 Can governments have a little law breaking as a treat? In what feels very much like a season one throwback, the country might be hurtling towards no deal as Boris Johnson threatens to blow up negotiations with the EU. What's the problem? As ever, it's the sticky issue of whether measures taken to avoid the need for a hard border on the island of Ireland constituting outrageous impingement on UK sovereignty. So far, so 2019. After the internal market bill passed at second reading by 77 votes, Tory backbenchers are all over flutter. I believe very strongly that we should obey international law. How can the government reassure future international partners that the UK can be trusted? I cannot vote for legislation that a cabinet minister stated from the dispatch box will break international law. Taking the view that playing fast and loose with Britain's international treaties constitutes a breach of the professional codes they signed up to, civil servants Sir Jonathan Jones and the government's law officer for Scotland, Lord Keane, tended their resignations. Lobby journalists are clacking about all over the shop, predicting big trouble for Boris Johnson unless he can modify the moderates in his party. Sound familiar? Well, it's basically prorogation to electric boogaloo. So, what's going on? The TLDR is having spent the last winter telling the country that the withdrawal agreement that the government negotiated is a fantastic deal, won an election on the promise to get Brexit done, and passed said deal in parliament with a shiny new ATC majority. The Prime Minister has now decided that there are unacceptable problems with the Northern Ireland protocol. I regret to have to tell the House that in recent months, the EU has suggested that it is willing to go to extreme and unreasonable lengths. Using the Northern Ireland protocol in a way that goes well beyond common sense. The Northern Ireland protocol, which, if you can cast your mind back, was supposed to be the better alternative to Theresa May's backstop, would create a customs barrier down the Irish Sea and keep Northern Ireland in the single market for goods. The protocol contains provisions for a joint committee to be set up to determine which goods exported from the mainland are at risk of entering the EU, and therefore should be subject to full tariffs as they cross the sea border rather than the land one. If there's no agreement between the two sides, the default position is that tariffs must be paid. Are you still with me? The government is now saying that this gives the EU too much power over what goes on in the UK's internal market, and that eggs going from Barkshire to Belfast are nobody's business but our own. The problem is, the Northern Ireland protocol is already international law. Is it a treaty signed by both parties ratified in our parliament this year and consented to by the European one? So this is where the internal market bill comes in. The legislation overrides the bits of the treaty that the government doesn't like, but interestingly doesn't actually contain any measures to deal with the threat of food blockade at all. Its supporters claim that this in itself can't be unlawful, because parliament's lawmaking power can't be bound by decisions made by previous parliament, and sticklers might want to point out that it was this parliament that ratified the treaty in the first place. The milk monitors of Westminster are less than happy with the idea that the government not only intends to break international law, but isn't even bothering to pretend like it isn't. Yes, this does break international law. This has united all five living former prime ministers in disdain. Theresa May spoke out against the bill, and David Cameron emerged from his 25 grand shed to condemn the move. Gordon Brown called the internal market bill an act of self-harm, while John Major and Tony Blair co-authored an opinion piece calling the legislation the Iraq of Mutual Recognition Measures. Okay, that's not strictly true. They called it irresponsible wrong in principle and dangerous in practice, which from Tony Blair is a bit… So are we heading for a no-deal? Maybe. It is worth remembering that we've been here before. Ratcheting up the threat of no-deal and driving a steamroller over constitutional norms by unlawfully proroguing parliament worked really well for Boris Johnson last year. He managed to fudge the Northern Ireland border and got a deal. He even secured the support of ERG hardliners, despite the fact that the withdrawal agreement was all that dissimilar from the one that got Theresa May defenestrated. It might be that the internal market bill is simply intended to add a bit of muscle to their WTO threats and help extract concessions and trade negotiations with the EU. Equally, they might just be squid ink to disguise Johnson's own capitulations, and also might be the case that this is all part of a clever plan, but we end up with an accidental no-deal anyway. What's clearer, and perhaps in the long term more significant, is that Johnson's government has bet that only geeks and remainers really care about constitutional norms. The Tories are at a solid 42% in the polls, and reviving the Brexit Forever War is no bad thing when COVID infections are on the up and no one can get a test. And also, this is music to the ears of the likes of Suella Braverman. Usually, an Attorney General's job is to provide legal advice to the government to make sure they're not blundering into any illegal no-nos. But with Suella Braverman's long-standing disdain for the process of judicial review, support for last year's unlawful prerogation, and commitment to booting bits of the withdrawal agreement into Rosie, it's clear she considers her role a little differently. She's not looking to uphold the law. She's interested in making sure it doesn't impinge on the power of government. The legal argument basically being that parliamentary sovereignty is the shiny charizard of constitutional norms and if you don't like it, it's entirely constitutional and lawful in domestic law to enact legislation that may operate in breach of international law or treaty obligations. Will this be a problem for the Conservatives? Well, breaching international agreements might not be great when you're looking to strike a shit-ton of bilateral trade agreements in the near future. But on the domestic front, there's a fair chunk of the population which quite likes the idea of Britain being a swaggering rule breaker on the international stage. When citizens break the law, they face the law. But when governments break the law, they change the law. And anything else is just finicky nitpicking and we've got more important things to think about. Thank you very much. The public care more about individualized acts of hypocrisy like dominant comings drive up to Durham, but not so much about the rules constraining the power of government so long as they're getting on with it. That's a hospitable environment for a nationalist populist project.