Will Johnson 'get Brexit done' if elected?

Conservative candidate and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeated throughout the six-week long election campaign that he will "get Brexit done" if elected, but he could face some hurdles even if he manages to get his Withdrawal Agreement past Parliament.

In a research note published by JP Morgan earlier in the same week, there are various possible outcomes for Brexit even assuming that Boris Johnson came out of the 12 December poll as the next PM.

Should the Tories secure a majority in Westminster, the most likely outcome is that Johnson will finally be able to get his WA bill passed after it was shot down by MPs on numerous occassions during the previous Parliament, the investment bank's analysts said, meaning that the UK would effectively leave the European Union by late January 2020.

Still, the withdrawal deal is but one part of the Brexit negotiations with Brussels.

There remains the matter of the long-term relationship with the bloc once the UK leaves, which both sides would need to negotiate and codify, and the deadline for doing that is now only just over a year away.

The EU has already said that it would be extremely difficult to hammer out the details of a trade agreement in that time-frame even though Johnson has repeatedly pledged he will not ask for an extension.

According to JP Morgan, there are four possible long-term Brexit scenarios assuming Johnson is elected.

In the first scenario, Johnson would agree to legislate for a referendum as a means to progress the Brexit process. It would not necessarily be a Brexit referendum with the same question as in 2016, but it could ask whether to accept a given version of his withdrawal deal or exit the transition period without one.

“Such a referendum could come about not because PM Johnson favours it, but because he is unable to sustain a Commons majority to implement a course that avoids one. It is possible that such a referendum requires an extension of the transition period into 2021 so that it can be held," JP Morgan said.

Nonetheless, the investment bank conceded that was the least likely scenario, focusing instead on the other three.

The other scenarios that the bank considered were exiting the transition period without a deal in place, agreeing a deal under which a new Treaty would establish the conditions that would apply from January 2021 onwards or extending the transition period into 2021.

And the investment bank believed that an extension to the transition period was the most likely option, regardless of the Conservative manifesto.

It also predicted that when the transition period ended and trade negotiations had concluded, the UK would be left facing a choice between accepting a narrow, disadvantageous trade deal, leaving without a deal, or pushing for more negotiating time via the extension that it had hitherto rejected.

But not everyone was quite as skeptical.

According to Reuters, if Johnson scored a big victory, he could then speed up negotiations with the bloc by promising that Britain would not diverge from EU business regulations, environmental rules and labour standards.

But if the Conservative leader only clinched a small majority, he would once again be at the mercy of the Tory hardliners who had pushed for a lightly-regulated UK which they said would be able to strike ambitious trade deals with the likes of the United States and China.

That would complicate striking a deal with the EU.

In that case, Reuters said that Johnson could be facing another political crisis within a year.

Regardless of the outcome for Brexit, only one thing was sure, it will not "get done" anytime soon.