Frustrated Davis could quit after being cut from key talks
The Brexit Secretary has agreed to the European Court of Justice keeping control over our laws
DAVID DAVIS could walk out on his job as Britain’s lead negotiator on Brexit because of frustration that he is being cut out of key strategic talks in Whitehall, his friends fear.
Allies of the Secretary for Exiting the European Union said they were concerned he was not being included in key talks about Britain’s negotiations.
One source said Mr Davis was frustrated that he had not been shown a key Brexit Cabinet paper sent by Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and Michael Gove, to the Prime Minister.
The fear is that Mr Davis might resign in protest – in the same way that he suddenly quit as shadow home secretary in 2008.
Allies of Mr Davis, known as “DD”, said Mrs May had been “captured” by civil servants Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet secretary, and Oliver Robbins, who works in No 10 advising Mrs May.
One said: “The officials are forming a phalanx around the PM and they are trying to cut DEXEU [the Department for Exiting the European Union] out of the loop and move the centre of gravity to No 10. DD is becoming increasingly frustrated.”
Mr Robbins suddenly quit his role as permanent secretary of the DEXEU in September to move to a coordinating role in No 10.
Another friend said that Mr Robbins
‘Officials are moving the centre of gravity to No 10. DD is becoming increasingly frustrated’
“did not leave on particularly good terms so will not really be that well disposed” towards Mr Davis. This is disputed by sources close to Mr Davis.
A source last night denied that the Secretary of State would walk out, saying: “This is completely wrong and anyone pushing this nonsense in order to undermine Brexit is going to be sorely disappointed.”
Last week, the Government announced that the exact date of our departure from the EU would appear on the “front page” of the EU Withdrawal Bill. Although as keen as anyone in Britain that we leave at 11pm on March 29 2019, this column wondered why. After all, Parliament (including all Conservative MPS, except Kenneth Clarke) had already voted to trigger Article 50, which set the timing in law.
“When governments re-announce something that has already been decided,” I wrote, “… they are putting up a smokescreen to hide something less popular that they intend to do.” Theresa May’s use of the phrase “front page”, when the normal parliamentary word is “face”, was a clue that she wanted a good headline.
Unhappily for the Government, the re-announcement is not working. On Wednesday, 15 Tory “mutineers” popped up, and said they would oppose the idea.
By Thursday, the Government’s business managers were hinting they hadn’t got the votes to press on. It looks like a case of “Hold the front page!”
In one sense, Brexiteers should not worry. Obviously the episode is embarrassing. The mutineers have ensured that Mrs May looks stupid in her various meetings on the Continent (yesterday, it was Sweden). Article 50 stays in place, though: we are still leaving. But this farce means that the smokescreen has blown away faster than intended. We can now see more clearly what it was hoping to conceal.
Speaking on Thursday in an institution called the Berlin Museum of Communication, the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, explained more about the “transition” period after we leave. He revealed that Britain would be “keeping both the rights of a European Union member and the obligations of one, such as the role of the European Court of Justice [ECJ]”.
This represents a gradual change of position, but a big one. In her Lancaster House speech in January, Theresa May declared that one of the main purposes of leaving the EU was to “take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice”. She banged the point home: “We will not have left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws.”
In her Florence speech, in September, which followed her electoral humiliation in June, Mrs May hinted that we might, during the transition, “have regard” to the views of the ECJ. Now Mr Davis’s message from the Berlin Museum of Communication is that we shall still be in the ECJ, although we will have left the EU. So we won’t be in control of our own laws.
Mr Davis will argue this change is technical. During the transition period, innumerable small decisions about regulations will be needed, and these will require a mutually accepted authority. They will indeed. But the authority he wants us to accept is the one we are trying to get away from, and we shall have even less voice in it than we do now. The sensible transitional answer is to agree a tribunal of three British judges and three European ones whose judgments would not have “direct effect” in law but both sides would respect them. Why are we not insisting on this point?
Mr Davis might then argue that the ECJ’S power will not matter because it is only for two years of transition. If he does, he is forgetting how the ECJ works. It is a political court, constructed always to favour the doctrine of “ever-closer Union”. Jacob Rees-mogg proposes an example of what might go wrong. Suppose, he says, that during that period, the member states of the European Union decide that only eurozone countries will be allowed to clear euros in their money markets. That would screw the City of London, and the ECJ could enforce it whether Britain liked it or not.
At Lancaster House, Mrs May promised that, in any transitional status, Britain would not be “struck forever in some kind of permanent political purgatory”. What Mr Davis now proposes is not permanent, but it could be purgatorial. We shall be rendered powerless, and so we could, if the European Union felt like it, be tormented for longer. If we object “But you promised!”, they can retort, “Take it to the European Court of Justice then”. They can be confident which way the ECJ will decide.
And if you look at the politics rather than the principle, you notice that the transition runs up almost until the next general election. The EU will have the British Government where it wants it – over a barrel.
I feel it is time to get annoyed with Mr Davis. For ages now, he has been flying from meeting to meeting, speaking at dinner after dinner, staying late at party after party, encouraging his bonhomous reassurance to be favourably contrasted with Mrs May’s anxious gloom.
What has he to show for it? What concessions has he won? The key to negotiations is putting your best foot forward at the meetings, not putting on a brave face after them. Michel Barnier has the right idea – a grave expression, a guardedly polite manner and the tenacious pursuit of what he wants. Instead of chattering, he just quietly pockets each concession and tries to turn it into the logical basis for the next. Unfortunately, he’s on the other side.
Needless to say, the BBC (in the form of Laura Kuenssberg) yesterday painted Mr Davis as “playing the bad cop” against the EU. If he’s a bad cop, what role is left for any “good” one? Mr Davis’s self-description was much more accurate: he had been “offering some creative compromises,” to the EU, he complained, “and not always got them back”. I’m afraid his ECJ concession is his most “creative” yet.
Our entire experience of more than 40 years inside the EU is that when a process is turned over to its bureaucratic management and legal supervision, Britain loses. That is where we are going with the transition: two years when we are out in law, but in in practice – the victim of rules we no longer make, the prisoner of concessions already given.
How should one read all of this? Stung by this newspaper’s front-page description of them as “mutineers”, the 15 published a letter on the page opposite on Thursday. They said they accepted, with “regret”, that “our country is leaving the European Union”: they were not trying to “delay or thwart” this. It is right, they said, for MPS to try to amend any Bill. They felt the Government was unnecessarily boxing itself in by “putting a date in law”.
Which sounds fair enough. The trouble is that everyone suspects everyone else’s motives. The further trouble is that Mrs May’s Government seems to have no motives of its own, no direction. So it is in each side’s interest to fight as hard and shout as loud as it possibly can. Spectators get deafened.
The further oddity of the situation is that no side can win unaided. Neither Labour, nor the Conservatives, nor Remainers, nor Leavers, have a secure majority. Each keeps bluffing the other.
From the Brexit point of view, the key thing at this stage is to keep open the reality of getting no deal at all. From the Remainer, it is to close off the no-deal possibility so that the EU can then dictate terms. No one knows who is winning.