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Hi Boris. If you would like low cost consultancy on basic game theory, I can help. Might stop you making mistakes like this one.
Key thing to get straight is what the costs and benefits of different strategies and outcomes are.
This will help you unlock the correct answer to the question: will the EU throw Ireland under the bus and erode the integrity of the single market to avoid a no deal that is worse for us than it is for them?
Once you have acquired the preliminary logical machinery of calculating the payoffs, we could then proceed to the Econ 102 module of working out what the other side thinks are your payoffs.
If I managed to guide you through this part of the territory successfully, we would then go on to what the other side thinks other people on your side think are the payoffs, and this is rather pertienent to the current case study of your contemplating no deal.
You see, because many of your fellow MPs understand what the payoffs are for the UK and the EU with no deal, they often talk about them. And the EU has thereby managed to grasp what those on your own side think about them.
Regrettably, it seems that someone has been explaining this basic game theory to them too, and they have figured out that not only is no deal not a rational plan for the UK, but most MPs also think this!
Of course, all good teachers have to consider the possibility that pupils are much brighter than they are letting on.
Despite the obvious head starts you had in life it must have taken some acumen to wrestle yourself to the top of the pile you joined. Perhaps you know all these payoffs already!
What then explains why you continue to advocate a strategy that is not going to work, even when it makes you look like you have not the slightest grasp of the calculations going on? What cunning has led to this being the right thing to do?
Despite my presumptuous and rhetorical offer, could it be that it is I that need schooling in the subtleties of game theory, and not your machinating self?
If we look at the bind you find yourself in now, the task of reaching the very top of the pile requires persuading Tory Party members that you will do what they want and think is right.
Let's hyopothesize that they don't understand the situation [it's they who need my services explaining game theory!] or if they do they don't value things the way the rest of the country does [perhaps they don't need to work any more being near the end of their lives].
Why, in this case, if there was no way of disabusing them of these misconceptions about the payoffs, or persuading them to care about the lives of others who *do* need to work, it might pay you to *pretend* that you have the same imbecillic or selfish view of the matter as they!
Of course this dark but majesterial logic cannot possibly be right, can it, because it would imply that despite the shining tradition of public service in politics you are not acting in the interests of the country, or perhaps even in the interests of Tory Party members?
It's an interesting thought, though. Because it leads to the question of what, supposing again that you don't in fact need my Econ 101 services, you will do once you are freed from the need to please these Tory members who have had the wool pulled over their eyes like this.
At that point, you face the EU who you told these Tory members you had to look in the eye with conviction. And you face the general electorate.
You will look the EU in the eye with conviction, but - following this train of thought - not the conviction you described to Tory Party members. But the conviction that - as the EU know already - no deal would be bad for you, the UK, and is not wanted by most MPs.
And the general electorate: you might hope that they too can have the wool pulled over their eyes, or persuaded by the threat of the greater evil of Marxism, or incited to self harm by some jingoism you conjur about yokes and the 2nd world war.
You would probably calculate that this would work better before no deal has actually happened than afterwards, because afterwards they can actually see what it means for them, rather than have its predicted effects mediated through your own strategically tuned filter.
