Boris Johnson is the self-appointed ‘will of the people’ now – it doesn’t matter what we want

It’s the simple messages that cut through in politics. Take Back Control. It’s the Economy, Stupid. F**k the Tories. That sort of thing. The art is to craft a message that is clear in intent, but which can mean different things to different people.

So how are we to judge: “Get Ready”? These are the two words that head up the government’s £100m campaign to ensure that we, the public, are prepared for Brexit. Apparently, they considered dusting off Take Back Control, but thought better of it.

Only I’ve wasted about an hour reading about CE conformity assessments and tariff-rate quotas on the new “Get Ready” site and I’m still not sure what I’m getting ready for. To rumble, as per Ant and Dec, 1994? Or for the train that is a-coming, as per Curtis Mayfield, 1965? (“There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner / Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own”). For rationing and medicine shortages? Or for pro-democracy protests and form-filling? No one wrote anything about that on the side of a bus, as far as I recall.

It’s sort of impressive that three years on from the referendum, we are no closer to learning what Brexit actually entails. “There’s a good chance we’ll get a deal and there’s a good chance that we won’t,” Boris Johnson unclarified in his interview with The Sunday Times. It remains “mad riddle”, as Danny Dyer once put it.

But while the WHAT remains nebulous, the HOW is taking shape. People, get ready... for a prime minister stuffing the House of Lords with Brexit ultras, deselecting Conservative MPs who disagree with him, asking his “ally”, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to do his dirty work with the EU while forcing the Queen to overrule parliament so that he can get his way. We don’t know what that “way” is. But that shouldn’t worry us since Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is the embodiment of the will of the people, so whatever he decides upon MUST be in our interests.

“Are you going to side with those who want to scrub the democratic verdict of the people and plunge this country into chaos?” he asked. “Or are you going to side with those of us who want to get on, deliver on the mandate of the people and focus with absolute, laser-like precision on the domestic agenda.” By way of a bribe: billions upon billions of spending promises that make you wonder what the point of nine years of miserable Tory austerity really was.

So far, Johnson has been able to build his career on constructive ambiguity. I don’t mean that we don’t know who he is; we really should by now. I mean that he grabs hold of principles when they suit him and drops them when they don’t. He is a One Person Tory before he is a One Nation Tory. In one of the most characteristic lines in his interview, he pulls back from an un-PC carbon-fuelled analogy while describing his spending plans: “I was going to say [we’re going] ‘full throttle’ except that would be to use a metaphor from the era of hydrocarbon-fuelled transport which we’re now leaving behind...”

Quips like that aren’t incidental to his appeal among Conservatives. Humour has allowed him to square circles, make retrograde stances seem progressive and vice versa. He is the man who wrote the pro-Leave and a prove-Remain column, the man who might get us a deal or might not. You don’t know! He can paint proroguing parliament as a completely normal piece of procedure and also as a genius tactical move, like “bringing a submachine gun to a knife fight”, as one acolyte stupidly put it.

What we do know is that once Johnson has grabbed his principle, he will barge ahead with it. We don’t know how he will pentagon the ellipse of the Irish backstop. Michel Barnier insists that it cannot be done. But no matter! Johnson has the rugby ball, and the backstop is a mere Japanese school child in his path. This is the spirit in which he clearly intends to govern.

But at some point, he will smack into reality.

Prime ministers are always undone by what at first seems to be their strength. And it is palpably absurd for him to claim that he represents the people. His legitimacy stems from 90,000 or so paid-up Conservative activists. The legitimacy of parliament stems from the 32 million people who voted in the 2017 general election. Moreover, the Conservatives won the most votes in that election by promising to sign “the best possible deal with the European Union”. There are clearly many Leavers who don’t give a damn about that at this point. There are many who will make sleight of hand arguments to imply that all 17.4 million Leave voters are as one.

But at the street protests that erupted at the weekend, there was something more visceral in the air. Johnson is trashing the British constitution as if he were still in the Bullingdon Club. A member of the elite is claiming that he matters more than you. The public schoolboys are cheating. Fair play isn’t being served. It’s easy to understand that. It’s democracy, stupid.