Theresa May has no one to blame but herself for Brexit debacle

Has there ever been a prime minister who created such a monumental omni-shambles as the British PM?

Theresa May laughs during a press conference inside 10 Downing Street after the resignation of Cabinet ministers. Picture: Getty Images

Has there ever been a prime minister who created such a monumental omni-shambles as Theresa May has with the chaotic Brexit negotiations she had conducted with the EU? Never has a leader come to office in such a strong position and squandered everything — domestic authority, a majority in parliament, immense negotiating strengths, initial clarity of purpose — to be salami sliced into the most ignominious failure in modern British politics.

May this week delivered her final Brexit deal, all 585 pages of it. She held a marathon cabinet meeting and announced, with apparent triumph, that the cabinet had endorsed her plan.

But May, who once seemed straightforward and admirably guileless in the best sense, says nothing now that you can rely on for more than an hour or so.

It was only hours after she announced the cabinet approval of her plan that it turned out that most of the cabinet thought it an absolute dog’s breakfast. And then the cabinet resignations began. Dominic Raab, the cabinet minister responsible for Brexit, and seen as potentially a future Conservative Party leader, was the first to go.

He said of May’s deal: “I don’t think it would be good for the long-term health of the country, either democratically or economically.” What kind of fiasco is this? The minister responsible for bringing a policy decision to cabinet resigns after cabinet accepts the decision?

The Raab resignation laid bare one of the many weird elements of this whole tragic situation. Rather than allowing an elected politician and fellow cabinet minister to run these negotiations, May has had a select handful of her own bureaucrats do so.

The Brexit secretary has been marginalised. When May in July took her plan for a deal to her cabinet at a meeting in Chequers, she also emerged to say she had a united cabinet.

Barely a day later, Raab’s predecessor as Brexit secretary, David Davis, resigned because he found the Chequers proposals unconscionable. So did foreign secretary Boris Johnson.

This time May lost two cabinet ministers almost straight away, and five junior frontbenchers.

The leader of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, Jacob Rees-Mogg, heightened the drama by calling for May to resign and acting to trigger a leadership spill by sending a letter of no confidence in her to the chairman of the Tory backbench committee. If there are 48 letters, a motion of no confidence will be moved automatically in the Tory caucus of 315 MPs. If May loses that, there is a leadership ballot, in which she cannot run, of the Tory grassroots membership.

This ballot would be between the two MPs with the greatest support among MPs. If only one candidate runs, they are elected unopposed, as happened when May succeeded David Cameron who resigned in 2016 just days after the British people voted in a referendum to leave the EU.

May’s position is an unmitigated disaster for herself, the Conservative Party, for the British nation and for the Western alliance, such as it is. Yet it is not inconceivable that she could prevail. For like many a disastrous leader before her, she has engineered a situation in which she can argue that the only alternative to her plan is chaos and destruction.

Britain is scheduled to leave Europe on March 29 next year, yet the future could not be more dramatically unclear, with any of a range of outcomes possible. Whichever way you look at it, this is disastrous management by May.

No one thought it would end like this. At the 2015 election Cameron, leading a minority government, promised a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. He won a surprise majority and held this referendum in the middle of 2016. Almost all the media and every sinew of the British establishment opposed Brexit, including a vast retinue of international leaders conscripted into the cause, most notably Barack Obama.

To the establishment’s astonishment, the British people voted to leave, 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Cam­eron resigned and May became leader almost by acclaim. She had been a long-time home secretary and had a reputation for being stubborn, tough and disciplined. She had supported the Remain case in the referendum but in a low-key manner. She claimed to be a convert to Brexit. Her penchant for short, declaratory sentences was taken as a sign of clarity of mind and purpose — a huge mistake, as it turns out.

May called an early election last year. She started the contest 23 percentage points ahead of the woeful and extremist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It turned out it was right to think her stubborn, wrong to think her courageous or clever. Her whole campaign was based in part on the idea that she was true leadership ­material and Corbyn was at best a flake, but then she showed she was scared of him by refusing to debate him. She proposed a spectacularly unpopular “dementia tax”, which would have forced the elderly to sell their homes to fund nursing home care.

She lost her majority and barely scraped back into office. The Conservative Brexit member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, told me recently that from the moment she lost her ­parliamentary majority the EU leaders in Brussels stopped any ­serious negotiation.

When she became leader, May had declared: “Brexit means ­Brexit.” She also declared: “No deal is better than a bad deal.” This meant that if the EU didn’t come to the party with a free trade agreement then Britain would just walk away from the EU and its post-EU trading relationships with the continent would be based on World Trade Organisation rules, as is the case for Australia, the US or China.

Before the election she triggered the formal notice of departure, which allowed for two years to negotiate the agreement. In early speeches and in the Conservative election manifesto she made it clear that Britain would leave the European single market, leave the customs union and no longer be subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice.

Her ­calamitous new deal reverses all those commitments.

May’s confidence, which turns out always to have been fragile, was shot by the near-death experience of the election. She subsequently gave way to the EU on almost everything.

One reason for this is that the British establishment refused to accept the legitimacy of the referendum result and worked to undermine it at every point. As Hannan and Rees-Mogg and ­others have told me, there is clearly a very strong British establishment. It resides in the media, the universities, parts of the business community, especially the regulated, closed shop industries, and of course, most powerfully of all, in the civil service.

The British establishment has just about thwarted the seemingly inescapable will of the people ­expressed in the referendum and in several election results.

Hannan told me that three British establishment politicians from the recent past — former ­Labour leader Tony Blair, former Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg and former Tory grandee Michael Heseltine — had effectively undermined their country’s position with Brussels. Their constant anti-Brexit interventions, after the referendum vote had been held, and their constant dialogue with EU leaders, who find them the type of Brits they like, had played a big role in convincing the EU to make no meaningful concessions to May.

Initially, May’s position was immensely strong. The EU wanted a divorce payment from Britain of roughly $70 billion. Critical EU industries such as the German car industry needed continued access to the British market. May had said that if the EU and Britain did not conclude a deal, Britain retained the right to reform its economic model to make itself more competitive economically.

This frightened the EU. The EU is a stagnant economic area with an antique and unfit economic model. It produces no Googles or Facebooks or Apples or any equivalent innovative companies because its economies are strangled by regulation and insane ­interference from Brussels. For big industries, however, benefiting from de facto protectionism and often enough direct subsidy, the system can work quite well.

The EU had lots of reasons to try to hurt Britain. Brussels was undemocratic, coercive, irresponsible, the normal EU combination. If Britain broke free, other nations might want to. EU scepticism was rampant and growing across the continent. As the former British foreign secretary William Hague remarked: the EU was a burning house from which there was no exit. The Eurocrats of Brussels were determined there would continue to be no exit.

One brilliant strategy that both the Brussels mandarins and the British establishment fixed on early was to make a huge issue of the border on the island of Ireland.

It is an elementary principle of democracy, and part of the Good Friday agreement that brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, that there could be no change to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without ­approval in a democratic referendum within the territory.

Even among the hysterical fearmongering of the Leave campaign in 2016 the issue of the Irish border had hardly been mentioned. The deeply irresponsible EU plotters decided, after the vote, that if a “hard border” was erected between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland this would lead to renewed communal violence.

I interviewed a Sinn Fein politician in London this year who more or less laughed this off and said Sinn Fein certainly had no interest in rekindling violence. The EU has land borders with many nations. Trade and people flow freely across them. But the EU made this a red line in its negotiations with May and she of course capitulated.

One solution the EU proposed was that Northern Ireland should stay in the single market and customs union after Britain exited. The Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, on which May ­relies for parliamentary survival, will not wear this at any price, for it fundamentally alters Northern Ireland’s constitutional status without the inconvenience of a democratic vote.

The contempt for democratic votes, by both the EU and the British establishment, has been a spectacular feature of this whole saga. Partly as a result, the muddle of an agreement May has produced is truly the worst of all worlds.

It provides that Britain and Northern Ireland should stay ­inside the EU customs union ­indefinitely. Britain would have no right ever to leave the customs union unless the EU agrees. This makes the destruction of democracy under the proposed deal even more egregious than it is under existing British EU membership. This is because, no doubt due to a drafting oversight, Britain can ­actually leave the EU but it would never be able to leave the customs union if this deal goes ahead.

All Britain’s tariff levels and ­industrial regulations would be ­determined by the EU but Britain would not even have the limited influence it now has as a member of the EU. It would not be able to negotiate new free trade agreements with other countries. And if it ever did negotiate a departure from the customs union under a future free trade agreement with Europe itself, the agreement provides that Northern Ireland would still have to submit to EU rules.

This deal is so spectacularly bad that it has united Leavers and ­Remainers in opposition to it. ­Ardent Brexiteers would rather stay in the EU because one day a better PM than May could still leave, rather than accept the status of permanent colony ruled from offshore that May’s deal includes.

But the most ruthless and irresponsible element of the British ­establishment’s plan to frustrate Brexit has been to make sure that no serious preparation was made to leave the EU without a deal. May now claims such a scenario would be utter chaos.

The immediate future is very unclear. Brexiteers were confidently predicting that nearly 90 Tory backbenchers would vote against the deal if it gets to the House of Commons. So would the 10 DUP members. May’s only chance of passing the deal would be with Labour votes. But Corbyn and Labour are delighted with the Conservatives’ disarray. They have no interest in bailing May out and allowing the Conservatives another couple of years in office.

Until the past two years, I have always thought the British had a genius for effective government. Now the case against that idea is much stronger. If they are to pull something decent out of this colossal mess, the Brits will need every bit of genius their history has afforded them.