Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
PM’s sending the cabinet on schmooze cruise to EU
PRIME Minister Theresa May will pack her Cabinet off to Europe this month to sell her new Brexit plan.
She is desperate to get talks with the EU started again after both Brexiteers and Remainers in her party tried to tear up her Brexit White Paper last week.
So she will kick off a round of tours across the Continent this week.
She will meet Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and Czech and Estonian PMs Andrej Babis and Juri Ratas.
Her deputy David Lidington will try to win over France, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt gets Germany and Chancellor Philip Hammond will schmooze EU finance ministers at a G20 summit. Home Secretary Sajid Javid will be in Spain and Business Secretary Greg Clark gets Italy.
Other visits are being planned and EU politicians will be invited to London.
Mrs May said: “We know European citizens will be keen to hear how this proposal will benefit them.”
They must shout merits of May’s EU plan from the rooftops
Theresa May was ridiculed for trying to send MPs home for the summer five days early to save her skin. She needn’t have bothered. They were sloping off anyway, eager to snaffle cheap flights before school holidays start.
That’s the last we’ll see of them for two months, and it could be the last we’ll see of Julian Smith as Chief Whip. That’s if he’s guilty of upskirting Parliamentary procedure by disgracefully ordering Tory chairman Brandon Lewis to break his solemn vote-pairing promise to maternity-leave Lib Dem Jo Swinson.
But it was a relieved PM I encountered in her No10 rose garden, now safe from any leadership contest before October.
Detective thrillers are her summer reading. With so many MPs plotting her downfall, whodunnits will come in handy. But she has a cunning plan up her sleeve, or would have if the dress she wore had sleeves.
Both Brexiteer and Remainer Tories are giving her such a hard time she’ll bypass Parliament to save her job.
The Chequers Brexit plan, which drove David Davis and Boris Johnson to hara-kiri, will now go to the country and Europe in the hope that when MPs return in the autumn it’s a done deal.
Local party bigwigs were called to No10 to air their grievances to chief of staff Gavin Barwell.
My snout inside told me: “There were some angry people there – and some stupid ones.
“But the message was, the PM needs to communicate more.”
The foot soldiers for this will be Cabinet ministers about to find their own holiday plans disrupted.
Each will be told to schlep through a bit of Britain that’s not Tory Home County territory and shout the merits of May’s new Brexit from the rooftops.
They’ll then be given an EU country each to do the same there. I pity whoever cops Austria yodelling the message in lederhosen.
May’s Brexit sell is an EU “association agreement” creating a free-trade area for goods.
A “facilitated customs arrangement” will collect EU tariffs at UK borders. And EU workers and students will still come here unhindered. To Brexiteers that sounds suspiciously like a single market, customs union and free movement by other names. No wonder they hate it.
But Mrs May’s survival hangs on this. And buttering up the EU with a spread of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Brexit is her only hope.
Jacob Rees-Mogg will never buy it but he’s got nanny to dry his tears. And Mrs May can spend the summer sticking pins into his voodoo effigy.
That jewellery box Donald Trump gave you and you can’t decide what to do with, Prime Minister, is a good place to store him.