The drugs still aren’t working. Or if they are, then Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have been given the wrong prescriptions. Both party leaders appeared on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday politics show to make sense of the current state of the Brexit negotiations, and both departed with their credibility further diminished. Far from each having a vision for the future, they looked as if they would be lucky to find a way out of the building. Even with the exit signs clearly marked.
After an interview in Saturday’s Daily Mail in which the prime minister tried to emphasise her human qualities – she might even have opened a can of baked beans last week! Who knew? – she was now back to her familiar stubborn, automaton self. No one was going to take her alive. If her own party wanted to come for her then let them bring it on. This was a fight to the death.
May began by arguing that her Brexit deal wasn’t about her – a message that doesn’t appear to have got through to her cabinet, her MPs or the rest of the country. It was about the national interest. It was about getting a deal that was worse than what we already had and nothing like the one that had originally been promised. A deal against which everyone could unite. Ridge looked understandably confused but tried to pin her down.
Maybe they could start with something easy. What bit of the deal did she actually believe in? None of it, May replied confidently. Because it was in the national interest for her not to believe in it. Obviously the 570 pages of the withdrawal agreement weren’t that great for the UK, but people shouldn’t get too fixated on the details of the backstop agreements, because there was a vanishingly small possibility that they would never be put in place. Ridge sighed. Mainly with pleasure. This was TV gold. Getting the prime minister to say something stupid live on air is every interviewer’s dream.
Chancing her arm, Ridge suggested there was a problem with the UK not being able to end the backstop unilaterally. May happily obliged with more spontaneous dadaism. It was like this. The backstop was like an insurance policy and no policy could be ended unilaterally. Here we had a prime minister all but admitting she needed permission to cancel her house insurance. And yes, she was furious at having to continue paying for policies she no longer needed. Like the home contents insurance at No 10.
In any case, people shouldn’t get too fixated about the withdrawal agreement as that was all signed off – something she had either omitted to tell Andrea Leadsom or that Leadsom was too stupid to have grasped – and concentrate on the future trade agreement. All seven pages of it. In the next week – she couldn’t say exactly when as she hadn’t checked availability on Eurostar – she was going back to Brussels in the hope of fleshing out the future trade agreement to another couple of pages of waffle. Nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. Ridge begged to differ. Everyone agreed she had won the interview hands down.
As she had with Corbyn earlier in the programme. The Labour leader didn’t get off to the best of starts, admitting he hadn’t read the entire withdrawal agreement. Obviously almost no one else in parliament has done so either – and those that have, apart from a few lawyers who make a living from disagreeing on its meaning, have failed to understand its full meaning – but it wasn’t a great look for someone who wants to be prime minister.
Corbyn did manage to clarify how Labour couldn’t stop Brexit on its own, but was at a loss when asked to square how Labour could negotiate a deal as good as the one the UK already had with the EU when the EU had categorically stated it was a non-starter.
But it was on the second referendum that he really struggled. It wasn’t something for now, but for the future. Except with just 131 days till 29 March, the future is pretty much now and Corbyn appeared to have no views on what choices should be on a second referendum or how he would vote if there was one. Rather he was going to pin all his hopes on voting down May’s deal and a no deal and cross his fingers that the government would call a general election even though it definitely wouldn’t. Shares in Ridge soared, just as shares in the UK plunged.
Still, May and Corbyn were visions of clarity compared with Dominic Raab over on the Andrew Marr Show. The former Brexit secretary imagines himself to be a natural leader, a Marvel superhero. The rest of the world sees him as Captain Mainwaring in Lycra. A genuinely comic comic-book hero.
He had resigned as Brexit secretary because his support for the prime minister was so firm and unwavering that it was better expressed from the backbenches. The withdrawal agreement he had helped to negotiate was nothing like the deal he had helped to negotiate. People dying as a result of a no-deal Brexit was no biggie because they could have been run over and killed on a B road. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Bizarrely, a few people other than Raab appear to believe he could be that man. Time for the hard hats.
