May’s diplomatic blunders will cost Britain dear in Brexit talks
Rafael Behr
There aren’t many rules to drug dealing, but one of them is not to get high on your own supply. The product is for punters, and getting wasted is bad for business. The equivalent rule in politics is not to be taken in by your own spin. Prime ministers employ people to push positive stories about them on Westminster street corners. But they shouldn’t consume that line themselves.
Theresa May is sitting on a consignment of Brexit. The street value is unknown. The quality is hard to ascertain because it has been cut with bad promises, myths and unrealistic expectations. The spun version depicts a nation on the threshold of ecstatic liberation. Foreigners will no longer make the laws, nor swarm the shores.
When urging MPs not to tamper with the bill permitting activation of article 50, May said it was “time to get on with … building an independent, self-governing, global Britain”. Anyone who queries the prime minister’s approach wants a subjugated, dependent, non-global Britain. May’s Brexit is the only Brexit, and it’s the good stuff – clean, pure, no nasty side-effects.
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May could have allayed anxiety with personal diplomacy, but that has never been her style. She is reserved with cabinet ministers she has known for years. With European leaders she has been formal to the point of rudeness, sticking to prepared speaking notes and gnomic banalities. Even in bilateral chats, where friendly counterparts have offered support in exchange for insight into May’s thinking, the prime minister has used her “Brexit means Brexit” line, unaware of how insulting it is to fob off the head of an EU power with a vacuous media soundbite.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/14/theresa-may-brexit-talks-prime-minister-diplomacy-eu
Longer read made shorter: May is as useless as Prime Minister as she was as Home Secretary. Who could have known?
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