In an ideal world, Boris Johnson’s approach to Brexit might just bring divided Britain together

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Remainers should live in hope that a version of the following will unfold: Boris Johnson, realistic about parliamentary arithmetic, will agree with the EU a change to the political agreement pushing out the Brexit date and committing to full negotiations on a trade agreement and Irish border technology.

In return, the EU will require UK electoral endorsement of the deal. Johnson will claim that he has done spiffingly to secure the interim tariff standstill that was always the real priority in his canny negotiation.

He will opt for an early election, campaigning for leaving the EU on the “Johnson deal”. The Lib Dems will win enough seats to bring about the departure of Corbyn, a coalition of the centre and an early referendum. The UK will remain in the EU and a divided country will gradually heal.

Steven Fogel
London NW11

There is no Brexit solution

Plan A is to renegotiate the Brexit deal and come out with a deal on 31 October. But the EU has been very clear that it’s not about to renegotiate either the withdrawal agreement or the backstop, and the Irish PM is not having it either.

Plan B is to leave with no deal, but get a “standstill” arrangement from 1 November to prevent crippling new tariffs. This sounds like: “I wish Gatt 24 could do what I thought it did!”

Plan C is to leave with no deal and no standstill arrangement. Absolutely silly to the point of being moronic. I keep coming up with an idea of a scheme, whereby Brexit is just the pawn in the game, while those with substantial spare cash and access simply “short” on the pound on the stock exchange while prolonging the state of uncertainty. No! Couldn’t happen, could it?

Any way you look at it, Brexit is a hijack of our democracy. Any authentic government would have found out the facts and rejected it three years ago on the clear grounds of its lack of substance and sheer implausibility.

I’ll say what I see. It looks like a scam to me. And we lose any which way but revoking Article 50. Why isn’t that happening?

Michael Cunliffe
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Democracy is at risk

Once we are over the brief hilarity of having Bozo the Clown at No 10, the full implications of such an error of democracy will become apparent.

Churchill said that in wartime the truth is “so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”. In an attempt to emulate the man he will never become, Boris Johnson’s equivalent is to surround himself with a “bodyguard” of his fellow liars in cabinet, to ensure that the truth is never allowed free expression. The exceptionally tangled web he has woven will, one day, unravel; let us hope it is not too late to save the United Kingdom from disaster.

Matt Minshall
Norfolk

A bitter pill

I hope you will let me add a few thoughts to Tom Peck’s perceptive article “Boris in No 10 is an act of national vandalism”.

For anglophiles in Continental Europe – to whose camp I once belonged – Boris Johnson is a bitter pill. He has become living proof that even an overinflated fool can make it into Eton and Oxford. What his country badly needs is the warning voice of another Old Etonian, one Eric Arthur Blair, who went by the name George Orwell. At best, Johnson is a character out of Nineteen Eighty Four – he would have been at home in the Ministry of Truth. Actually, we may also credit him with most of the qualities of the pigs Napoleon and Squealer in Animal Farm.

Georges Waser
Carshalton, Greater London

Another independence referendum

Given the Scottish first minister’s opposition to the UK leaving the EU with no deal, can we now be reassured she will apply this same rationale to Scotland in the UK?

If she ever gets her way over a second independence referendum and, with a rush of blood to the head, the people of Scotland choose separation; will Nicola Sturgeon conclude that after a couple of years of being unable to agree a mutually satisfactory deal with the UK, we should remain in the UK to avoid a no-deal exit?

Keith Howell
West Linton, Scottish Borders

No paternity leave for self-employed

I have recently discovered paternity leave is currently unavailable to self-employed men.

This seems a terribly archaic and unfair oversight, especially considering self-employed men often have even less flexibility in their working hours than employed ones.

We must raise awareness of this inequality if we have any hope for it to be rectified.

Abi Newis
Address supplied