How The Law May Bite Back At Boris Johnson. Big Time

Sign up now to get The Waugh Zone, our weekday evening politics briefing, by email. 

No one expected John Bercow to go gently into the good night of his Commons speakership. His granting of emergency debates recently showed he clearly fully intends to make life as difficult as possible for Boris Johnson’s attempts to sideline parliament, despite the prorogation.

But tonight, Bercow went even further as he delivered the annual lecture at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. The clue was in the title as he warned he won’t let the PM get round the Benn Act, recently passed to delay Brexit beyond October 31 in the event of no-deal.

The Speaker said that suggestions that Johnson could defy the law were “frankly astonishing”. Moreover, he used a comparison that was very pointed indeed, claiming it would be like justifying “robbing a bank on the basis that the cash stolen would be donated to a charitable cause immediately afterwards.”

That felt very much like a jibe at Johnson’s own infamous remarks about Muslim women in burkas looking like ‘bank robbers’. The echoes of Labour MP Tan Singh Dhesi’s stinging attack on the PM were not hard to hear.

Bercow then doubled down. In one typically verbose section he ad-libbed from his script to actually compare Johnson to a knife-wielding street gang member:

“Not obeying the law must surely be a non-starter. What conceivable moral force do the public’s elected representatives have in seeking to tackle anti-social behaviour, in prosecuting with greater vigour and relentlessness the fight against knife crime, arguing the state must protect itself against all sorts of nefarious illegality, if we are to treat for the moment of the proposition that it might be in order … to disregard a law enacted by parliament?”

Told you it was verbose, but you get the point. 

Most interesting of all, Bercow gave a less than veiled hint that he would fully facilitate any novel wheezes by MPs to bind the PM’s hands. “I would imagine that parliament would want to cut off such a possibility and to do so forcefully. If that demands additional procedural creativity to come to pass, it is a racing certainty that this will happen and that neither the limitations of the existing rulebook nor the ticking of the clock will stop it doing so.” Ominous? You betcha.

Bercow then rolled out the big gun which he thinks will blitz Boris. He said a new “Parliamentary Powers Act might be introduced to entrench the authority of the House of Commons and ensure that the rule of law is never distorted or perverted by executive malpractice”. Boom. Shak-a-laka.

There’s no question that some in government have been actively looking at just how and whether the Benn Act can be challenged in court. Dominic Raab has already suggested he wants to ‘test’ the law, while upholding the law.

In our Commons People podcast this week, former Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer pours a bucket of manure over the very suggestion, telling us it is “low class garbage” to even propagate the idea.