Daily Mail

All that detail ... my brain just pulled a hamstring

- Quentin Letts

WAS that barbed wire round her neck? Or a chain of enslavemen­t? For her road-to-Brexit speech yesterday, Theresa May wore a strikingly chunky metal necklace.

What message did her jewellery choice send? Like the speech’s contents, that possibly depends on your viewpoint.

A hands- off signal to the Eurocrats or a realistic acknowledg­ement of post-Brexit bonds with the EU zone? Our exporters may have to follow EU manufactur­ing standards (but they would have done anyway, if they wanted to sell goods there). Meanwhile, we will assert the right to set our own trade deals, run our own borders and stop paying billions in subs. Good.

The venue was London’s Mansion House. The Prime Minister originally intended to travel to a Tyneside factory to make this speech but the bad weather kyboshed that plan, so the Lord Mayor of London opened his gilded parlour.

Not that television viewers would have gathered that this was the grand- columned, high- ceilinged Egyptian Hall. Downing Street’s roadies had erected the usual bland stage fittings, this time with a backdrop saying ‘Our Future Partnershi­p’. This slogan was just over Mrs May’s left shoulder and seemed to suggest that our future partnershi­p would be somewhere east of Turkey.

Mark Carney, governor of the nearby Bank of England, was in the front row for the 1.30pm speech, as were Business Secretary Greg Clark, Chancellor Philip Hammond and Brexit Secretary David Davis (the one true believer of that lot). Boris Johnson was marooned in Hungary.

After some opening words about the snow, Mrs May began by recalling her first speech as PM when she spoke up for the ‘just about managings’ and promised to defend them against ‘the powerful’, ‘mighty’, ‘wealthy’ and the ‘fortunate few’. In other words, George Osborne and Tony Blair!

‘That pledge,’ she said yesterday, ‘is what guides me in our negotiatio­ns with the EU.’

She hailed us as a nation of pioneers and explorers and innovators. We had tremendous intellects and we were proud of standing up for our values, etc. When prime ministers talk like this (Gordon Brown was always telling us, furiously, about our values) I find it exhausting. A pioneer? Moi? Explorer? Oh, Lord, do I have to be? I just want to sit down and have a sausage roll.

BUT such is the language of the political speech. When Mrs May mentioned our cities, they had to be ‘our great cities’. The union of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland and England was ‘the precious Union’.

She spoke for almost an hour and chunks of it were little easier to understand than one of St Paul’s epistles. Does any ordinary churchgoer ever cop what Paul is on about? One of the greatest miracles of Christiani­ty is that it spread despite St Paul’s inability to write accessible prose.

Theresa May speeches are not exactly Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown comedy routines but you had to admit that she packed in plenty of detail, even if one’s eyeballs were starting to smoke a bit when she got on to the Rogano Convention and the Safe Harbour Data Framework. Nurse, quick, bandages and splint, please: my brain just pulled a hamstring. Crafty old Boris to have found an excuse not to attend.

Which soundbite to believe? The one in which she said ‘we will not be buffeted by the demands to talk tough or threaten a walk- out’ or the repetition of her old line ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’? I’ve a nasty feeling the former is more her true position.

But there was a flicker of irritation (a raised fingernail) with the EU when she mentioned Northern Ireland. And after saying she equally dismissed the ‘counsels of despair’ of the Remoaners, she gave a strong reply to a German reporter who invited her to disown Brexit. ‘No, we won’t think again on Brexit,’ she said. ‘The British people voted for Brexit.’

With that, and a certain air of relief, the assembled company voted for a late lunch.

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