As the PM seeks co-operation in talks with European leaders, the hardline Brexiteers are already up in arms
Presumably the model May would like to emulate, if she truly wants the closest possible trading relationship, is Norway’s. Norway is outside the EU but has extensive access to the single market. The quid pro quo is that it obeys the rules of the single market, including freedom of movement and paying into the EU budget, without having any say in those rules. Even if, in the end, she manages to agree a special agreement to limit freedom of movement, the commercial and regulatory rules of the single market will still be made in Brussels without our say-so. That, surely, can only be seen as a loss of control?
At some point, then, the square will have to be circled. For May to repeat that “Brexit means Brexit” may see her through the summer but it cannot persist for much longer. At some point in the autumn we need to know what she prefers: to protect British jobs and investment by accepting the rules of the single market or to bend to the threats and imprecise ambitions of her hardline Brexit backbenchers. Her new Foreign Secretary may famously have a policy on cake that is pro-having it and pro-eating it, but it’s not a policy a government can deliver.
For the Conservatives, the sabre rattling of the hardliners is ominous. The schism over Europe that has claimed the scalps of three prime ministers — Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron — is unbridgeable. There are two sides to the Tory brain: the desire for untrammelled economic liberalism that created the City’s Big Bang, embraced globalisation, sold off numerous state assets and drove the creation of the single market in the first place and the socially conservative, village-green Englishness that values tradition, defence of the realm and a 19th-century view of parliamentary sovereignty. Nowhere is that divide more exposed than over Europe. And no deal can be struck over the terms of our exit from Europe that will satisfy both sides.
May will have to make those hard choices. She will have to come clean with her backbenchers, the Brexiteers and their supporters in the press. If they react the way they appear to be preparing to, with dogma rather than patriotic responsibility, the present veneer of Conservative unity will soon give way to splits as stark as those within Labour. The slender majority the Prime Mini ster enjoys will no longer give her much protection. As her three predecessors learned the hard way, you cannot fudge your way to party unity over Europe.
Her MPs may be cock-a-hoop when t hey l ook ove r a t t he Opposi t i on benches and see Labour tearing themselves apart but they should watch with humility. Labour’s day of reckoning may come sooner but theirs could be lurking just behind.