Short of giving Mr Juncker a peerage she couldn’t be more placatory
THERE we were in Florence, city of murals and medieval marvels, home of Botticelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and strawberry gelati as big as fists.
Enter Theresa the Not Quite So Magnificent, striding into a room with a classical frieze showing two nearnaked cherubs frolicking and holding hands.
Sure enough, Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond sat in the front row. They tried to exchange friendly banter but it was about as convincing as Charles and Diana in the late 1980s.
In this Florentine setting, the intended subtext was how Brexit and Brussels negotiators should raise sights to higher planes of Renaissance hope and human possibility. A noble ideal. Possibly doomed.
Optimism in lovely Italy is one thing. Try it with Mutti Merkel in dank Berlin midwinterish and it may not look so realistic.
Let Britain and the EU continue their talks ‘on the basis of trust’, implored Mrs May. To buy that trust (which is how these things work) she proposed paying money to Brussels for another couple of years. Nooooo!
I did not hear conditions attached to this concession. Who is to say 10 or 20billion quid will satisfy the grasping thieves? And what happened to those lawyers of ours who said we did not owe a penny?
An Italian political speech has its own touches. Mrs May arrived at the Santa Maria Novella complex in a Maserati. We journos were placed in a holding room which had once been the dining room of 15th century monks.
NEAR Brexit Secretary David Davis sat a local dignitary – a pouting, inky-haired ringer for Peter Mandelson – who was wearing a wonderful green, white and red sash. He may have borrowed it from Miss Tuscany 2017.
Italy’s Europe minister, Sandro Gozi, was there. The only time he stiffened slightly was when Mrs May said she wanted early agreement from Brussels on her transition proposal. Early agreement from Barnier and Juncker on anything? Good luck with that, bella. Warmish autumnal sun slanted through the clerestory windows. Beside me stood an Italian security service bodyguard, quivering with adrenaline, a vertical stripe of beard down his chiselled chin like a zip. He was no doubt as tough as Etruscan goat but his skin was gleaming with cosmetic oilings and he wore blue suede shoes. Perhaps he was there to save Mrs May if Mr Hammond suddenly turned tonto.
Who came out on top here? Hammond or Boris? Mrs May firmly said no to some of the Treasury’s wetter proposals on economic association with the EU, but her two-year transition period after 2019 looks seriously pongy, and is not what Boris wanted. Two ruddy years! The European ostrich-elite gets two more years of clover.
Afterwards I took a small bite out of the PM’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, about this transition delay.
You can give a child extra time for its homework but it will still leave everything till the last moment. Will the same not
happen with our diplomats? Little Barwell’s eyes bulged and pinkened a bit but he said nothing.
Mrs May began and ended her speech with cultural, upbeat outreach – workmanlike flattery about Florence’s contribution to civilisation, diplomatic stuff about our ‘partnership of interests’ with the EU. She gave these passages doubleclenches of her clawing fingers, little growls of her voice. But the better passages were her polite assertions that Brexit was about sovereignty – the British people wanted to be governed ‘by people directly accountable to them’. Voters throughout the EU may have cheered that.
Outside, a tiny group of Chiantishire expat Brits warbled Remainerishly. They were led by a former Labour MP, Roger Casale, and they were moaning that Brexit was going to ruin their sun-kissed rights. After this almost excessively moist speech, the only people standing in the way of a smooth (and for us costly) relationship with Europe will be the anti-UK headbangers in Brussels.
It is hard to see how, short of giving Jean-Claude Juncker a life peerage, Mrs May could have been more placatory to the EU.