The perverse politics of Brexit

Most of us will have had the experience of living under a government pursuing a policy with which we profoundly disagreed. It might have been the privatizations of the 1980s, or the Iraq War, or the ban on hunting. It might, indeed, have been joining what became the EU and then progressively closening and deepening that membership through the signing of treaties up to and including Lisbon.

The situation with the government’s Brexit policy, though, is fundamentally different. All of the policies listed above, and all others that I can think of, were deliverable in principle and the people who championed them knew how to deliver them in practice. The profound political dislocation of Brexit is that neither of these things are true in this case.

The problem in principle has been widely described, not least on this blog. The government’s Brexit policy cannot be delivered because it contains incompatible demands, fundamentally because it seeks to keep something close to the economic arrangements of EU membership, and especially single market membership, without accepting the political and institutional arrangements that go with that. This incompatibility is most starkly obvious in relation to the Irish border, which the government wants to have completely open whilst also not belonging to the single market or having a comprehensive customs agreement. But the same basic impossibility runs through every part of the policy for the same reason.

That is not to say that any form of Brexit policy would be impossible in principle to deliver. It would be possible to deliver a soft Brexit of single market membership via EFTA/EEA along with a comprehensive customs agreement. Or it would be possible to deliver a ‘clean Brexit’ of complete detachment from the EU, the single market and the customs union. Both of these policies would be politically controversial for various reasons and both would be economically damaging, in the latter case catastrophically so. But they would not contain the inherent contradictions of the actual Brexit policy and in that sense would, for better or for worse, be deliverable.

Of course any form of Brexit would, whatever one’s view of its desirability, be a complex matter. That is just because of the scale of the operation and the timescales involved and, as such, it requires very considerable expertise across a wide range of domains – trade, security, international relations, and law being just a few of them. One of the biggest ironies of the present situation is that, by and large, the advocates of hard Brexit simply do not possess that expertise and in this sense are reliant upon those who do. But those who do are, again by and large, opposed to Brexit in general and, even if they were not, cannot by definition be expected to enact a form of Brexit which is impossible in principle.

This appears to be the unprecedented bind that the Civil Service finds itself in. It is generally thought (and the class and education profile of the Referendum vote makes it statistically probable) that civil servants are, again generally, not in favour of Brexit. Indeed, Brexiters frequently bemoan this. But delivering policies with which they disagree is meat and drink to career civil servants and hardwired into the ethos of the British Civil Service. It’s an ethos which is nicely captured in the classic political sitcom Yes Minister, when Sir Humphrey explains:

“I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.”

What makes the government’s Brexit policy different is the impossibility of delivering it. It is difficult to know what is going on behind the scenes because serving civil servants do not give public briefings, but we have seen many indications of what I am claiming. Most obviously, the high profile resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers, formerly Britain’s Ambassador to the EU, who was effectively hounded from office by the Brexit Ultras, showed how the government refuses to listen to expert advice which challenges an impossible policy. The statements of many other former senior civil servants paints the same picture, and it is difficult to believe that they are not saying in public what their current-day successors think and say in private.

The most recent example is the comment by Sir Martin Donnelly, until last year Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade, criticising the government’s ‘Fairy Godmother’ approach to Brexit, a term that underscores, indeed, its fantastical nature. This prompted a scathing response from Brexiters including his former political boss at DfIT, Liam Fox. It is difficult to imagine that when, just months back, they were working together they did not hold similar positions to those they hold now. More generally, it is reasonable to suspect that the senior civil service is endlessly trying to explain to Ministers what is and is not possible and being ignored if it does not fit the hard Brexit playbook. Indeed, the trashing of the leaked forecasts of the consequences of Brexit seems to confirm this.

The politics of Brexit are unprecedented for another reason. Just as civil servants often have to enact policies they disagree with so too, very likely, do Ministers and even perhaps, on occasion, Prime Ministers. But Brexit is unique in that it is not just a single policy but a complete reset of Britain’s fundamental economic and geo-political strategy and yet the Prime Minister herself appears to think that it is essentially mistaken. I remarked in my previous post that the sub-text of her speech on Friday, as with the Florence speech, was that Britain would be better off staying in the EU. A very acute editorial in today’s Observer makes the same argument at length, pointing out that the speech constantly implied the benefits of what was being rejected. It is an interpretation bolstered by her evasive response when asked after the speech whether Brexit was worth it, and by the fact that she has twice refused to say whether she would vote for Brexit if the Referendum was being held now.

This is really quite an extraordinary situation. Of course, it is well known that May was, if only reluctantly and not very vocally, a remainer during the campaign. It’s easy to understand why she would have felt it necessary to endorse Brexit in order to secure the leadership of her party, and it’s not wholly ignoble for a leader to seek to keep her party from splitting (though that’s not to say that placing that above the national interest is justified). Nor is it ignoble to believe, as she apparently does, that not to have enacted Brexit would have created a potential crisis of democratic legitimacy and trust. But none of that justifies, or requires, the pursuit of Brexit in an impossible form. There was an answer that would have satisfied those concerns and also have been deliverable (i.e. soft Brexit, in the meaning described above). We may even, conceivably, end up with something not a million miles away from that, but only via a route which will leave the Ultras (whose hopes she has raised) and remainers (whose views she has treated with contempt) equally unhappy.

Whatever her motivations, what has been revealed is a profound lack of leadership. She appears to have mistaken stubbornness for strength, determined that come what may, and regardless even of her own true beliefs, she must continue down the path she has embarked upon. Ironically, I have heard it said (but cannot find the source) that when she was at the Home Office she was described as having the qualities of a good civil servant in terms of delivering her brief. She seems to have taken the Referendum to have set out the brief and her job as PM to be to deliver it. But the Referendum did not set out how the result should be delivered and, anyway, a good civil servant knows that there are ways and means of delivering. Or, as Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey once put it (and I suspect that his current real life counterparts are now often, in effect, saying):

“If you are going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way.”

So the politics of Brexit are truly remarkable not just because Brexit polarises opinion more deeply than perhaps any issue in modern British history but because it does so in a particular way. Brexit policy has taken a form that demands the impossible and requires those who know it is impossible to implement it. It is overseen by someone who presumably thinks that it is possible in this form, but doesn’t appear to believe that it is desirable. Meanwhile it is proclaimed as the sacred Will of the People who magically knew what they voted for two years ago, even though it was only last week that the government precariously agreed what that was. And what we end up with will certainly be different to what the government wants, because that’s impossible to deliver, but whatever it turns out to be it would be an affront to democracy to ask the people to vote on whether or not they agree to it.

Four speeches and a wake-up call

Speeches have been as plentiful as snow this week and like our snow-blocked roads they lead us precisely nowhere. That was made brutally clear by the publication of the EU’s draft text of the Withdrawal Agreement and the predictably absurd reactions it engendered.

Liam Fox’s is easily dealt with. It was a vapid restatement of claims about the value of an independent trade policy which the government’s own analysis show to be minimal and which his own former Permanent Secretary had earlier the same day analytically trashed.

Jeremy Corbyn’s had a greater political significance in that by opening up a different policy on a comprehensive customs treaty he also created a route for parliamentary defeats of the government and, with that, unpredictable but potentially major implications. How that plays out now will depend on the extent to which Tory remainers are willing to take the opportunity. But, that said, a customs union alone will not solve the Irish border issue nor will it mitigate very much of the economic damage of Brexit. For that, Labour need to shift on the single market, too – and that seems to be their most likely, though still very far from assured, direction of travel.

John Major’s speech was a reminder of the virtue of common sense, which seems to have all but deserted the British polity, and made logical, detailed, and well-informed arguments (although he, too, appears to think that a customs union will solve the Irish border). Beneath the tone of statesmanlike sagacity I thought I detected an almost pleading note to the country and to his party to get real before it is too late. Predictably, it was immediately denounced by the Ultra Brexiters as treachery. There may well still be voters who listen to and are swayed by Major, but alas for him and for us all, a large swathe of the backbenchers in his party have moved beyond common sense, logic and detailed well-informed argument.

And finally the Prime Minister’s capstone of the ‘road to Brexit’ series. At the core of it lay a statement of the ‘three baskets’ or ‘ambitious managed divergence’ approach agreed at Chequers last week. For the reasons I discussed in some detail in my previous post, this is a non-starter. After all these months, she still refuses to understand that although there are different ways of being in or being out of the single market, there is no way of being both in and out. The most depressing aspect of it, as with the Florence speech, was the sub-text that it would be better for Britain not to leave the EU at all or, at least, to do so whilst staying within the EEA. It is a terrible, tragic failure of political leadership that a British PM is enacting a policy which is not only harmful to Britain but which she clearly realises is harmful to Britain. And it’s an insult to the people of Britain to demand that we ‘come together’ to support a Brexit that almost half who voted did not want, and in a form that more than half of them certainly don’t want.

Overall, it seems clear that there is going to be no change of course by the government, unless it is forced on them by parliament, and thus they will have to accept the consequences of having chosen that course. Which bring us to the wake-up call of the EU draft Withdrawal Agreement. There was nothing in it that should really have been a surprise to anyone since it is the legal reflection of what was agreed in the phase 1 talks in December. Those talks agreed that, barring a trade arrangement (option A) or a technological arrangement (option B) that obviated the need for a hard border, then option C would be continuing complete harmonization (in effect, continued single market and customs union operations) across the border. Whether or not that extends to the whole of the UK or just Northern Ireland would be a matter for the British government. There is no ‘annexation’ going on here.

The howls of outrage from the Brexiters were entirely bogus. They arise solely because as the Article 50 period continues it is exposing all of the lies, fantasies and misunderstandings in which they have indulged and which they have conned many voters into believing. As reality bites back, this ceases to be a matter of theoretical argument or political rhetoric but begins to take on a tangible, legal and institutional form. This is what they wanted, but they act as if it is being forced upon them.

In particular, as regards the Irish border, what is being rammed home is that both a customs union and a single market entail, for a different reasons, a border. That cannot be negotiated away because it doesn’t lie within either the EU’s or the UK’s power to do so. A customs union is a particular kind of construct within those WTO rules that Brexiters often say they like so much, but even if that were not so as soon as there are different tariff levels within different territories there has to be a border, or else there is no way of enforcing the tariff. Similarly, with market standards and regulation. Brexiters say they want freedom for regulatory divergence, even, we are told, to set higher standards than the EU. Suppose this happens, perhaps on animal welfare standards: how then will the Brexiters prevent lower-standard EU produce entering the UK without a border? The same goes for every regulatory divergence or tariff divergence, whether upwards or downwards, between the EU and the UK – indeed, ironically, were it not so those independent free trade deals that Brexiters are obsessed with would be impossible. The technical details are fiendishly complicated; the basic principles could be understood by a child.

So if you leave the single market and any customs union you have to have a border. The only question is where. It can’t be on the Irish land mass if the GFA is to survive. It can’t be in the Irish Sea if the United Kingdom is to survive. So the government have to decide which of these mutually incompatible choices they wish to ditch. Howling that it isn’t fair will change nothing.

Of course the government’s position is, still, that these choices can be avoided, either by a free trade agreement so comprehensive that the need for a border is obviated (option A) or by means of a technological solution which makes the border virtual (option B). So far as the first of these is concerned it rests on the pervasive failure of Brexiters to understand the difference between a single market and a free trade agreement (FTA). No FTA, no matter how ‘deep and special’ or ‘bespoke’, can be the same as single market membership. I suppose it is just about conceivable that an agreement could be devised which amounted in all but name to membership but if so the obvious question would be: so why leave? In any case, such an outcome would be completely at odds with the government’s current ‘managed divergence’ plan, and with its existing red lines, as May’s speech made clear.

The idea of a technological fix for the Irish border has gained new impetus in the last few weeks in Brexiter circles because they have latched on to a research paper produced for the European Parliament on this topic. As is their habitual modus operandi, they leap on to things that they half-understand (‘WTO rules’ and ‘Most Favoured Nation’ being other examples) in order to proclaim that there is, after all, an answer to the incompatible demands they make. In the present case, like the devil quoting scripture, the fact that it is a report to (not, as many of them claim, by) an EU body adds to their glee.

However, that glee is quite misplaced. The document in question outlines a series of new and still-emergent technologies which could be used in a combination that has never been tried before and to that extent is highly speculative. But, crucially, even if it could be put into practice (and in any kind of feasible timescale) it would not remove the need for any physical infrastructure at the border and does not claim to do so. Moreover, it would not avoid the need for human interventions at the border, for example to check vehicles which intelligence operations had identified as suspicious.

This latter point was made by Dr Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, who has conducted detailed research on Brexit and the Irish border issue, in an interview on Radio 4’s The World Tonight last Tuesday. Yet the very next edition of the same programme had former Tory leader Michael Howard re-stating that the ‘EU’ paper proved that the border issue could be solved by technology. He was being interviewed by the same person as had interviewed Hayward the day before, yet her points were not put to him. This, in microcosm, is one reason why so little progress is made in debate with Brexiters: they set off false hares that leave everyone chasing around in circles until the next one starts. It was, don’t forget, only a few weeks ago that they were proclaiming with equal confidence and equal inaccuracy that the Sweden-Norway and USA-Canada borders were frictionless.

In the absence of a viable form for options A and B, the EU draft text only provided details of option C, whilst being clear that this would be rendered irrelevant if the UK did, indeed, come up with a practical alternative. Apart from the ridiculous reaction of the Brexiters (including Mrs May’s peculiar response that no British PM could agree to option C when she did exactly that, at least as a potential, in December) some sensible and well-informed commentators suggested that the EU had been undiplomatic and provocative in drafting the document this way.

I strongly disagree with that. The whole sorry mess that Britain has got itself into arises from the inability or refusal to stand up to the Brexit Ultras in politics and the press. For years now, like domestic tyrants whose families try to avoid enraging them, they have been tiptoed around. Cameron did so, May does so and actually, more broadly, pro-EU politicians did so. One of the reasons the Referendum went the way it did was that for decades very few pro-Europeans were willing to make a full-on case for membership – rather than a grudging, transactional case - so that by the time of the campaign it was too late. Instead, the Brexiter narrative was allowed to take hold as established fact rather than being firmly dismissed from the outset as nonsense. As usual with the politics of appeasement, it failed.

There’s no reason at all why the EU should now show any respect for the sensibilities of the Brexit Ultras. During the years of Britain’s membership, endless accommodations were made to those sensibilities (hence the numerous opt outs, including from the Euro and Schengen) but, of course, they could not satisfy the Ultras because, as we now clearly see, they cannot be satisfied. Now that we are leaving, the EU-27 are understandably unwilling to continue trying to work around them. But even if that were not so, the circumstances of Brexit make it impossible for them to do so. What the Brexiters want is fantasy because it contains so many mutually exclusive things and there’s just no way that the EU can pander to this by pretending it is not so or by ignoring it. Britain is still refusing to get real about Brexit, as the speeches by May, Fox and Corbyn, and the reaction to that by Major, showed: that does not mean that the EU will or can do the same. Britain, and the Brexit government in particular, needs to wake up to that.

Britain still refuses to get real about Brexit

In December 2017, after the end of the phase 1 talks, I wrote on this blog that what would now happen would be that “we will continue to travel endlessly around the Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness. That is to say, on the one hand the Ultras will keep finding new ways to imagine that it is possible to have all of features of being in the single market without being in the single market, whilst the EU will keep finding new ways to explain that this cannot be so”. The Chequers Awayday meeting was the last chance the government had before the phase 2 talks start to get off this endless fantasy loop. They blew it, and have arrived back at something that was first mooted as far back as 2016: a form of sector-by-sector Brexit.

The current version goes by various new names – three baskets, managed divergence or, freshly minted today, ‘ambitious managed divergence’. Whatever term is used the idea is almost certainly doomed to failure. In December 2016 I discussed some of the reasons why in a blog on UK in a Changing Europe website. I won’t reprise all that now, but one issue, which may not be immediately obvious, is that business sectors are rarely, if ever, discrete, clearly bounded, entities. For example, the government can talk about ‘the automotive sector’ but that pulls in goods and services from all kinds of other sectors, such as textiles or computer software. Sectors do not stand alone.

That indeed is one of the reasons why (as is already clear) the EU are highly unlikely to agree anything like the Chequers model. That is often expressed in terms of a refusal to allow ‘cherry picking’, but I think that is a misleading expression, implying that the juicy cherries are there to be plucked if only the EU would be more flexible or if the UK were to negotiate bullishly enough.

The real point is that the single market is, conceptually, precisely that: a single market. It is not in principle a single market in X or in Y, and if it were to be, or become, so it would lose what is central to its defining characteristic and its economic rationale. It is true that, to the extent that it is still a work in progress, especially in services, some sectors lie outside it and are only gradually being brought in. But those sectoral exceptions are temporary, usually for reasons of technical difficulty; anomalies to be rectified, not end states to be made permanent. The single market doesn’t just unify national markets, it creates a unified market tout court.

There is another issue – perhaps not worth spending much time on, since the whole model is almost certainly not going to happen, but important for understanding one of the key confusions of Brexiters. That confusion is the now often-stated idea that a UK trade deal with the EU will be easy because of existing convergence, which is the thing that is time-consuming in normal trade deals. The meta-problem with that is that this is not an ordinary trade deal in that it will be concerned – uniquely – with divergence not convergence, as discussed in a previous blog post. But within that, there is a particular issue that arises from the idea of a sector-by sector Brexit.

If we think about a normal trade deal, one of the key sources of delay is that powerful business groups lobby for their sectors to be excluded (i.e. to protect themselves from competition) and/or to shape the forms that regulatory convergence takes. In the Brexit case, the same lobbying will happen but in reverse: almost all sectors will lobby to be amongst those included in the single market and/or to shape the forms that regulatory divergence will take. So whereas it would very probably be fairly quick to agree a soft Brexit of Britain staying entirely in the single market (via EEA/EFTA), it will be no quicker to negotiate a sectoral Brexit than it would be to negotiate any other trade deal – in other words, many years.

But all this is, as I say, largely beside the point. Unless something drastic changes on the UK red line on the ECJ (and that’s not impossible: we already see signs of it softening over Citizens’ Rights and security), then ‘ambitious managed divergence’ is a dead duck. It simply won’t work to have some sectors of the UK economy in the single market on the basis of the UK sticking to EU regulations for this or that sector or having some form of mutual recognition agreement (itself a much more complex matter than the government seems to understand, which would need another post but in the meantime see this briefing from the Institute for Government). The reason it won’t work is simple: what happens when there are differences between, or disputes about, the application of regulations? Some body has to decide, and that has to be a supra-national body. The UK courts by definition are national not supra-national, so it has to be the ECJ. This the key take away from a detailed assessment of ‘sectoral Brexit’ from the UK Trade Policy Observatory (which is well worth a read not just on the ECJ issue, but also those of mutual recognition agreements and the WTO constraints on sectoral Brexit).

So, still, the Brexit government is trying to square the circles of incompatible demands. What they want is logically impossible to deliver, and it doesn’t matter a jot how often Brexiters invoke ‘the Will of the People’ to insist that it ‘must’ be delivered. You can vote that the earth is flat, but it doesn’t make it so, and it doesn’t enable ships to sail or aircraft to fly to insist it ‘must’ be so. It is extremely unfortunate – and, frankly, embarrassing - that it falls to the EU to keep having to  tell the British government that its demands are impossible because that, of course, feeds the Brexiters’ narrative of ‘punishment’. It would be far preferable if our own politicians were to have the courage to tell the British people the truth.

The Conservative Party, of course, is hamstrung by its ERG Ultras, who have been out again in force this week demanding a scorched earth Brexit (for a revealing analysis of this group and its motivations see Otto English’s blog, and for an analysis of the inadequacy of the ERG letter’s understanding of the WTO issues it raises, see ex-WTO official Peter Ungphakorn’s twitter thread). As a result, the government shows only occasional flashes of realism (for example, this week, on the likely need for a longer transition period and on an acceptance that EU nationals arriving in the UK during the transition period will have full rights), and these only after having resisted the obvious for so long that this realism can be positioned as a betrayal by the Ultras.

It is Labour who hold the key, because although politics is a complex business sometimes it can be thought of in the very simple way of parliamentary arithmetic. For the time being, they are only inching towards something realistic in terms of a customs union, but it is too little and too slow. It’s actually quite strange that the Labour leadership seem to have reservations about a comprehensive customs union only on the grounds that it would entail the Common Commercial Policy (CCP; i.e. no independent trade policy), since business doesn’t care about that (as the business benefits are almost non-existent whilst the costs are huge) and the Corbynite objection to the EU is on the grounds of global neo-liberalization.

It is a tantalising thought that if Jeremy Corbyn were to come out in favour not just of a comprehensive customs treaty but also single market membership then he would be both the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party in modern times and the champion of the ‘jobs first Brexit’ he apparently wants, whilst also positioning Labour as ‘the party of business’. That term used to be the unquestioned possession of the Conservatives, of course, and one of the strangest political turnarounds of Brexit is how unequivocally they have become an anti-business party as well as becoming committed to damaging British geo-political standing and influence. Above all, the Conservative Party used to pride itself on being ‘non-ideological’ and pragmatic. In its Brexit incarnation it is neither. Hence we have a government committed – and there is no precedent for this in modern British history that I am aware of – to the art of the impossible.

May's Munich speech: seriously ambiguous

Munich may not be the most historically auspicious place for a British Prime Minister to give a speech about European security, but Theresa May delivered what Charles Grant, the widely respected Director of the Centre for European Reform, rightly called a serious speech. This, perhaps, reflects that after her years in the Home Office security is an area where she feels comfortable and knowledgeable. Even so, it contained many ambiguities when the time for ambiguity is running out.

Was the speech intended to be conciliatory and reassuring in stating “unconditionally” Britain’s commitment to Europe’s internal and external security? Or was intended to be threatening in its detailed references to Britain’s intelligence and military capabilities? Was she saying we need each other, or that you need us more than we need you? Perhaps both, and, if so, perhaps for difference audiences?

Was the reference to the need to prevent “rigid institutional restrictions or deep-seated ideology” getting in the way of a deal on security a staggeringly unreflective remark given that the Brexit Ultras, indeed Brexit itself, are the most obvious embodiment of such dogma? Or was it a warning to those same Ultras of the need to be flexible? Was it saying to the EU that whereas the options for trade have been framed in terms of pre-existing models (Norway, Canada) that for security could be bespoke (though, strangely, she invoked trade as an area where there are precedents for a bespoke deal)? Or did it mean that if security could be dealt with on a bespoke basis then why not trade and everything else? Or did it in fact imply, as Sky News’ Political Editor Faisal Islam suggested, a different model, that of the Ukraine Association Agreement?

The references to the role of the ECJ were potentially highly significant, but again ambiguous. She accepted that “when participating in EU agencies the UK will respect the remit of the European Court of Justice”, but the sentence before said that any agreement “must be respectful of both the UK and the EU’s legal orders” (and a spokesperson later said that she had just meant that the UK would pay “due regard” to ECJ rulings). So does this mean Britain accepting actual, or perhaps de facto, ECJ jurisdiction with respect to participation in those agencies or not? Does it imply, instead, some kind of new UK-EU legal body (I have thought, ever since the White Paper was published, that this was where things were heading) and if so how would it work and what would the implications be for participation in other agencies, such as Euratom? The ECJ red line, first drawn by May in her Party Conference speech in 2016, has created some of the most intractable problems for Brexit – but was she softening it or restating it in the Munich speech?

The meaning of these ambiguities is itself ambiguous. Is it that she dare not be clear for fear of causing uproar within her party? Or that she is not clear in her own mind what she means? Sometimes, I have the sense that May is simply not alive to the implications of the phrases that she uses. Going right back to the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ months, before the Lancaster House speech, she used to speak of retaining frictionless trade in goods and services. This seemed to code a soft Brexit, since that is the only way of achieving such trade. But subsequently it emerged that this was not what she meant, even though she still uses the same phrase, and it sometimes seems that she does not understand the complexities and subtleties of what is involved in Brexit – for example the full implications of having set herself so firmly against any role for the ECJ. That may seem an extraordinary thing to say of a Prime Minister and seasoned politician, but if the picture created by Tim Shipman’s widely acclaimed book Fall Out is accurate it may be correct. There, she is portrayed very much as a blank canvas on to which her advisers painted pretty much whatever they wanted.

Whether studied or uncomprehending, her ambiguity has in the past served her well, allowing different people to project on to her whatever they find conducive. This has enabled her to walk the line between EU and domestic pressures and between different factions in her ever-more fractious party. The Munich speech reflects that: it can be read as slowly inching her Ultras towards pragmatism or slowly inching the EU towards creating the bespoke Brexit that she apparently thinks possible. (Shipman’s book is again revealing on this, both in suggesting that she does, indeed, reject the ‘Norway-Canada’ duality and, also, that she regards the ‘opt out and selectively opt back in’ approach that she adopted to the EU whilst at the Home Office as the template for Brexit, although few regard it as realistic. Tellingly, she made reference to exactly that experience in her Munich speech).

However, such ambiguity is fast becoming a fatal weakness. Had we but world enough and time, to use the words of Marvell’s famous poem, it might be viable to keep walking the tightrope and, perhaps, to gradually push whoever it is she wants to push towards whatever it is she wants to push towards, if indeed she knows. Since she sent the Article 50 letter, though, time has been at a premium and has now all but expired. May’s speech in Munich may have been serious but the ambiguities within it, as well as her wider ambiguities about Brexit, cannot persist for much longer. Within the next few months, if not indeed the next few weeks, she will need to come off several carefully-constructed but inherently fragile fences.