By Peter Oborne MISS MARPLE OF CHEQUERS THE PLOTTERS UNDERESTIMATED AT THEIR PERIL
Two incisive voices for and against THAT deal
Theresa May’s Brexit proposals, unveiled on Friday night, have been greeted by howls of protest from those Leave campaigners who believe they are victims of the biggest betrayal by any prime minister since Munich 1938.
and one can understand that fury all too well. The Brexiteers promised a clean break from europe. They guaranteed an independent Britain, free to strike trade deals unshackled by Brussels.
and not just the Brexiteers. so did the Prime Minister herself in her Lancaster house speech in January last year. Back then, she set out a vision of a global Britain, liberated from the paralysing constraints of the customs union. a Britain where our manufacturers could trade freely outside the single market and away from the jurisdiction of the hated european Court of Justice.
For the first time since Britain acceded to the european economic Community in 1973, Mrs May held out the tantalising prospect that we would be an independent sovereign state. a Britain, furthermore, where the uncontrolled immigration which has put such pressure on public services would be brought to a halt. Brexit, insisted the PM in a famous phrase, meant Brexit.
so I can appreciate why people who voted to leave the eU two years ago now think the Prime Minister was deceiving them. Brexit, it turns out, actually means remain — certainly in some very material aspects.
No wonder Nigel Farage is promising a return to frontline politics. Nor am I surprised that there is now strong talk of a mutiny in the Tory shires. Indeed, many Tories now seem to want to see our PM driven from office.
I disagree with them. In my view, Mrs May deserves to be hailed as a politician of exceptional acuity.
This apparently innocuous and lacklustre operator has pulled off one of the undoubted masterstrokes of modern British political history. she has performed the impossible by uniting her fractious and divided Cabinet behind her personal vision of Brexit.
This is an extraordinary feat for a politician written off time and again by commentators and by her rivals. Now it is Theresa May who is exerting political authority. Downing street has made clear that she demands total loyalty from Cabinet ministers from now on. anyone who diverges from her strategy will be fired.
The astonishing truth is that she has stared down the Brexiteers and defeated them at their own game. This most underrated of leaders managed to persuade them to sign up to a future for Britain far more closely entwined with europe than they wanted.
Sheconfronted them with a choice between her vision of Brexit and no Brexit at all. It was the Brexiteers who flinched first.
Let’s start at the top with her Foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. It was Mr Johnson who led the Tory campaign for Brexit in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, and ever since he has been the most outspoken advocate for a so- called clean Brexit which would liberate Britain altogether from the control of Brussels.
Mr Johnson is conspicuously unhappy with the proposals unveiled by Mrs May and has used lavatorial language to express the scale of his disgust. Why does Mr Johnson therefore remain a Cabinet member? Why hasn’t he resigned as a matter of principle? I must admit that I am baffled.
I now turn to David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the european Union. Mr Davis is equally, if not even more, at fault. he campaigned on the Brexit ticket in the referendum and, as Brexit secretary, had a massive opportunity to put his own personal imprimatur on our manner of departure from the eU. he has totally failed.
he has not paid enough attention to detail. his civil servants have run rings round him. Thanks to his negligence, his senior civil servant, Olly robbins, has been allowed to take control of the Brexit negotiations. had Mr Davis been doing his job properly, this would never have happened.
recently it emerged that the hapless Davis has had only four hours of meetings with Michel Barnier, europe’s chief negotiator, during all of this year. how utterly pathetic. If anybody has betrayed Brexit, then it is David Davis.
as for secretary of state for International Trade Liam Fox, he is politically impotent. he talks a big game but delivers nothing. Of the fourth Brexiteer, andrea Leadsom, the less said the better.
To sum up, it is easy to see why the Cabinet Brexiteers have been accused of being gutless careerists, more interested in their ministerial cars than the principles they pretend to believe in.
Mrs May has set out a strategy for the softest possible Brexit and the Brexiteers have failed to protest. I believe that we now need to reassess the political acumen of this Prime Minister who has so often been dismissed as a stopgap of no lasting significance.
she has been playing a long game. she kept her Cabinet together by being prepared to look weak — and too many political observers made the mistake of believing that she really was weak. In reality, Mrs May was playing a patient and calculated game.
Last weekend she struck — ruthlessly, remorselessly. as a result, she is stronger than at any time since calling that disastrous general election.
Of course she, too, faces charges of betrayal. But name me any Prime Minister, including Mrs Thatcher or Winston Churchill, who has not been the victim of similar accusation.
The fact is that Mrs May does intend to take Britain out of the eU, as she promised. she is determined, however, to do it her way.
AsPrime Minister, Mrs May sees her primary concerns as preserving British prosperity and jobs. When Land rover talks of relocating and airbus of disinvesting, she worried. It is one thing for Mr Farage to insist on a clean Brexit regardless of the consequences for ordinary people, but for Mrs May this is a matter of the utmost importance.
Today, there is a new shape to British politics. Mrs May, dismissed so often as a political dullard, has made mincemeat of those figures like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who appear so much cleverer than she does. she has pulverised Johnson and played Davis with the contemptuous ease of an expert fisherwoman in a salmon pool. This is masterly politics.
In many ways, Mrs May reminds me of agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who appeared at first sight to be timid and innocuous to the predatory men who crossed her path. But they underestimated her at their peril — and at the weekend it was the Brexiteers and not Mrs May who found themselves helplessly out of their depth.
There will be trouble ahead. Who knows how europe will react to the new negotiating guidelines thrashed out at Chequers?
Many pitfalls will loom over the coming months, to be followed by a knife- edge vote in Parliament later this year. But for the time being, it is game, set and match to the Prime Minister.