We all thought Salzburg was going to be a non-event but it may eventually be seen as the pivotal moment when the Brexit dream was broken. As always with EU summits, even informal ones like Salzburg, we get an awful lot of speculation beforehand some of it well informed but often not it seems. Most commentators thought Mrs May would get a few warm words and little else. In the event it was a disaster and a humiliation for the PM (HERE). Brexit was not originally on the agenda and Theresa May was permitted a ten minute peroration to plead with the other leaders to be gentle with us.
She has an unfortunate personal quality that makes her appear like a rather testy and irritated school mistress. She doesn't do pleading well. She is probably the only person who can make the plea of a desperate supplicant sound like a sharp rebuke. It didn't help that she began the day telling Leo Varadkar that, "She did not believe it would be possible for the British government and Brussels to come to a solution by [the October summit]. Six months after promising to come up with a fix that would avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in all possible circumstances, the British appeared to be stalling for time again". (HERE)
Following this the EU27 turned on her with Macron particularly tough and described as "putting the boot in" with his barbed comments about the "liars" who told us Brexit would all be easy. In the after summit press conference she is described by several commentators as nervous and shaking with anger. But it was all quite foreseeable wasn't it? And incidentally, where was Dominic Raab her Brexit minister? Perhaps her anger was directed at him?
Robert Peston the TV journalist with a short piece that originally went up on his Facebook page and was then reprinted in The Spectator (HERE) and Chris Grey for The inews website (HERE) sum it up. Peston says:
"So the question is why she waited to have that so publicly and humiliatingly stated by the EU’s president Donald Tusk today, rather than quietly acquiring some wriggle room over recent days. She’s also rejected the EU’s proposal to keep the Northern Ireland border with the Republic open – because, in her estimation, it would undermine the integrity of the UK – but won’t tell them what her revised proposal may be, though she insists she has one".
Grey is a professor of organisational studies who has his own blog (HERE) where his Salzburg article first appeared. He points out:
"There are two versions of what Theresa May has done in Salzburg, neither of them especially edifying. On the one hand, she was demanding that the EU must now make compromises; on the other she was imploring the EU to recognize the domestic constraints that require her to ask it to do so".
He doesn't say so but the EU are under hard legal constraints while she is under soft political ones. But he goes on:
"Beyond that, demands for compromises and concessions fall into the pattern of truculence that has characterised the government’s approach to the negotiations from the start, including Theresa May’s willing embrace of the “bloody difficult woman” tag. A visitor from Mars might get the impression that Britain was being forced to leave the EU against its wishes, and therefore stubbornly insisting on as much as it could salvage, rather than choosing to leave in the confident knowledge that life outside would be much better".
How true this last sentence is. I know many leavers think we can simply pull the plug and go and the extraordinary lengths the government is going to in order to "salvage" what they can is utterly baffling to them. No one has ever explained what a catastrophe leaving the EU without a deal would be.
Let us hope the aftermath of Salzburg has injected a bit of realism into government thinking. The EU are not going to blink and we shouldn't harbour any illusions about it.
And for a summary of her biggest Brexit policy errors, how about this:
"Actually, her premiership has been marked by a litany of monumentally poor judgments: not seeking a consensual, soft Brexit when she had the chance; pointlessly fighting the Gina Miller court case; failing to call out the extremist ‘enemies of the people’ rhetoric; triggering Article 50 with no agreed government position; calling and fluffing the general election; signing the phase 1 agreement that she subsequently declared (as regards the Irish backstop) to be impossible; and, when belatedly softening her approach at Chequers, producing a plan that would satisfy no one. Throughout, she has mistaken stubbornness for strength. Far from being pragmatic, she has consistently backed herself – and the country – into unnecessary and impossible corners".
