A deal that pleases no one was the best she could get

Theresa May’s fate and legacy will be to leave Britain with something she knows is a bad deal, but was the best she could get.

After months of stalled talks, false starts and setbacks, negotiators from Britain and the European Union struck a proposed divorce deal on Tuesday to provide for the UK's smooth exit from the bloc. Picture: AP

Harold Wilson was once advised by Roy Jenkins, after one of his interminable cabinet meetings, that he needed to argue to a decision rather than a conclusion. This evening, having decided there was no conclusion they could agree on, the members of the cabinet concluded they had better make a decision.

As I write, the cabinet is still intact though the anonymous briefing, to let us know that Esther McVey, Penny Mourdant, Andrea Leadsom and Dominic Raab are not happy about it, has begun. Any one of them might make a tactical resignation dressed up as an act of principle. Quite what the point would be is impossible to fathom but then this whole sorry episode is quite difficult to fathom.

While the rest of them had a glass of wine (English, probably) in the cabinet room, the prime minister popped outside to make a statement. Her first point was a truth so important that most of the prominent Brexiteers cannot bear to hear it. “I firmly believe” she said, “that the draft withdrawal agreement was the best that could be negotiated”.

That is, alas, true and the fallacy of all the pro-Brexit opposition to this deal is that there was no enormously better option available. It might well be a bad deal but it does not follow that it could have been hugely better. From the point of view of the committed Brexiter there are actually things to like. The deal, as Mrs May says, “brings back control of our money, laws and borders, ends free movement”. If Brexit is your poison there is a lot there to drink in.

And there was one clause in particular that ought to sound out a warning. Mrs May concluded that there were three options left. To leave on her terms, to leave without a deal or not to leave at all. That was a significant change in the argument and a taste of the campaign of persuasion to come. This will be the threat and it will be real. The dreamt-of prize of leaving the EU could disappear. The prospect of losing the whole project is in view. This was as explicit as Mrs May has ever been. We might not leave. Be careful, Brexit lovers, what you wish for.

The sheer folly of the whole self-harming enterprise was contained in the Prime Minister’s parting words. “I firmly believe” she said unconvincingly, “with my head and my heart, that this is a decision that is in the best interests of the entire United Kingdom”. There is very little possibility that those words are true. Mrs May voted to remain in the EU. She knows with her head and her heart that this deal is worse than the one we are relinquishing. It is her fate and her legacy to leave the nation with something she knows is a bad deal. The fact that it is also just about as good as she could have got is no consolation. An ungrateful party, which simply has no idea what it wants, may punish her simply because she has finally come to a decision.

— The Times