How Boris came in like a wrecking ball

A key issue is Boris Johnson's legitimacy. He is taking the country on a course which sails very close to being against the spirit of the British constitution if not the actual letter, which fundamentally recasts the United Kingdom's relations with the rest of the world by withdrawing from the European Union regardless of whether there is a deal in place or not, and he is doing all this without ever winning either a vote in Parliament or a general election.

He has no mandate for his "no deal" option from the Tory election manifesto of 2017, and the only basis for his occupation of 10 Downing Street is the support of less than a 100,000 members of the Conservative Party in a leadership ballot. In the preliminary ballot among Tory MPs, a third voted against him.

One biographer of Boris Johnson, Andrew Gimson, quoted a letter Johnson's housemaster at Eton had written to his parents, observations which seem as relevant today as the day they were made.

"Boris sometimes seem affronted," he wrote, "when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility... I think he honestly believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligations which binds everyone else."

The British constitution rests on conventions – what might be termed customs and practices cemented by generations of usage. These are "networks of obligations" which bind politicians as they go about their daily business. They presuppose an agreed code of acceptable behaviour, and the existence of social sanctions which are applied to those who do not honour it.

We have a demonstration of those sanctions at work in the outcry, part honest and part theatrical, directed at Boris Johnson because of his latest tactics. This is using the prorogation of Parliament to limit the amount of time his opponents have available to frustrate his Brexit policy. He may be within the law – the courts will decide – but he has clearly broken the code by which prime ministers are expected to govern. His lack of a mandate or of any vestige of democratic legitimacy worries him not at all.

It has to be said that Theresa May already tried this tactic, for instance when she briefly defied the will of Parliament concerning the publication of legal advice she had received. It is not difficult to imagine that there were too many worried conversations in Parliamentary corridors, too many senior Tory heads being shaken and too many lips being pursed, for this to be sustainable for long. She was held to be in contempt of Parliament, but she was susceptible to social pressure. The point of the Eton housemaster's letter is that Boris Johnson is not. He is a wrecking ball in the middle of the finely balanced forces which prop up the constitution, preventing it collapsing in on itself.

Now maybe Brexit always was so difficult a journey that some such exercise of non-consensual wilfulness would ultimately be necessary to deliver it, and maybe that is why Johnson was, from a pro-Brexit point of view, the right choice after all. Mrs May had tried sweet reason and failed. Alternatively, if Brexit could only be delivered by such means, does that not prove that Brexit never was a reasonable project – never was compatible with the social conventions that British political discourse is normally governed by? And hence, should never have been tried and now should be abandoned?

I am inclined to think so. And jumping into the cold bath of Brexit without a single glance in the direction of the Irish border problem was reckless. That is merely one instance of a "gross failure of responsibility". There are many others, and the blame lies much wider than with Mr Johnson alone. Indeed, David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister who triggered the referendum assuming he was bound to win it, is the grandfather of this whole mess. At least he played by the rules, somewhat. There is little evidence that Boris has ever seen a copy of them.