There is an eerie fatality in the unrolling of the Brexit negotiations; and there will no doubt be a corresponding fatality in its denouement.
Theresa May keeps insisting that she wants Britain to have a close and friendly relationship with the European Union. But the Brexiters in her cabinet, of whom she is mortally afraid, seem to prefer crashing out of the EU. Although they all signed up to the prime minister’s emollient Florence speech, Boris Johnson has since then set “red lines” on any deal he’d accept while Liam Fox has been talking up the benefits of “no deal”. These ministers are supported by a vocal campaign by Brexiters outside the cabinet calling for the talks to be abandoned now.
The French have a phrase to describe the Brexiters’ policy: la politique du pire. This is the policy of making things get as bad as possible, on the theory that the worse things get, the greater the chance that they will turn out in your favour.
Three things are now becoming clear. The first is that there is no compromise in sight between May and the Brexiters. The second is that neither can win. The third is that a crash is therefore almost inevitable.
Officially, May’s government keeps asking the EU to let the Brexit negotiations move on from Phase 1, the terms of the divorce, to Phase 2, Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU.
But as things stand, this is impossible. The EU’s position is that its chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, can only move to Phase 2, when there has been “sufficient progress” on Phase 1. But since the Brexiters want Britain to crash out of the EU without a deal, they are necessarily doing their best to prevent the negotiations from moving to Phase 2.
This may be easy for them. For who will decide whether “sufficient progress” has occurred? Not May, but the EU. The prime minister may think she has recently started to make some more conciliatory noises, as in her Florence speech, and again in Brussels. The problem is that the treaties lay down the procedures for leaving the EU, and it is the member states who decide whether these procedures have been satisfied.
May last week week pleaded with the other leaders to cut her some slack, and some of them may be tempted to do so. But changing Michel Barnier’s negotiating mandate will require a supermajority of the 27 member states.
If the Brexiters can succeed in preventing the shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2, they will also be able to prevent any deal with the EU. The question is, would this enable them to lead Britain into the sunny open seas of free trade with the rest of the world? It is much more likely to precipitate a train crash in Parliament, and a convulsive crisis inside the Conservative Party; which would immediately be terminal for the Conservative government.
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Edited by Hugo Dixon
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