May seeks help from above as Cox moves the goalposts

About 36 hours after Downing Street put Westminster on alert, Theresa May was turning to her Bible.

Theresa May leaves Westminster Abbey on Monday. Picture: AP

About 36 hours after Downing Street put Westminster on alert for a snap prime ministerial visit to Europe, there was little sign of resolution and Theresa May was turning to her Bible.

Standing in Westminster Abbey, she read a passage from Corinthians to commemorate Commonwealth Day. Her text talked about what happened when different parts of the body acted independently of one ­another rather than in co-ordination, as a way of urging respect and co-operation.

With May ducking Jeremy Corbyn’s urgent question in the Commons on Brexit, there could be no better metaphor for the body politic.

Insiders said that her government started the day in Downing Street “in a panic” with a “blank piece of paper”, unsure where the Brexit negotiations would end up. Olly Robbins, her Brexit negotiator, rather than Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney-General, was in Brussels trying to salvage a deal. After months of pressure from Brexiteers to replace negotiating officials with politicians, it ­appeared an odd tactic.

Cox had spent the weekend in Devon. On Saturday afternoon he was at a meeting of Torridge & West Devon Conservatives “talking us through the backstop and beyond”, according to one of those present, to ensure his reselection, which was unanimous.

There was “disbelief” among some in government at his disappearance, although he had two conference calls with May and Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay.

Cox’s absence may have been no bad thing, however. His involvement, only months after he was first touted as leader, began with great optimism. After his first talks with the EU’s Bexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, just under a month ago, Cox told colleagues that he could quickly begin work on a “precise and detailed text” to table with EU negotiators in the coming days.

However, over time his “bluster” and a propensity to lecture Barnier and his deputy, Sabine Weyand, a German trade official, played badly.

One diplomat said: “We had made the same mistake as the Prime Minister by relying on her Attorney-General, a criminal lawyer who at best has a vague idea of EU law.’’

Over dinner Cox went further, accusing the EU of damaging human rights in Northern Ireland with a backstop that could permanently put the province under Brussels’s control.

A senior Brussels source said: “When he said that the EU and the backstop could violate the European Convention on Human Rights, we knew the plot was well and truly lost. This is, Barnier ­reminded him, the treaty your Prime Minister signed in November. What are you trying to do?”

A newspaper interview last Sunday appears to have provoked a particularly significant bust-up. He told a tabloid: “If we did secure an arbitration mechanism, it could be triggered on the very first day we entered the backstop.”

To Barnier, the suggestion that Britain would want to automatically exit the backstop “on day one” without even trying to negotiate was evidence of bad faith, a point he made forcefully to EU ambassadors on Monday.

“(It was a) really astonishing thing to do. Stupid doesn’t cover it,” one diplomat said.

The low point came on Sunday night with preparations in hand for May to arrive in Brussels the next day. “She had signalled that she could live with the EU’s offer of the legal guarantees on the backstop but it was rejected (by some in her) cabinet,” an EU diplomat said after Barnier’s briefing.

During a phone call with Jean-Claude Juncker, May discussed cancelling the meaningful vote for a conditional motion spelling out what the government would need from Brussels to get a deal through the Commons. She was told this would be “unacceptable”.

One diplomat said: “It would be perceived as the government backing no-deal against a confirmatory vote for the agreement with the assurances she had asked for. It would be the end.”

Another said: “A conditional vote on her own deal will be seen as a no-deal vote.”

As the news that May would go to Strasbourg broke, most recognised that this meeting at the French seat of the European Parliament would be a turning point.

“Has she caved or has her ­Attorney-General?” said a senior diplomat. “Strasbourg could be historic. Either the Brexit deal is saved or, if it goes wrong, she will be history.”

In the end the EU appears to have offered the same package of help May had asked for in her meeting with Juncker in Egypt at the end of last month before Cox arrived last week in Brussels to move the goalposts.

The Times