The polls are dire and getting worse by the day. The morning after the next general election (if not sooner!) is going to see recriminations and open warfare. The party will never survive the coming vicious civil war.
David Davis has been speaking to the Institute for Government (IfG) in their Ministers Reflect series and his comments appear in The Telegraph and on the Civil Service World website where I am sure they will be well received!
The whole interview is HERE.
The negotiators weren’t tough enough, government lawyers gave bad advice, the Foreign Office was hollowed out, the best bright young things were blocked from moving to his DEXEU department, The Treasury couldn’t compete with The City so anybody who was any good at figures was earning £1 million a year as a currency trader. It was in other words, all someone else’s fault.
The bit about our negotiators is this:
“Whitehall did a really crap job of negotiation. I mean, really crap. I think it’s partly because they sympathised with the European view and assumed that was reciprocated."
It's the old remoaners who have ruined it all argument again, although they're described here as "dyed-in-the-wool eurocrats" who didn't "understand what we were doing." He can't mean Lord Frost surely? May and Oliver Robbins were naïve about it all, Davis says. A veil is drawn over his own role.
From where I am the only people who were naïve and didn't know what they were doing were the Brexit fanatics like Davis.
It’s not hard to see why he thinks the deal is crap. You can see the evidence all around and you can’t miss articles from Brexit-supporting commentators decrying the hundreds of issues raised by our new trading relationship.
Davis thinks we were too soft. He genuinely believed Britain could get three of the four single market freedoms - all except freedom of movement of people - and frictionless trade would have continued unabated. And it’s clear from the IfG interview, he still thinks so.
These are his thoughts on the Irish border problem, to which the ERG and the DUP are doing their utmost to block any possible solution.
"It’s possible to have an invisible border between north and south, of course it is! I know that border quite well for other historic reasons. This was the first place in the world to have CCTV cameras on it. We pioneered CCTV cameras to deal with the IRA, on the Irish border and on the M6 from Liverpool to London, so we could track any terrorists coming over. So it’s got surveillance structures there. It’s already got in place a trusted trader scheme because it is a fiscal border already. There are VAT differences there. There are individual tax differences."
Lord knows how many times he must have been told invisible borders are impossible, but he still maintains they are. He also claims that Maroš Šefčovič an EU Vice President responsible for the NIP has admitted "an invisible border is possible. It’s always been bloody possible! It’s just that various governments decided they were not going to accept it was possible. That battle went on until the day I left the government."
Yes, the swaggering Davis of old is still there in the IfG interview. You can’t detect a hint of shame or regret, only that it’s all been done badly by people who didn’t support it. Brexit is like a religious cult. If Brexit can only work if it’s done by those who truly believe in it, I assume that it is all bound to fail since 60% + of the population now think it’s a disaster and clearly don't believe in it.
A few examples of his stupidity:
The EU always made it clear that all negotiations would be via Barnier. They had given him a mandate (in April 2017) and it was up to him. Yet Davis in July 2018 at Chequers when he decided to resign, was advising cabinet ministers to “go and talk to their opposite numbers in all the European countries, bearing in mind, Brexit covered nearly every department."
It was, he says, “astonishing” that we hadn’t done that before. It was a total waste of time and the only astonishment was that we thought we might get the mandate softened. Any EU capital could (and did!) tell them it was out of the question. The mandate was never going to be revisited.
Also at the Chequers meeting on 6 July 2018, Davis has a sly dig at Boris Johnson who, he claims, “stood up and made a speech in favour of [May’s] deal, in the end, over dinner. Or at least he seemed to, that’s the impression it gave.”
Johnson then went and resigned as foreign secretary two days later because her plans "stick in the throat". This was after Davis had quit and as soon as Johnson realised his chance at being PM might be slipping away.
The day after he quit, Davis says The Express had a headline saying something like ‘Davis won’ and because he hadn’t briefed them, he thinks Number 10 briefed them. He says it couldn't have been Johnson or Gove so by elimination, Number 10 must have briefed them. I'm not sure how that works but Davis says No 10 "realised they couldn’t win the logical argument because it is impossible to win the logical argument. If you’re not going to have a divergence policy, you haven’t got a Brexit."
On the question of the money, Davis said, “My briefing to Robbins was because they were asking for €100 billion, you can go to €40 billion but it’s got to be conditional on the trade arrangements. “
In fact, De Rynck mentions this in his book. The two figures are in fact more or less the same. The first is gross, and the second is after the rebate and funding for UK projects had been accounted for.
After his 2018 resignation, Davis seemed to think he would somehow take over from May, perhaps that was his plan:
"There were lots and lots of stories flying around that I should take over, I mean, loads. The whole parliamentary party expected me just to remove her and replace her — quite how that constitutionally works, I don’t know. But I wasn’t about to do that."
He boasts about his time as shadow home secretary: "We had an incredibly successful team on the shadow home brief. Beverley Hughes, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke [former home secretaries] all lost their jobs on my watch there."
To give a bit of balance the IfG in 2017 when he was running DEXEU, said Davis was running an ‘utterly disorganised’ department, with one in four posts unfilled. Mmmm... perhaps his management skills are not quite what he thinks they are?
When he was running the Europe department in the Foreign Office under John Major his team — Stephen Wall, John Kerr, and others apparently "had a collective IQ of about ten thousand! You could have lit up London with the brainpower." He called them the Einsteins.
The problem was they all believed in the EU. Davis doesn't ask himself why the best minds in government thought EU membership was beneficial to this country. He thinks they all "wanted to go on to be the ambassadors in Bonn, Berlin, Paris and Rome — all the glamorous jobs — or in the European Commission where you get paid a fortune and tax-free."
Perhaps they genuinely thought it was a good thing and were not as self-serving as him and Johnson.
