The Telegraph (HERE), The Daily Express (HERE) and, so I believe also The Daily Mail, are beginning to panic. The Express thinks, "It is time for ministers to stop over-thinking Brexit and instead take the practical steps necessary to make it work in the nation's best interests". Even for the newspaper that has cheered Brexit like an over-excited Millwall fan, this is quite something. Over-thinking Brexit? Really? What on earth's going on at The Express? Don't they read other newspapers?
The Telegraph is a bit nearer the mark. It seems to have abstained from whatever it was they've been smoking for the last few years and awoken from the drug-induced euphoria over the referendum result to declare: There is so little time left to get Brexit right, and to then ask, "What is Theresa May doing?".
They finally recognise the problem: "just five weeks remain for this matter [the customs arrangement] to be settled; and yet the Government has not even got a unified position".
Well, well, well. After years of telling us we should get out of the EU and, since the referendum, assuring us that all will go swimmingly in the negotiations - even when told by experts we cannot have our cake and eat it as well - the right wing press are slowly being forced to confront reality. Brexit is difficult. Brexit will be costly. Jobs will be lost. The nation will be poorer, less secure, less influential.
The Express isn't quite ready just yet. In the Through-the-Looking-Glass world they inhabit, "A new report suggesting that the alternative Max Fac - maximum facilitation - option can easily be ready for Brexit day on March 29 should be music to the Cabinet's ears". This is like The Queen, in Lewis Carroll's famous work, who sometimes believed in six impossible things before breakfast.
Firstly, Max-Fac does not actually exist anywhere in the world at the moment. Assuming for arguments sake it did, being ready by March 29th next year would be impossible anyway. And, since both of these first two points are not in any doubt, the EU have rejected the idea. Even if Max-Fac was a slim possibility at some distant, future date, all the other EU countries (all those that export to us) would have to design, invest and implement the same technology. And this in turn means operating two customs regimes, one for us (Max-Fac) and one for the rest of the world. This would just be to allow us to avoid the customs union, the single market and the ECJ, that they are all part of and subject to.
Only the Express and its readers think it is going to happen.
