Britain’s mess can only get worse

For once Jeremy Corbyn, at most times inapt, had it right. “The Chequers compromise,” the Labour Party leader told the British House of Commons, “took two years to reach, and just two days to unravel.”

The Chequers compromise to which he referred was last week’s agreement, if that’s what it was, among members of Theresa May’s chronically divided Conservative government, setting out the terms it would seek for Britain’s exit from the European Union.

It has indeed been two years since Britons, in a fit of the same anti-elite, anti-outsider populism that was to carry Donald Trump to power later that year, voted to withdraw from the EU. Yet with just three months left to reach an agreement with Brussels, not only on the terms of the divorce but of any new post-Brexit relationship that might survive the rupture, and with nine months to go until Britain must leave, under Article 50 of the EU treaty, with or without a deal, the May government is only now beginning to flesh out its bargaining position.

The reason for this foot-dragging became clear over the weekend. The truce between the Conservative party’s hardline Euroskeptic faction and the moderate and anti-Brexit majority could be sustained only as long as the issue was left vague. The moment the government committed to specifics, as in the deal hammered out at the prime minister’s country residence, one side or the other was bound to feel put out.

At any rate, not two days after the agreement was announced, the minister in charge of negotiating Brexit, David Davis, had resigned, followed shortly thereafter by Boris Johnson, the mercurial foreign secretary.