The prime minister is being battered from all sides and is beginning to look like what the popular press usually calls unfortunate or hapless, ill fated or even doomed. For a while now her grip on events has looked arthritically tenuous at best but now she seems to be either a passenger or perhaps even a bystander, albeit not an innocent one. In fact she of course actually set off the accident that we know as the Article 50 process.
No sooner is it announced that she is going to Sharm-el-Sheikh at the weekend to try and sell her new deal, the one she has been frantically selling by 'phone like a demented call-centre worker for the past few days, than the EU say the best she can expect is a meeting with Juncker on the sidelines of the summit (HERE). She is proposing to jet five thousand miles to meet the man she had a meeting with on Wednesday and got nowhere. No wonder we've got a climate change problem.
It's like gatecrashing a lavish party only to find yourself in a dimly lit utility room away from the other revellers reading Proust or Thomas Mann with a right bore and drinking tomato juice.
Meanwhile, three remain leaning cabinet ministers have noted the current penchant for fifth columns and have formed one themselves, writing in the Daily Mail (HERE) that they effectively plan to adopt policies of their own unless the PM agrees to delay Brexit next week to avoid no deal. This is Greg Clark, Amber Rudd and David Gauke.
Cabinet Brexiteers from the other side are telling Theresa May to step down after the local elections in May (HERE) hardly a ringing endorsement of firm leadership.
The Labour party has Momentum, the Tories have the ERG as well as the Brexit Delivery Group, parliament has The Independent Group and the cabinet is made up of factions. Next we will no doubt find these parties within parties will get fifth columns of their own and so on until the biggest groups have no more than three members, each with unique policy positions trying to influence every other group. From the sidelines it will look like high speed dodgem cars with the steering being randomly disconnected and everybody off their heads on hallucinatory drugs. By comparison Bedlam will seem like a quiet Japanese rock garden.
And to increase pressure on her a bit more there is a claim that the Labour party are moving towards a policy of supporting a second referendum (HERE). In an interview with the Evening Standard John McDonnel has said:
“On the people’s vote, we’ve kept it on the table and we’re moving towards that".
The PM and the ERG are looking ever more isolated and extreme.
To cap a truly terrible week for the Theresa May, Leo Varadkar says (HERE) we can forget a trade deal with the USA if the principle of an open border and commitment to the Good Friday Agreement isn't guaranteed through the backstop.
It feels like the nation is caught in a giant nutcracker.
