It’ has been said over the Channel in recent days that Theresa May was reportedly duped by someone who, if not malicious, was certainly ham-fisted. And this apprentice sorcerer was none other than Jean-Claude Juncker! It is whispered that the president of the European Commission took advantage of confidential chats with the UK prime minister to urge her to call a snap general election to increase her parliamentary majority – which stood at barely seventeen seats – ahead of the Brexit negotiations.
Given that the divorce will be costly for the United Kingdom (and also for the EU though it is blameless; as Michel Barnier put it: “It is the UK which is leaving the EU and not vice-versa”) and will force British leaders to take decisions which their British citizens and businesses will find hard to stomach, having fresh and numerically stronger democratic legitimacy seemed to be sensible advice. The prospect was all the more tempting as Mrs May had taken over from David Cameron in the immediate aftermath of the referendum of 23 June last year without seeking the benediction of the people.
Wherever the advice came from, whether from the president of “Brussels” or her two closest advisers chosen as sacrificial lambs, for Theresa May it brought disaster, a comprehensive pasting. Instead of the previous majority of seventeen, she now has to go cap in hand to seek the support of Northern Irish Protestant fundamentalists who, beyond their societal obsessions, will surely add their own demands to the UK wish list, making the Rubik’s cube-like process even more complex (see EUROPE 11805). This is a situation which, as it happens, is not helpful either to Mrs May or to her European interlocutors.
For these EU interlocutors, the negotiations that are due to open on 19 June have now become more difficult because, as Christian Democrat MEP Elmar Brok said, “Britain has not got a government of real authority”, making the talks and the outcome more unpredictable than ever. This is particularly so since, as Fintan O’Toole notes, the twenty seven member states find themselves having “to try to extract a rational outcome from an essentially irrational process”, when they have a very simple question to ask: “What do you Brits actually want?”. The question may be ever so simple but the responses it elicits are seen by this Irish writer as bordering on the outrageous:
“And the answer is that the Brits want what they can’t possibly have. They want everything to change and everything to go as before. They want an end to immigration – except for all the immigrants they need to run their economy and health service. They want it to be 1900, when Britain was a superpower and didn’t have to make messy compromises with foreigners” (The New York Review of Books, 10 June).
For Prime Minister Theresa May, O’Toole’s criticism is all the more unpleasant as her electoral set back is now forcing her to look reality in the face: the electorate turned its back at least as much on the “hard Brexit” that she championed as on her in last week’s vote. For whom was she speaking when she presented herself as the “strong and stable” custodian of British interests if not, first and foremost, for herself as the political leader of a rudderless country and for a Conservative party which, O’Toole argues, “has plunged its country into an existential crisis because it was too weak to stand up to a minority of nationalist zealots and tabloid press barons”, a party, he says as he delivers a final twist of the knife, that is “as strong as a jellyfish and as stable as a flea”.
More prosaically, how can one fail that in Great Britain – and even in England – a wind of revolt is rising against the prospect of cutting all ties with the continent?
What the election on 8 June shows is that the British citizens who voted for Brexit are realising that it will not come without major disadvantages. It’s beginning to dawn on them that the drop in value of the pound means more expensive air fares and tourist packages, and energy bills are beginning to rise. They are discovering little by little that what they were offered in the run-up to the referendum was nothing but hollow promises, that they most definitely cannot have their cake and eat it. They are realising that their anger as citizens who felt left behind could come back to haunt them, that maybe they would have been better off staying within the EU and fighting to make sure it offers them more protection than their own country – and more than their government wanted it to! They are realising, as former Polish minister Jacek Rostowski suggested, that Theresa May tried to present a hard Brexit as the only way – and that meant that no deal is better than a bad deal. They felt they had been “manipulated – and they took their revenge at the polls” (Project Syndicate, 9 June).
Did Theresa may plot against her people to satisfy her thirst for personal and partisan power? If she did, she can have no axe to grind with the “Machiavelli of Brussels”, even though Jean-Claude Juncker has good reason to allow himself a quiet chuckle.
In the meantime, as far as Brexit is concerned, there is less certainty than ever. That’s the most important thing – for the UK and for Europe! (to be continued)
Michel Theys