Key U.K. minister may bolt after May’s Brexit crisis talks
Plan is ‘a fudge’ and ‘practically irrelevant to reality,’ EU diplomats say
LONDON— Theresa May has averted a crisis, and sent her proposal on how to solve the Irish border question to Brussels.
Amid speculation Brexit Secretary David Davis was preparing to resign over her proposal, May held crisis talks that resulted in new language on timelimiting her plan to tie Britain to European Union customs rules after leaving the bloc. It now says the backstop “should” end in December 2021, by which time it expects its new customs setup will be ready.
But the result is not the Davis victory some are spinning.
May has headed off another threat to her leadership, and her Brexit vision is the one sent to Brussels. It’s not at all clear her proposal will clear EU scrutiny, though after 24 hours of intense political drama, reaching the next stage of negotiations remains a victory of sorts. The fight has been postponed.
The issue became toxic, with Davis and his allies failing to quell speculation he could quit over the row. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Michael Gove, the environment secretary, also object to the plan.
Davis is the public face of May’s Brexit negotiating team and losing him at such a deli- cate moment in the talks would be a potentially disastrous blow to the prime minister’s strategy.
At the head of a fragile government with no automatic majority in Parliament, May also knows that the resignation of the minister responsible for her central Brexit policy could trigger a campaign to oust her among disillusioned members of her Tory party.
“To contemplate these negotiations continuing without David Davis would be deeply upsetting and deeply dangerous for the country and David Davis needs to stay where he is,” former Brexit minister David Jones told BBC Radio 4’s Today show. Backing his former boss’s position, he said that an openended customs deal “would just not be acceptable to the mass of the Conservative Party.”
Last month, May persuaded Davis and the other pro-Brexit ministers in her inner cabinet that they should support her plan for a temporary customs arrangement with the EU, until a new system comes into force.
But Davis apparently objected when he saw the document’s wording because although it stipulated that the extension of EU customs rules would be time limited, it did not say exactly when the arrangement would come to an end.
Brexit backers in May’s party fear the result will be that the U.K. is forced to remain inside the EU’s tariff rules forever, destroying their vision for the country’s future. If the U.K. applies the EU’s tariffs on goods imports, it won’t be able to negotiate effective trade deals, eu- roskeptic Tories believe.
As EU diplomats in Brussels begin to digest the U.K. proposal, they’re reacting with a mixture of confusion and dismay.
One described the government’s paper as a “joke,” and another as “backtracking.” A third said the EU would never be able to accept it without far greater clarification. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Brexit negotiations.
“It’s a fudge that satisfies her cabinet, but it’s a fudge that’s practically irrelevant to reality,” said the first diplomat, who said it remained unclear what would happen if the future arrangement isn’t ready in December 2021.
There’s still the question of when the U.K. will engage with the issue of alignment of EU standards that’s needed to prevent a hard Irish border — as well as why the U.K. is confusing the U.K-wide customs plan with the Ireland solution, the diplomat said.
That theme was expanded on by the second diplomat. The U.K. plan turns the Irish backstop solution into a U.K.-wide customs arrangement that would probably give the U.K. goods access to the internal market without the usual conditions, which “raises the question why we should do this,” the diplomat said.
Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexit co-ordinator in the European Parliament, was also dismissive: “Difficult to see how U.K. proposal on customs aspects of IE/NI backstop will deliver a workable solution,” he tweeted.