The EU knows it, so do our own MPs – Theresa May is finished
European leaders have known for some time that the prime minister wasn’t up to the Brexit job. This week she’s proved it
The EU has no time for Theresa May, which doesn’t mean there is no flexibility in the Brexit timetable. Continental leaders have granted an article 50 extension, but not the one requested by the prime minister. She had pitched for a new departure date of 30 June. She was given 39 days fewer, until 22 May. And that date only stands if parliament ratifies the deal.
If May flunks another meaningful vote, the extension gets shorter – 12 April is the new cliff-edge that comes into view. That date marks the point at which Britain would have to start organising European parliament elections, should it want another even longer extension. A national change of heart on the whole Brexit business would still be welcome in Brussels but it is not expected, and the priority is to escort a troublesome ex-member off the premises with a minimum of disruption before those MEP ballots get under way.
Does May like this plan? It doesn’t matter. She wasn’t in the room where it happened. The summit conclusions were handed down to the petitioning nation as it paced around an antechamber. This is the power relationship between a “third country” and the EU. Britain had better get used to it.
The terms of the extension are not drafted for the prime minister’s benefit. They contain a message from the EU direct to the House of Commons. In crude terms: piss or get off the pot. If you want to leave with a deal, vote for the damned deal. If you are foolish enough to leave without a deal, do not blame us. Have a couple more weeks to think about it. But if you want something else, a referendum or a softer Brexit, work it out soon. And then send someone who isn’t Theresa May to talk to us about it.
EU leaders cannot say explicitly that they no longer want to deal with the current prime minister. Urging regime change is beyond the pale of normal diplomacy among democratic states. But there is no effort to conceal the frustration in May or the evacuation of confidence in her as a negotiating partner. The one thing everyone in Brussels, Berlin and Paris had most wanted to avoid from an article 50 extension was giving May a licence to carry on behaving as she has done for what feels like an eternity. They could no longer tolerate the hollow shell of a prime minister shuttling back and forth between Tory hardliners demanding fantasy Brexits and Brussels negotiators who trade in realities.
There is a difference between patience with the prime minister and readiness to help her country navigate through its current crisis. There are still stores of goodwill available for Britain in Brussels, but they cannot be unlocked by May.
The bankruptcy of May’s overseas enterprise has been coming since the day she set up shop in No 10. The squandering of credibility started almost at once, with the appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary in 2016. Only someone with a tin ear for European sensibilities would have given the top diplomat job to a man known on the continent as a rogue peddler of anti-Brussels propaganda.
Then there was the early negotiating period, during which EU leaders thought May’s robotic, inscrutable manner concealed a deep, strategic intelligence. They came to realise that there was no mask. The inanity – the reciting of “Brexit means Brexit” even in private meetings – was not the cover story for a secret plan. It was the plan.
The point of no return was the summit in Salzburg last September. May was invited to make the case for what was left of her “Chequers plan” to European heads of government. It was late. They were tired. There were other difficult matters to attend to. And instead of speaking candidly, persuasively, passionately or even just coherently, the British prime minister read mechanically from a text that was, in substance, no different from an op-ed article already published under her name in a German newspaper that morning. It was embarrassing and insulting. Many European diplomats say that was the moment when Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and others realised they were dealing with someone out of her depth, unable to perform at the level required for the job that needed doing.
A similar story is emerging from last night’s summit. May was asked about backup plans in the event that parliament rejects her deal a third time. She had nothing. She restated her determination that the deal should pass. This infuriating obtuseness is grimly familiar on this side of the Channel. Cabinet ministers recognise the experience of being desperate for some glimpse of the prime minister’s calculations. People who want to support her have needed some window into the workings of her political brain, maybe just a peek at her soul. They get nothing. It is hard to build trust with someone so closed and hard to stay loyal.
There was a Salzburg-style moment for pro-European Tories on Wednesday night, when the prime minister went on television to berate MPs for obstructing her deal. The spirit was demagogic, even if the style was typically charmless. Here was a besieged leader, emerging from her bunker, presenting herself as the champion of her people against a rotten parliament. This did not go down well with MPs of any stripe. But it was most counterproductive with moderate Conservatives who have voted for May’s deal twice already and both times seen her respond to defeat by borrowing ideas and rhetoric from the hardliners who have given her nothing but humiliation. She rewards enemies of compromise by becoming ever less compromising.
Wednesday night’s performance exposed something that many of May’s colleagues find uncomfortable to acknowledge: the prime minister’s failure at overseas diplomacy and her failure at domestic politics express a single fatal flaw. She is unable to communicate with others because she has lost the ability to be honest with herself. She has no outward-facing powers of persuasion but she also lacks the introspection necessary to take responsibility for the mess made by her obstinacy. She has crossed a line from stubbornness into megalomania.
That leads to a conclusion that Britain’s continental neighbours reached long ago. Even if the UK ends up leaving the EU on the terms outlined in the prime minister’s deal, her part in the story will very soon be over. She is finished. The problems with Brexit are much bigger than Theresa May’s failings as a leader. But those failings disqualify her from being part of a viable solution.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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My Comments :
1. Apart from the grotesquely frivolous and utterly irresponsible Cameron initiative, to set afloat an (entirely ignorance-based) ADVISORY referendum, in order to "once and for all" silence the ultra-nationalists within the Conservative party, it has been the leadership-contest AFTER Cameron had to relief himself prematurely from his Premiership after the unexpected referendum result, that finally set the conditions for the process of negotiating the withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU over the past two years.
2. After all, after the contenders of this Tory leadership contest in 2016, either took themselves out by way of treasonous behaviour (Gove versus Johnson), or otherwise, the two remaining candidates - Leadsom and May - decided to avoid a prolonged battle over the months to come, by agreeing (after Leadsom proved to be rather too gaffe-prone and too politically inexperienced, to continue anyway)) that the "superior" May should be the successor (in name) of Cameron.
3. It is my well educated guess, that May only has been given the keys of No. 10 by her Party, in exchange for the definite condition, that she should rigorously follow the extreme-right ideological policy line of Leadsom (*) and her ultra-nationalist right-extremist bedfellows from the ERG et al..
4. So the (politically speaking, relatively moderate and pro-Remain May - having been led for long by the burning ambition of becoming PM et all cost - had voluntarily have herself taken prisoner by the Tory alt-right, that had been preaching hard-Brexit even long before it became known as such.
5. From that moment on she had been literately dictated by Leadsom and her reckless and ruthless ideological Brexit adventurists, the policies that she (May) had to pursuit and execute in exchange for what had been supposed to be the ultimate glamour-job of PM.
6. The so-called doctrinaire red lines of May, in reality have been all along the ideological red lines of Leadsom and her racist friends.
7. So, the reason that May had been monotonously and robotically repeating the same rigid Brexit mantras for the last two years, had been mainly, because she knew all along, that if she did not have done so, Leadsom and her gang of ultra-orthodox Christians exceptionalists would have removed her from the Throne immediately.
8. Theresa "hostile environment" May herself had already been deeply racialist orientated by conviction, so she never ever had any moral objection against the overtly xenophobe nature of her belligerent neo-nationalist policy whisperers.
9. Although she at the same time, had to frenetically keep her party from falling apart all of the time, she will have done so out of pure self-interest as well, because when her party would have split, the game of occupying No 10, would have been over for her.
10. Those deliberations are the main reason why she has been resisting any other approach but a strictly partisan one : At the very cost of the future fate of the United kingdom as a whole semi-sovereign nation of course.
11. A seriously complicating factor in all of this jockeying for positions in the parliamentary debate on Brexit and under what precise conditions the UK should leave, undoubtedly has been the (divine) intervention by Gina Miller, who almost barehandedly prevented Brexit from becoming a merely Tory-led, governmental executive exercise, whipped upon the UK population as a whole.
12. Another major contributing factor to the confusion of today, of course is the very fact, that the next generation of youth - at the time of the referendum not allowed to vote yet - appears to be dominantly Remain-orientated, and is desperately protesting any sort of Brexit (hard or soft) all-together.
(*) It has been rumoured though, that former City Banker Leadsom in 2013 might have declared, that "leaving the EU would be a disaster" : So much for selling one's soul to the devil (personified at that time by her main backer Boris Johnson, who - the personification of hypocrisy himself - also had been in the rich possession of an entire public history of explicitly pro-European sympathies.
