Sunday 16 February 2020

The special relationship is special no more

Yesterday The Times carried an article: Euroscpetic fears as PM shelves Trump talks. It follows a disastrous 'phone call a few days ago when the president apparently slammed the receiver down on Brexit Johnson after being told of the UK's decision to allow Huawei into our 5G network. He was said to be 'apoplectic'. The special relationship has taken a nasty turn and looks even less than ordinary now. Eurosceptics like Steve Baker and Duncan Smith are quoted by The Times:

Baker, the ERG chairman, says, " We need to be negotiating with the US now" and "There's a danger of failing to coordinate and excessively prioritising the trade deal with the EU. I am concerned to understand why the prime minister is not there [in the USA] already"

Iain Duncan Smith said, "Success requires us to run both EU and US negotiations in lock-step. In that case we will be calling the shots. If we do it separately we will have no leverage, the EU will hold all the cards. We will end up with no deal".

Brexit Johnson has reportedly 'cancelled plans' to visit the US. There was a plan to go in January, then February and now this has been called off altogether. Trump and the PM will not now meet until the scheduled G7 summit at Camp David in June. 

A few days ago an official in the Trump administration, Larry Kudlow, said that because there is "some structure" to talks with the European Union, "reigniting that will be easier" than starting the whole process with the UK.  In other words we are not at the front of the queue. It's perfectly possible, indeed probable that by the end of the year we will have no trade deal with our first and second largest export markets and frozen out of talks on a US-EU mega deal.

Meanwhile, the government is pathetically complaining about the USA upping the tariff on aircraft coming from the EU in retaliation for Airbus getting subsidies which were declared illegal by the WTO. Our inept trade Secretary, Liz Truss, has written to her American counterpart urging them to 'engage and reach a negotiated settlement'.
The Americans have spent years fighting this through the WTO so to suggest more negotiations is really not going to wash.  Outside the EU what defensive measures is Britain able to threaten?

Brexit is inherently a bad thing but this demonstrates what an utterly cack-handed job the Brexiteers in government are making of it. One would almost think they want Brexit to fail. The have alienated half the country, the EU, the USA, the Scottish government, Stormont, British business, the civil service, the Treasury, the BBC and much of the press. Even The Daily Mail seems to have gone on the attack.  To imagine it could end well is the triumph of illusion over reality.

If Dominic Cummings is behind it all he is not quite the genius he is made out to be.  This piece by Nick Watts on the BBC about the PMs strange adviser is fascinating. It ends with this:

"Johnson summoned Cummings in his first hour of need when Brexit and the future of the Conservative party were in jeopardy. Cummings was the right fit for the first phase of Boris Johnson in No 10. It will be a cliffhanger to see how long the match lasts."  

If Cummings is in place at the end of the year it will be a surprise to me.

One of the reasons I think Cummings will fail is in his inability to face up to things.  He may be the disrupter in a powerful position and driving things forward but sooner or later he will hit the rocks.

A few days ago, when the botched reshuffle took place and Julian Smith was sacked from his post as NI Secretary, he received an awful lot of support from all sides. The fact that he got the Stormont Assembly back up and running and was widely respected counted for zilch in Downing Street. He is a man with some ability but his face didn't fit and that was enough to see him off.

In a Twitter thread, Peter Foster said Mr Smith wasn't popular with Johnson or Cummings because he tended to raise difficult issues;
Smith was born in Stirling but represents Skipton. He seems to have acquired a Yorkshireman's uncanny ability to see the weakness in an argument and to cheerfully and loudly point it out. Johnson and Cummings on the other hand want to ignore the problems. They don't want to hear about problems. This is Cummings' Achilles heel.

Smith didn't succeed in Northern Ireland by ignoring the hard things. He faced up to them, found solutions and won respect.

It's wonderful having a lot of compliant sycophants around the cabinet table and you might even be able to limp along for quite a while - provided they were half competent. The present lot are anything but. Eventually the elephants that nobody points to will come back to destroy them.  And Brexit has a whole herd.
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