPs who disagreed with his policy of getting out of the EU “come what may” at the end of October.

So last week, the House of Commons voted to take control of its own timetable from the government. It was such an unusual manoeuvre, using an emergency debate in a way it had never been used before, that many constitutional experts had said it couldn’t happen.

Many politics experts, meanwhile, expressed doubts about whether there really were enough Tory MPs prepared to vote against their own government. But when it came to it, the bill to block a no-deal Brexit was passed by a majority of 28 votes.

And the real drama came on Thursday, when Labour MPs refused to vote for an early election. More than that, though, it became clear that they wouldn’t vote for an election even after a no-deal Brexit was ruled out by law. Thus MPs will vote tonight to avoid a general election, despite the anti-no-deal bill receiving the royal assent this afternoon.

That means the prime minister has five weeks to negotiate a deal that he can get through the Commons at the last moment in October. He has run out of other options. If he can’t get a deal, he will have to resign and demand to fight an election after some other prime minister has secured the Brexit extension required by law.

I don’t think there are many other devices that Johnson can deploy. Everything he has tried has blown up in his face. Most of today’s parliamentary business – the part that wasn’t devoted to hero-worship of the outgoing speaker – was devoted to long expressions of outrage about the tactics the prime minister has used so far.

John Bercow allowed two further emergency debates: one on the horrors of prorogation (which didn’t work), and one on the off-the-record suggestions that the prime minister might refuse to obey the anti-no-deal law (which won’t happen).

The situation is as simple as it seemed before Johnson won the Tory leadership election. There is a majority in this parliament against a no-deal Brexit. In the end, the only ways round that immovable object are to agree a deal or to elect a new parliament. For a time, while parliament wasn’t sitting, the new prime minister managed to persuade a lot of people that he could take the UK out of the EU without a deal if necessary – through sheer force of assertion.

Now we know he can’t. His premiership is wounded, weakened and stranded for five weeks, while the parties will hold annual conferences and his stripped-down negotiating team will try, desperately, to rewrite the protocol on the Irish border so that the undemocratic backstop can be rebranded as a democratic backstop.

If he can’t do that, his last throw would be to resign, in the expectation that this would force the Commons, somehow, to vote for an election – given that Tory MPs won’t make Corbyn prime minister and Labour MPs won’t allow Kenneth Clarke to be prime minister for long.

MPs will vote tonight – or, rather, they will sit on their hands – to avoid an election on 15 October. But once Johnson has been weakened sufficiently, they must vote for one eventually, probably in late November or early December.