Theresa May’s premiership finally got down to business today. After the changing of the guard, the cabinet-making, and the courtesy phone calls, it was at last time for serious politics, government and power to kick in. Mrs May’s government only exists at all because of the historic vote last month to leave the European Union. It will be judged above all by the way it handles the Brexit mandate and by the kind of post-Brexit Britain – if a Britain remains – that it shapes. Today Mrs May took the first steps of that momentous collective journey.
The most important event in the prime minister’s diary was her meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, which will be followed by a meeting in Paris with President François Hollande tomorrow. These will begin to shape the negotiations which will define Mrs May’s larger success or failure. Few prime ministers have been handed a more difficult task than extricating the UK from the EU. Last month’s vote settled the ultimate destination, but not the terms. Between them, the May government and the EU member states must now decide what Brexit actually means in practice – as little change as possible, in our view – and then sell it to the Tory party and to a divided UK. That is easy to say but very hard to do.
Before that, however, came Mrs May’s debut at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Despite some claims to the contrary, these events still matter, and not just in the Westminster hothouse (and it was a very hot house today). Television coverage, especially of these first sessions for Mrs May, gives voters a good sense of the kind of prime minister the country has now got. Mrs May proved to be pretty good at it, sticking to her socially inclusive principles, scoring some points, and revealing a previously well-hidden talent for Margaret Thatcher impressions.
She was helped by Jeremy Corbyn’s misguided priorities in this first PMQs encounter. Instead of pressing Mrs May about the meeting with Mrs Merkel or shaking the tightrope on EU market access and free movement of labour – issues on which Mrs May is undoubtedly vulnerable – the Labour leader asked about the 1980s’ miners strike. True, the disorder at Orgreave in 1984 was important. But it pales into insignificance, never mind topicality, when set alongside the national uncertainties set in train by the Brexit vote. Once again Mr Corbyn showed a tin ear on the vital importance of Europe.
Other MPs nevertheless gave notice that Mrs May’s Westminster honeymoon on Europe may not last too long. The SNP’s Angus Robertson insisted that Scotland’s vote to remain in the EU will have to be respected. The Conservative backbenchers Sir Edward Leigh, Philip Davies and Simon Hoare also put down their own markers, on the regulatory costs of access to the single market, on keeping immigration numbers to the “tens of thousands” and on agricultural subsidies to farmers. The Labour backbencher Barry Sheerman meanwhile insisted on a fair deal for young UK citizens wanting to travel and work in Europe.
All these issues and more will be the stuff of the process that got underway in Berlin. All are potential pitfalls. At this stage, Mrs May is testing the waters and making clear her government’s intention to deliver Brexit in a form that can be sold politically at home, not to renege on the June 2016 vote. Today’s announcement that the UK will not now take up its turn as rotating president of the EU in the second half of 2017 was designed to underscore that. So was the fact of the prime minister leading on the issue rather than any of the newly appointed Brexiters in her cabinet.
Yet even these early meetings are a reminder that there will be two sides, and often many more than two, to every issue in the negotiations. Most remainers and some leavers prefer a minimalist Brexit, but PMQs showed there are many Tory MPs on the maximalist side. The history of the European issue is full of reminders that a determined minority can make life impossible for a prime minister with a small majority.
And Mrs Merkel was testing the waters too. She also has big interests at stake, from EU stability, to relations with Russia and Turkey, to her party’s need to be re-elected in 2017. In the end, moreover, the EU is less dependent on the UK than the UK is on the EU, certainly in terms of exports. The atmospherics between the two most powerful women in Europe were fascinating today. But this is only the start. The hard pounding has just begun and the outcome is far but certain.
