DAVIS: SHE’S GONE TOO FAR
He slams May’s plan ... but was his resignation letter written a month ago?
DAVID Davis yesterday accused Theresa May of giving ‘too much away too easily’ to Brussels.
As Mrs May appointed staunch Eurosceptic Dominic Raab to replace him as Brexit Secretary, Mr Davis warned the Chequers plan agreed by the Cabinet ‘would not deliver a proper Brexit’.
Talking to BBC Radio 4 after his Sunday night resignation, Mr Davis said: ‘We are giving too much away too easily and that’s a dangerous strategy at this time.
‘Hopefully we will resist very strongly any attempt to get any further concessions from us, because I think this goes further than we should have gone already.’
Describing the Chequers plan as flawed, he explained it would ‘not have been plausible’ for him to be ‘front and centre in delivering’ it. Mr Davis said he did not want others to follow him out of Government but added it was a ‘decision of conscience’ that must be made ‘in their own minds’.
He insisted he believed Mrs May was a ‘good prime minister’. Asked if she could survive, he replied: ‘Oh yes, of course.’
In Mr Davis’s resignation letter, he told the Prime Minister that the role of Brexit Secretary should now go to an ‘enthusiastic believer in your approach, and not merely a reluctant conscript’.
He warned the Chequers plan ‘ hands control of large swathes of our economy to the EU and is certainly not returning control of our laws in any real sense’.
Last night, former Tory MP Paul Goodman revealed that Mr Davis had begun writing his resignation a month ago. Mr Goodman told the Conservative Home website that he had met Mr Davis in a restaurant near Westminster on June 6 and that he had asked for advice on whether he should remain in post.
He said that a draft resignation letter to the Prime Minister, which he was shown during the dinner, included phrases used in the final version, such as: ‘It is possible that you are right and I am wrong.’
Mr Davis’s successor Mr Raab enters Cabinet for the first time, having served in more junior ministerial posts in the housing and justice departments.
Arriving at his new office last night, the 44-year- old MP for Esher and Walton argued the Government was ‘absolutely’ still fit for purpose as he pledged to deliver what was agreed at Chequers.
‘What we have got to do is rise to the challenges of Brexit,’ Mr Raab said.
‘The way I am going to try and do that is by forging team spirit among the party, the Government and the country at large, really focusing on the benefits and opportunities of Brexit.’
Mr Raab called for the country to leave the EU long before the referendum. His appointment will please Eurosceptics who had raised concerns that Mrs May could scrap the Department for Exiting the EU and bring it fully under No 10’s control.
‘We have got to rise to the challenges’
HISTorY tells us that the electorate does not like disunited parties. Ask John Major. or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whose internecine warfare did much to bring about Labour’s defeat in 2010.
After the seismic resignations yesterday of Boris Johnson and David Davis, there can be no question that the Tory Party is more divided than ever. Junior Brexit minister Steve Baker also chose to walk the plank, while many Conservative backbench MPs are in open revolt.
No one knows whether Theresa May has a week, a month, a year, or more in Downing Street. But it is surely clear that events are spinning out of her control, and that she is increasingly (as Norman Lamont famously once said of John Major) in office, but not in power.
Fractious
Would she have played ‘hard cop’ so ruthlessly at Chequers last week — effectively imposing her solution and attempting to silence internal Cabinet opposition — if she had known that three days later she would lose two senior ministers? It’s hard to think so. What is indisputable is that she is now in a terrible predicament.
And it is surely certain that if the Tories continue to present a spectacle to the public of a fractious and disputatious party, they will sooner or later be dismissed by exasperated voters — and Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-Left cohort will then constitute the Government of the United Kingdom.
His extremism may seem an impediment, but do not suppose that it would make him unelectable if the Tories were to subside further into an orgy of bickering and mutual recrimination. The age of Corbyn is a real possibility. It may be almost upon us.
Nor should anyone doubt that, in the political chaos in which we find ourselves, Corbyn has a surface plausibility. Some of his arguments about the Government’s mistakes over Brexit are right. Yesterday in the Commons, he hit the right spot on a number of occasions in response to a stiff and frankly uninspiring performance by a clearly stricken Prime Minister.
It was hard not to agree with his contention that the Government had spent a long time getting nowhere very much in its Brexit negotiations. Difficult not to agree with him that Boris Johnson and David Davis had abandoned a ‘sinking ship’, shattering the ‘illusion of unity’.
of course, it’s true that Labour is itself divided over Brexit, and that Corbyn is often confused, if not incoherent, on the issue. But that does not matter very much when the party that is supposed to be in government is showing such alarming signs of fragmentation.
No, Jeremy Corbyn is closer to the door of No 10 than ever before. And if he were to enter it, that, to my way of thinking, would a disaster by the side of which the worst possible outcome over Brexit would virtually pale into insignificance.
Mass nationalisation, confiscatory taxes, rocketing public expenditure, hard-Left trade union leaders dictating policy, the embrace of odious foreign regimes and the boorish rejection of dependable allies such as the United States: these are just a few of the nightmarish consequences that would almost inevitably follow a Corbyn victory.
His closest lieutenant and political ally, John McDonnell, is a self-confessed Marxist who would undoubtedly wreak havoc at the Treasury, and leave behind a legacy that would make the flawed economic policies of previous unsuccessful Labour administrations look positively benign.
And then there is the sheer inexperience and terrifying ignorance of most of Corbyn’s front bench, which has been almost wholly denuded of talent as the party’s brightest, moderate voices have fled in dismay to the back benches. one only has to look around the world — for example, at the catastrophic regime in Venezuela, once praised by Corbyn — to realise that a malign and doctrinaire government can do a huge amount of damage in a very few years.
Why can’t the Tories, whether fervent Brexiteers or avid remainers or those somewhere in the middle, grasp this simple fact — that their increasingly acrimonious divisions are easing the path to power of a leader who is both terrifyingly mediocre in intellect and idiotically extreme in his ideology?
Now I realise it is easy enough for me to preach the merits of amity and concord. In the real world it’s obviously much more difficult for Tories to choose harmony over discord when there are genuine and apparently irresolvable disagreements.
All one can say is: consider the alternative. For a hardLeft Corbyn administration would not only adopt the calamitous policies I have mentioned, and more. It would also almost certainly embrace a Brexit even softer than that which the Prime Minister’s sinuous svengali and chief Brexit adviser, olly robbins, dreams of.
Disunity
In other words, if the Conservative Party insists on advertising its disunity, and washing its dirty linen in public, the likely upshot is not only a Corbyn- orchestrated economic apocalypse, but also the most unsatisfactory of Brexits — and conceivably no Brexit at all.
As a Brexiteer, I naturally dislike the prospect of compromising on important principles. Yet if a degree of give-and-take can obviate the dangers I have invoked, wouldn’t it be sensible to show some pragmatic flexibility?
But equally the Prime Minister must demonstrate that in her new mood of resolution she is not hidebound. obviously, she can’t now resile from what was agreed at Chequers, but any further significant concessions on her part would in all likelihood be suicidal.
It seems improbable that Brussels will accept all the Chequers’ proposals. In particular, EU negotiators may demand something close to free movement (i.e. unrestrained migration) in return for the UK having what amounts to access to the Single Market for food, farm and manufactured goods.
Although Theresa May reiterated yesterday that there would be a ‘complete end to free movement’, she may well come under pressure from the EU (not to mention the likes of olly robbins) to give ground. If she does so, I fear she will be finished.
Revolt
of course, she could be finished anyway. A couple more resignations by senior colleagues, or a well-organised backbench revolt, would see to that. on the other hand, if she survives the next ten days until the summer Parliamentary recess, she should be safe until at least the autumn.
Conservative MPs who are plotting to bring her down, and ministers who may be contemplating further resignations, should ask themselves this question: is a new Tory leader really likely to bring more unity to the party?
I don’t think so. In fact, I would suggest that such an act of matricide would probably be followed by more evidence of division, and further bloodshed. More and more people would recoil from voting for a party so palpably at war with itself. Corbyn’s time would then come.
Is there any hope of stopping him? It depends on whether or not one believes that the Conservative Party has taken leave of its senses. Despite my exhortations, I can’t say that I am over-optimistic.
And yet it’s not too late, even in these febrile times, for quarrelsome Tories to show some balance and good sense, and to save this country from disaster.