Merlot Memo to save Brexit

Boris and Gove drafted letter to May as they shared bottle of wine Former rivals warned PM to ignore Cabinet Bremoaners like Chancellor

THERESA May faced a fresh Cabinet rift last night as a leaked letter revealed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have secretly been urging her to take on Chancellor Philip Hammond.

The two big beasts of the Brexit campaign fell out last year after Mr Gove spectacularly torpedoed Mr Johnson’s Tory leadership hopes.

But yesterday it emerged that they have buried the hatchet and formed a new alliance in order to protect Brexit from diehard Remainers in the Cabinet.

In a joint letter, Mr Johnson and Mr Gove encouraged the Prime Minister to ‘clarify the minds’ of those not demonstrating ‘sufficient energy’ over the country’s Brexit plans.

The message appears to be a thinly veiled attack on Mr Hammond. The Chancellor has faced criticism for wanting a softer Brexit and angered Cabinet colleagues by refusing to release cash to

‘That would leave us over a barrel’

prepare for the country’s departure. As Andrew Pierce reports on the facing page, Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson and Environment Secretary Mr Gove put their Brexit blueprint together over a bottle of Merlot at a private meeting in September.

In the letter to the Prime Minister they wrote: ‘Your approach is governed by sensible pragmatism. That does not in any way dilute our ambition to be a fully independent self-governing country by the time of the next election. If we are to counter those who wish to frustrate that end, there are ways of underlining your resolve.

‘We are profoundly worried that in some parts of Government the current preparations are not proceeding with anything like sufficient energy.

‘We have heard it argued by some that we cannot start preparations on the basis of “No Deal” because that would undermine our obligation of “sincere co-operation” with the EU. If taken seriously, that would leave us over a barrel in 2021.’

Mr Johnson and Mr Gove also used the missive to insist that transition arrangements for Britain’s exit from the EU must end on June 30, 2021.

The term ‘sincere co-operation’ was used by Mr Hammond in a speech in June, when the Chancellor told an audience in Berlin: ‘We will engage, in a spirit of sincere co-operation.’

The letter, titled EU Exit – Next Steps, is marked ‘ For your and Gavin’s eyes only’, a reference to the PM’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell. It is thought it was delivered to Number 10 at the start of October, shortly before Mr Hammond sparked a public row by refusing to allocate cash to prepare for a no deal scenario.

The Chancellor infuriated Down- ing Street by writing an article for The Times in which he suggested it would be irresponsible to start making costly preparations now.

Mrs May issued a public rebuke within hours, making it clear that the Treasury would be required to fund planning for all eventualities. The Prime Minister had planned to sack her Chancellor after the elec- tion last June but was too weakened to carry out the purge after losing her Commons majority.

Speculation is mounting that Mr Hammond could be axed in a New Year reshuffle if this month’s Budget is a flop.

Mr Gove yesterday refused to comment on the letter, but revealed he would not block Mrs May if she decides to hand over extra cash to Brussels to secure a good exit deal.

The Prime Minister and Brexit Secretary David Davis should be ‘given the flexibility’ they need to secure a good deal, the Environment Secretary said.

He told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show that the Government is ‘doing everything we can’ to secure a good deal but is making sure that whatever happens in the talks, Britain can ‘make the best of them’.

Among the more admirable characteristics of the British people is a refusal to panic. Phlegmatic might be the word that best describes us. Would that that were true of the parliamentary Conservative Party, which, if countless reports in the Press and in the broadcasting media are even halfway correct, is undergoing a self-generated nervous breakdown.

Their constant text is: Theresa may doesn’t know what she’s doing on Brexit, the EU is triumphant and our government is collapsing.

This theme has been enthusiastically taken up by newspapers on the Continent and by EU politicians charged with negotiating the terms of Britain’s exit from the institutions of Brussels.

The headline on the front page of last Thursday’s Times was: ‘Brussels braced for fall of Theresa may’s government.’ This seemed largely based on the fact that in the previous fortnight, two Cabinet ministers — michael Fallon and Priti Patel — had resigned.

Here’s some real news for the drama queens of Westminster and Brussels.

outside the circles of the politically obsessed, no one cares or even knows much about michael Fallon and Priti Patel: still less about whatever precipitated their exit from the Cabinet.

Security

For the record, Fallon left because he had made lewd remarks to female colleagues sometime in the past, and Patel because when on ‘holiday’ in Israel she had held discussions with Israeli politicians without telling the Foreign office.

Is there anyone — anyone normal, that is — who thinks this means the government is done for? Who believes, either, that what Fallon and Patel did is unforgivably damaging to voters, or that they are such towering figures as to be irreplaceable?

I repeat: no one outside the self-inflating Westminster bubble could possibly believe either proposition.

And to the extent that the Fallon resignation was connected to the similarly over-puffed issue of unwanted slap and tickle in the corridors of Parliament (‘Pestminster’): who really thinks that this storm in a Westminster teacup has the slightest effect on the well-being and security of the British people?

This didn’t stop the BBC running as its main story on the 10 o’clock news last Thursday, a report from Brussels breathlessly declaring that European leaders viewed what was happening to the British government ‘with incredulity’.

We were told they couldn’t believe the level of chaotic dysfunctionality in the may administration.

I don’t think that our negotiating partners in the EU can teach us much about political stability.

The germans are still, months after their general election, struggling to establish a workable governing coalition (it will have to involve three parties, which is a mess). And after that election, the Bundestag has, for the first time, a significant body of mPs — in the shape of Alternative für Deutschland — some of whom are close to neo-nazi, and all of whom want to disrupt the cosy pro- EU consensus in Berlin.

Spain is facing the biggest constitutional crisis since it returned to democracy, with the threatened secession of its most economically vibrant region, Catalonia. meanwhile, across the Pyrenees, Emmanuel macron’s poll ratings have fallen with a speed and depth never before witnessed in a recently elected French President.

By contrast, Theresa may’s post-election standing in the polls (and that of her party) has remained unaffected by all the alleged chaos in her Cabinet or in the Brexit negotiations: proof, if it were needed, that the public can tell a real crisis from a phoney one generated by backbenchers angry at lack of promotion or by media sound and fury signifying nothing.

Thus a Yougov survey last week showed that support for mrs may as the public’s preferred choice as Pm rose by one point over the month to 34 per cent.

The proportion of those saying they’d prefer Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn as Pm had fallen by two points to 31 per cent. meanwhile, the parties themselves were running neck-and-neck, with Labour leading the Conservatives by 43 per cent to 40 per cent.

The former Pm Tony Blair observed of this, in his characteristic chat-show tone: ‘Come on guys, we should be 15, 20 points ahead at this stage.’ And that great election-winner for Labour had the right to make this point.

Exhausted

When John major was facing internal challenges to his own leadership of the Conservative Party in the mid-1990s, the party was more than 40 per cent behind Labour in the polls. And towards the end of gordon Brown’s period of office, his own polling ratings were so far behind the then opposition leader David Cameron’s that, if it were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped the bout. Indeed, Brown had looked every inch a beaten man, a grey and exhausted shadow.

The same description might also have been levelled at major as his government became ever more embattled: perhaps unfairly, both he and Brown were portrayed as men on the edge of complete nervous collapse.

As it happened, I met Theresa may last week and had a chat with her (not least about the glittering Remembrance poppy brooch she was wearing — it came from m&S, she assured me). now, I’m no doctor, but she looked strong and well — far from someone crushed by adversity.

It’s true that she had a deep crisis of confidence in the immediate aftermath of June’s general Election, when, as much as anything because of her own awkwardness and leadenness as a campaigner, the Conservatives lost their parliamentary majority.

But, disastrous as that was, she is now coping dutifully with the consequences — and this commands more respect from her fellow leaders in the EU than you might imagine from the headlines.

And while those in this country who don’t accept the result of the 2016 referendum take a most unseemly delight in what they see as her and the UK’s weakness in our divorce negotiations with the EU, mrs may has not been deflected from her original objectives (departure from membership of the Single market and Customs Union, and from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice).

meanwhile, as Paul goodman, the highly respected editor of the website Conservative Home, pointed out yesterday: ‘our media is not set up to probe the differences and divisions among our negotiating partners, which are no less real for not being adequately covered.’

Buoyant

obviously, if the economy were in the tank, then mrs may and her administration really would be in the terminal trouble that so much of the media describe as fact (rather than their own lurid anticipation). And it would be if the claims of the Remain campaign had been vindicated: that a vote for Leave would in and of itself lead to an immediate surge in unemployment and a recession.

But their forecasts were no more than black propaganda.

Last week brought the latest batch of figures refuting those politically manipulated prophesies of doom.

In october, Britain’s industrial production grew for the sixth month in a row, the first time that has happened in almost a quarter of a century. And the Bank of England said that it expected average wages in the UK to increase by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent next year.

If this is one of the Bank’s forecasts that actually becomes true, there really would be an improvement in the popular mood.

But the public’s attitude is in any case much more buoyant than that of the vast majority of pundits — and certainly of the anti-Brexit claque who believe their own propaganda that Britain can’t cope with life outside the EU.

Figures released last week by the office for national Statistics show that ‘average happiness levels’ in the year to June 2017 rose to more than 7.5 (out of ten), the highest since this form of data was first collected in 2011.

I am not a great believer in ‘ the happiness index’, but the fact that it has moved upwards over the past year does put the self-indulgent panic of Conservative mPs (and those who encourage them) into sharp perspective.

of course, it’s good sport for the media to create a sense that the government will collapse at any moment. But if that’s wrong, then it is not Theresa may, but they and the rent-a- quote disaffected politicians who will deserve to be treated with contempt.