There is at least as much of the scorned “company awayday” about today’s cabinet meeting at Chequers as there is the feel of the new term. But there needs to be rather more substance than customarily comes out of either. For all the (largely male) characterisation of Theresa May as headmistress trying to impose some discipline on staff and students who have gone a bit wild over the summer break, this gathering needs to do much more.
Two months after the UK voted narrowly, but clearly, in favour of leaving the EU, May has to marshal the ministers she has appointed behind a clear and common purpose.
It is all very well to argue that August didn’t really count because we have “gone European” in the sense of taking the whole month off, so really no time has been lost. However, politics in August was active enough for the three senior Brexit ministers (Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis) to be seen quarrelling – not just with remainers, but among themselves – for Brexiteers to argue on the basis of short-term economic figures that the economic harm from Brexit was exaggerated, and for a host of interest groups to lobby for their particular cause (from the City, via science and technology to academia). If all this was going on in public, how much else was seething away in private? The prime minister may have been striding over mountainsides, but many others have been very busy indeed.
Yet to what effect? So far all that appears to have been decided is this. The UK will move to leave the European Union; “Brexit means Brexit”, as Theresa May has said. A second referendum on the terms negotiated – as per Labour’s Owen Smith and many others – will not happen so long as May is prime minister.
Other points, however confidently articulated, seem less certain. The prime minister has the authority to invoke article 50 to trigger the leaving process – but MPs will apparently have a role. There will be no hurry to start the process, but no dallying either. There will be no early election – oh, won’t there? And wouldn’t there be at least pressure for one if there were a proper opposition? And what about the two – or is it three – million EU citizens currently living in the UK? Will they have the right to stay? They probably will, but no one wants to say so lest it encourages a wave of new arrivals.
This will presumably be broached at today’s meeting, but it is a detail beside the big questions that need urgent answers. One – even at this relatively early stage – is of May’s own making. The potentially destructive dispute about demarcation and precedence that broke out between Fox and others is a product of the departmental structure May has devised. The Brexit campaign that dissolved so spectacularly in the shock of victory has to reconnect with its supporters and get back to the basic premise of “taking back control”.
The second – for all that ministers have been asked to accentuate the positive and suggest how Brexit can benefit their particular department – is the question that lurked beneath the whole campaign: single market versus curbs on EU migration. All the argument over the summer on this side of the Channel has been about negotiating as much single market as possible, while limiting free movement just enough to satisfy the leave voters. The difficulty here is that the EU insists that the two are indivisible and linguistic nuance is probably not what many leave voters had in mind.
Two months on, the choice remains as stark as it was in June. Oh, to be a fly on the Chequers wall.
