Well, that went well. Theresa May: Her Part in Her Downfall. Episode 1,002. Having used her traditional hardball negotiating skills to come away with an offer she had never wanted, the Leader in Name Only scampered back to the UK at the earliest possible moment. So it’s just as well we’re not hoping to sign any major free-trade deals with China in the near future. Sod you China, we’ve got the Faeroes in the bag.
Before the latest Brexit clusterfuck caused everyone to drop everything, the main item on the agenda of this week’s European council had been the negotiations to hold negotiations about a trade deal between the EU and China. A huge delegation of Chinese officials and journalists had descended on Brussels for the occasion and they weren’t best pleased to be sidelined to a one-hour slot on Friday morning. Nor were they impressed that Lino hadn’t bothered to stick around to apologise for messing them about. Remember that time when Lino said the UK would play a full part in the EU until the day we left? She doesn’t. But China will.
Apart from among the Chinese, there was a genuinely bearable lightness of being in the air inside the Council of Ministers once May had gone. Her greatest gift to the EU is her absence. The relief in her departure is much the same as you get when a migraine finally wears off. Or when Question Time finishes. Most European leaders would rather have surgery without anaesthetic than spend another hour in her company. She is the singularity of infinite density at the heart of a gigantic black hole.
With Lino back in Blighty, the EU was free to indulge in what has become its favourite pastime. Trolling the UK. Our gift to the world is to offer hope to failed states and provide amusement to all other countries. Brexit has never been about sovereignty or taking back control. It’s been setting ourselves up as a global comedy TV show franchise acted by a cast of the grotesque and the inadequate. For years to come, Dave will be broadcasting repeats on an endless loop. In between finishing his memoirs.
It was the French president who sounded most pleased to see the back of the prime minister. When she had begun her 90-minute piece of self-destructive absurdist performance art, Emmanuel Macron had rated her chances of getting her deal through the British parliament as no more than 10%. By the time she had finished, he had revised that down to 5%. Donald Tusk, the European council president, reckoned that was being generous. Whatever hand she held, she could be relied on to play it badly.
Après Macron, le deluge. At a side meeting of European Economic Area and European Free Trade Association countries, Iceland declared it wouldn’t be at all happy having the UK as a member. We were just too much trouble. We’d try to change the rules before we’d even joined, refuse to meet our obligations and then demand to leave. Nobody would ever get anything useful done. The EEA and EFTA would be in permanent gridlock. Existing merely to exist. The bottom line was that the UK was too Poundland for Iceland.
Things weren’t going any better back in the House of Commons, where Labour took advantage of a rare Friday sitting to ask the Brexit secretary for his take on how the European council had gone. As Stephen Barclay’s sole job is to know almost nothing about anything, he conveniently made himself absent and left Kwasi Kwarteng, the most junior member of the department, whose sole job is to know less than the cleaners about what is going on, to take the hit.
It was a bloodbath from the off. Not only is Kwarteng a round peg in a round stupidity hole, no one in government had actually got round to considering that some kind of plan might be needed after the EU had taken back control the night before. So he was left to make things up as he went along, while MPs on both sides of the house openly mocked him for his incompetence. He must have done something hideous in a previous life to deserve his current one.
Kwarteng’s basic line was that some things might probably happen, but if they didn’t then some other things, as yet unspecified, might happen instead. He couldn’t be any clearer than that. As the laughter around him grew – several MPs shouted “Is that it?” – Kwarteng panicked and began to make up government policy on the hoof. Indicative votes, meaningful votes, free votes. Everything was both on and off the table.
How could anyone tell if he was telling the truth, or even agreed with what he had said five minutes earlier, Kwarteng was asked. They couldn’t, he replied confidently. But if no one else was going to come up with something that resembled a plan then he might as well do it himself. Cometh the hour, cometh the Forrest Gump. Ecce homo!
Over in Downing Street, things were just as bad. Lino had holed herself up in her bedroom and was refusing to come out. She shouted at the mirror that she had really nailed it in Brussels. She was a winner. “It’s over,” her reflection said, shaking its head not unkindly. “Enough is enough.” Then it gradually dissolved until May was just staring at nothing. Now she really was completely alone.
