Theresa May and the art of no deal

Theresa May’s relentless misrule is the antithesis of Donald Trump’s routine triumphs.

Theresa May and Donald Trump during his visit to Britain last year. Picture: Getty Images

Has there ever been a greater contrast in democratic leadership styles than US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May?

Last week Trump saw off the threat of impeachment and the most challenging criticism of his presidency — the allegation that he and his campaign illegally colluded with the Russians in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Robert Mueller, the special counsel beloved of the Democrats and lionised by the anti-Trump media — the plaster-cast saint of all virtues taken from Hollywood central casting as the conservative-looking good guy railing against corruption in high office — declared that, in fact, there was no criminal collusion between Trump and the Russians.

Once more, Trump has driven his opponents into clinical insanity. They all need counselling, a Bex and a good lie-down.

Trump is belligerent, brash, (sometimes) boorish — and successful. May could not have had a more different week, nor be a more different leader.

And whereas Trump banished — at least temporarily and possibly for a goodly time — his worst foes last week, May succumbed to hers, still achieving absolutely nothing, uniting her party and the opposition only in the settled determination that she should resign, and in the end promising to resign if the party and parliament passed her deal to leave the EU.

Whether that deal finally passes or not, May is heading for the exit — the Therexit, as some British papers put it. The whole of parliament, if not the whole of Britain and much of the rest of the world, seemed to echo Oliver Cromwell: “In the name of God, go!”

‘Brexit means Brexit’

May will surely rank as one of the most astonishingly unsuccessful British leaders of the past century. Less than two years ago she inherited the head-of-government role from David Cameron, who had called a referendum on remaining in the EU or leaving and, to his astonishment, lost.

In the end, May was his successor by acclamation. The Tory leaders of the Brexit push — notably Boris Johnson and Michael Gove — spectacularly fell out with each other.

May had a political honeymoon to die for. She had been a stubborn, tough home secretary who didn’t say much but spoke in a perfect, clipped Home Counties accent. She seemed so decent and straightforward after the slippery Cameron. And though she had been a more or less inactive Remainer in the referendum, she styled herself the Boadicea of Brexit.

She roared from Lancaster House: “Brexit means Brexit.” And even more emphatically: “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

She dumped the highest profile Cameron Remainers such as ­George Osborne and promoted the most flamboyant Brexiteer, Johnson. Her path seemed clear and straightforward. Spend two years attempting to negotiate the best possible free trade agreement with the EU but all the time make preparations for a no-deal Brexit.

Prospect of rebirth

The so-called no-deal Brexit simply means trading with the EU under World Trade Organisation rules, as Australia, the US, China, Japan and, indeed, most of the world do. Britain would take back control of its national life. It would be able, like Australia, to determine its own immigration program. It would liberate its courts and its life from the dim tyranny of the grossly misnamed European Court of Justice. It would pursue the old cavalier British trading policy, making new trade deals with the US and Australia, joining bodies such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It would remain close to Europe, friendly, helpful, co-operative, a key economic and security partner, but it would be the old Britain born anew, the nation famed for statecraft, for trading, for diplomacy and stability.

From the first May pursued an incoherent strategy. She appointed ardent Brexiteers, people who truly believed what she claimed to believe, to her cabinet, gave them the key Brexit positions, but then kept them away from all power and even from much information about what her actual Brexit strategy was.

Her actual Brexit strategy, almost insanely, May entrusted to the civil service, which was adamantly opposed to Brexit in principle and every possible incarn­ation of Brexit in practice.

This was bound to guarantee a BRINO outcome — Brexit in name only — in which Britain continued to accept all the EU rules but lost any say in them.

In the meantime, May called an early and needless election. Cameron had secured a surprise outright victory with a majority of about a dozen for the Conservatives. This was thought too narrow a base on which to build a Brexit.

But the Conservatives’ position in the House of Commons was actually quite a bit better than it looked. The Sinn Fein MPs from Northern Ireland never take up their seats or vote, while the Democratic Unionists from there more or less always vote with the Conservatives. May’s actual working majority was nearer 30.

But the polls were telling May she had a super majority at her fingertips. A majority of 100! A majority of 150! Anything seemed possible for the new Iron Lady.

She entered the campaign 23 percentage points ahead. Labour was led by the execrable Jeremy Corbyn. Surely Britain would never elect the lifelong friend of terrorists, the undergraduate radical who never graduated academically or politically, a man who admired the Venezuelan model of socialism.

But May ran the worst election campaign in Western history. Her message was that Corbyn was an untrustworthy extremist, but then she looked scared of him as she refused to debate him.

The media, always happy to be anti-Conservative, decided that because Corbyn couldn’t win they’d go easy on him, not subject him to very searching scrutiny, and forgive all his macabre past.

Electoral folly

May believed she would win all across Britain, so she wasted resources on seats the Tories could never win and neglected seats they might lose.

Because she was convinced she would have a huge majority no matter what she did, she briefly advocated unpopular user-pays policies for older Brits that might have forced them to sell the family home to pay for aged care, thus attacking a key Tory voting constituency.

Astonishingly, she lost her majority and had to rely on the DUP for her position as Prime Minister and to get any legislation passed.

Her position was infinitely weakened in Britain but her position vis-a-vis the EU contained great strengths, had she the wit or will to use them. Trump was astonished at May’s inability to make anything of all Britain’s strengths. He couldn’t believe a fellow leader was so weak.

The EU wanted nearly £40 billion ($74bn) as an exit payment from Britain. London was not remotely obliged to pay this, or any money. But showing that mixture of naivety and duplicity with which May has conducted Brexit, she agreed to the payment to earn EU goodwill.

However, EU goodwill is an oxymoron. The EU wanted to punish, humiliate, extort and shackle Britain. Unfathomably, May connived with the EU in this.

Britain also ran a substantial trade deficit with the EU. Proportionately, Britain had more to lose if it all went wrong, but absolutely the EU had a lot to lose, too.

And the EU is stuck in appallingly slow economic growth. Youth unemployment is chronic throughout southern Europe. The straitjacket of the single currency keeps southern Europe permanently uncompetitive. Italy is in recession. Germany is on the brink of recession. A new crisis threatens at any time with the inability of one of the southern European nations to service their debt. The EU didn’t want to lose in Britain its most dynamic economy, nor did it want to lose one of the only solvent big economies.

Misled by mandarins

Despite May’s minority government status, Brexit had undeniable democratic legitimacy. Cameron won a surprise majority in 2015 by promising a Brexit referendum. At the referendum, in the biggest vote of any kind in British history, people voted 52 to 48 per cent to leave the EU. Then at the 2017 election the parties that promised to honour Brexit, to leave the EU, namely the Conservatives and Labour, won 80 per cent of the vote, reversing the trend for the vote to atomise. And the most explicitly pro-Remain party, the Liberal Democrats, got smashed.

The Brexit legislation that May’s government passed explicitly envisaged a no-deal Brexit. If Britain and the EU could not negotiate a deal, then Britain would leave with no deal.

But the civil service, the media and the majority of MPs in the House of Commons were all strongly for Remain. They outsmarted the British voters. They managed to stop any preparations for a no-deal exit until the last moment.

May herself then connived in the no-deal panic, trying to get her preposterous deal passed on the basis that there was no alternative.

May’s deal may be the worst deal anyone could ever have imagined. It provides only for a transition period in which Britain stays bound by EU rules. Then when the transition period ends, if Britain and the EU have not negotiated a deal for a long-term relationship, a so-called backstop agreement comes into force.

This backstop agreement, among many objectionable elements, provides that Britain stays in the EU customs union until the EU agrees to let it go.

Now, given that the EU would not negotiate a sensible free trade agreement with the UK when ­Britain had so much leverage — money, trade balance and, above all, the credible threat of leaving with no deal and trading under WTO rules — what is the prospect that the EU would negotiate a real deal with Britain when it had given up all that leverage?

It is most likely Britain would never be able to do a free trade deal with anyone, including Australia, under these arrangements.

The lost leader

This week in parliament, MPs seized control of the day-to-day agenda from the government. They held a series of indicative votes on eight Brexit options, from a free trade agreement to a second referendum.

The House of Commons, in a stunning display of how divided Britain now is, voted no to all alternatives, just as it had twice voted no to May’s terrible deal.

High-profile hardline Brexiteers such as Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith swung belatedly behind May’s deal because, they said, it was the only way to avoid losing Brexit altogether.

I’m not sure the Brexiteers are being entirely honest here. It may be that they feel they cannot be seen by the Conservative rank and file, who are overwhelmingly pro-Brexit, to have prevented the only possible Brexit.

Whether May’s deal or some version of it finally gets through, her leadership is at an effective end. It may stagger on zombie-like for a few more chaotic episodes but it is in its final stages. The DUP still says it won’t back her deal.

So all the senior Tories are lining up for the leadership contest, which must follow shortly.

Johnson is still the best-placed Brexiteer. Gove, a former Brexiteer who gave away his old positions to stay in May’s cabinet, could be a foot-in-both-camps kind of candidate.

Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary and a good Tory ethnic minority success story, has support, as does Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab.

Whoever becomes leader will probably do a better job than May. But they still will head a minority government and a bitterly divided party.

Britain still could just about stumble out with no deal, some version of May’s deal or something like it could still pass, or Brexit could be frustrated and reversed altogether. The divisions in the nation and within both parties will be slow to heal at best.

May speaks in whole sentences in a perfect accent. But her leadership has been incoherent and ineffective. Trump blusters and bullies and considers the tweet — a modern haiku equivalent — to be the highest form of political communication.

But Trump bends history to his will. May simply bends under the will of others.