Even though Boris Johnson was probably the single most important political figure in the vote that brought about the Brexit result last Friday, his departure from the Conservative leadership race probably makes the task of reaching an agreement on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU that much more difficult.
Johnson, an internationalist and a wavering leaver, was probably the leadership candidate most willing to compromise with Brussels on free movement of workers.
He probably had the greatest opportunity to secure a deal built around a version of Norway’s arrangement, in which the UK has access to the single market, and a greater element of free movement than currently allowed to the nations inside the European Free Trade Area (Efta), Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein and Switzerland.
Instead, the axis of the leadership contest now tilts harder to the leave side. Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove move the terms of the debate to pressing for a hard, uncompromising negotiation. A candidate who shows any flexibility to Brussels is certain to founder.
Even Theresa May, the home secretary, a half-hearted remainer and probably the leadership favourite, in her launch address on Thursday will have given Brussels little hope that a mutually beneficial deal is going to be easy to secure.
Brussels will know she is a formidably calm, stable negotiator, on top of detail. Through her talks on justice and home affairs councils, she also knows her way around Brussels. But she made clear she will put a senior Brexiter in charge of the exit talks, at the helm of a new government department, so reassuring the leavers that she will not go wobbly, or deploy fifth columnists or soft europhile diplomats.
In her statement, May set down some difficult markers for Brussels. She made clear that the UK will not trigger article 50, which starts the negotiations with the EU, until the turn of the year, months after the leadership elections, a timeline that will displease the commission. Brussels wants the talks to start immediately a new leader is in place in September, and will not even allow informal talks to begin until article 50 is triggered. May argues that the government needs longer to work out its negotiating position. If the markets abhor a vacuum, tough.
In a further effort to reassure the leavers, she promised there will be no backdoor route back into the EU, saying there will be no second referendum, something some Brussels diplomats and some in the Obama administration still crave. An early election was also dismissed, so it does not look as if she feels the need to seek further democratic legitimacy once a deal has been struck. “Brexit means Brexit,” she said.
The only glimpse of flexibility was when she said there was clearly no mandate for a deal that involves accepting free movement of people as it had worked hitherto. That leaves her free to argue that an emergency brake on free movement might be a compromise that satisfies Brussels and gives the UK access to the single market.
Finally, she explicitly identified some cards that she may have in a tough negotiating hand. She said the rights of EU migrants to remain in the UK will be in play in the talks, implying that without a deal, tens of thousands of Europeans could be thrown out of the UK.
Gove, Fox and Leadsom will point to her lengthy pro-remain speech in the referendum campaign to show she is liable to relent on free movement to get access to a single market.
For some Brexiters it was significant, too, that May has spoken of an initial deal, suggesting that an interim Norway deal may be required and that her priority was to to maintain the single market.
In her single referendum campaign speech, May ridiculed the whole architecture of the Brexit negotiations.
“The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would have access to the single market,” she said. “We do know that in the negotiations we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations over which we would have no say, making financial contributions just as we do now, accepting free movement rules. It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”
She also foresaw the threats, now emerging from Paris, about the threat to the City of London from Brexit by losing its right to passport euro trade deals. “If we were not in the European Union, there would be little we could do to stop discriminatory policies being introduced, and London’s position as the world’s leading financial centre would be in danger. The banks may be unpopular, but this is no small risk: financial services account for more than 7% of our economic output, 13% of our exports, a trade surplus of almost £60bn – and more than 1 million British jobs.”
She also seemed to understand how hard and perilous it would be to secure a bilateral trade deal with the EU. “We would have to replace 36 existing trade agreements we have with non-EU countries that cover 53 markets. The EU trade deals Britain has been driving – with the US, worth £10bn per year to the UK, with Japan, worth £5bn a year to the UK, with Canada, worth £1.3bn a year to the UK – would be in danger of collapse. And while we could certainly negotiate our own trade agreements, there would be no guarantee that they would be on terms as good as those we enjoy now.”
If she is elected party leader, the civil service could do worse than putting her own warnings on the top of her first file setting out the prospects for Brexit.
The other candidates will also point to her ability to fold. In the speech launching her leadership bid she made a complete volte face on the European convention on human rights, saying she was dropping her plan to pull out. Yet during the referendum campaign she said: “The ECHR can bind the hands of parliament, adds nothing to our prosperity, makes us less secure by preventing the deportation of dangerous foreign nationals – and does nothing to change the attitudes of governments like Russia’s when it comes to human rights. So regardless of the EU referendum, my view is this. If we want to reform human rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court.”
All that has now been shelved by her. Gove, Fox and Leadsom will remorselessly ask whether if she can fold on this principle, will she not backtrack on free movement to gain easy access to the single market.
