The meeting of senior ministers yesterday probably went just as badly as the PM expected (HERE). It was described as heated, which is diplomatic language for a shouting match. A succession of the usual suspects lined up to pan the idea of the whole UK staying in a customs union indefinitely until a solution is found to deliver frictionless trade across the Irish border. Fox, Raab, Leadsom, Gove, Mordant and McVey apparently all criticised the plan but I assume they didn't come up with a alternative proposal to avoid a hard border in Ireland. This morning several are said to be considering their positions.
I have to say looking at the list of potential resigners they all seem completely useless and could hardly be missed if they were to quit. In fact picking substitutes at random from people walking across Westminster Bridge any afternoon would raise the intellectual capacity of the cabinet significantly. Leadsom I think has a negative IQ figure so just leaving her seat vacant would help a lot.
The i News (HERE), in a massive understatement, says May is bracing for a backlash from the Eurosceptics in her party.
The PM faces a stark choice. She has three options. Stick to the timetable and push her proposal through next week with the risk that a quarter of the cabinet may step down - she may not survive as PM of course but there is no time to develop an alternative plan. Announce that the UK is ending the talks and leaving without a deal - the pound would plummet and industry would start to leave and she may not survive this either.
Or ask for Article 50 to be extended to give more time for the talks to yield something. The EU may not grant an extension anyway but even if it did, she may not survive that.
She is not between a rock and a hard place but between two rocks.
It is hard to imagine a process more important for the nation's future being handled as badly as Brexit. There was no thought beforehand and precious little in the two years since. Theresa May is notoriously secretive, working with close advisers who know nothing and she cannot make decisions to save her life anyway. But what decisions she did make were invariably catastrophically wrong.
She triggered Article 50 before we were anywhere near ready, blocked discussion in cabinet, decided we should leave the SM and the CU, agreed the backstop without realising the potential problems and so on and so on. Big decisions and every one wrong.
Leave HQ, a pro-Brexit website (HERE) has an item headed, "A failure to plan was a plan for failure" which includes this:
"If anything has made Brexit more costly and difficult than it ever needed to be it is the obstinacy and intransigence of the Brexiter ultras who have squandered a genuine opportunity to to reshape Europe in favour of free trade delusions and a stunted idea of sovereignty. Worse still we will pay for it through the course of a long vassal state transition that could have been avoided. It's almost like a Brexit plan was a good idea".
The Leave campaign deliberately disdained a plan and now the blame game begins between the factions who were all united in cheering wildly on June 24th 2016. The days to disaster are counting down and all they can do is argue among themselves.
What a shambles. How will we ever recover our reputation for calm pragmatism?
