Beware Mrs May’s ‘damage limitation’ exercise

Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former right-hand man, is surely correct when he says that she sees Brexit mainly as a “damage limitation exercise”. It explains so much. The oddest characteristic of damage limitation exercises is that they normally make the damage worse. People can see that the person trying to limit the damage is on the defensive.

If you embark on something as complicated, controversial and protracted as Brexit, you are at an enormous disadvantage if you never wanted it yourself. You can work conscientiously to get it right, and Mrs May clearly has; but this cannot overcome the original problem that your heart is not in it.

As a result, the bigger and bolder the new thing being suggested, the more you fear damage. Your opponents notice this, of course, and hem you in. The European Commission leaders saw this from the first. When Mrs May made her Withdrawal Agreement with them, she fell into the trap they had been carefully preparing for two years.

So now, in the name of damage limitation, she wants Parliament to vote next week for a deal which it has already rejected by 230 votes – one which hands over the money in advance, keeps us under the EU’S aegis without any power of decision and provides for the effective break-up of the United Kingdom if we later decide to go our own way; and all because the alternatives are supposedly more damaging. This is seen as “pragmatic”, but in fact it is funk.

So now it boils down to lawyers, always the refuge of those who cannot make up their own minds. Having exhausted her credibility with her parliamentary party, Mrs May is leaving the final bit to the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox QC. He will study whatever form of words Brussels comes up with to mollify Tory and DUP Brexiteers about the Northern Irish backstop. If he says it’s legally watertight, the Commons will be invited to accept it.

I feel a little wary of Mr Cox. The Law Officers in British government are supposed to steady the ship. They combine legal expertise with quiet political astuteness. Trouble always starts – as it did in the Westland crisis and over the Iraq war – when they get dragged publicly into issues of great contention. Temperamentally, Mr Cox does not seem to understand this. His histrionic appearances at the party conference and in Parliament suggest that he thinks he is in some television drama in which he thrillingly exposes the guilt of the accused before an admiring jury.

It is therefore a smart move of the European Research Group to have on hand a panel of eight legal eagles to greet him on his return to our shores and cross-examine him on what he has brought back. But it shows how much Mrs May’s “damage limitation” has drained trust from the process that our political future may now hang on the arcane details of the law.

The row about anti-semitism in the Labour Party is important in its own right. After all, never before in this country have a party leadership and organisation been guilty (although sadly there have often been individual anti-semites in all main parties).

But the story has an additional importance: it cannot be solved so long as Jeremy Corbyn remains leader. This is because he cannot believe the accusations are true, and yet they are true – partly because of him. If he were not the leader, Labour would not have become so embroiled in a vast conspiracy theory about who secretly rules the world – a theory which attributes uniquely diabolical powers to Jews. Such discourse is strongly present in the attitudes of Labour’s hard Left and is all but global among politicised Islam which deliberately confuses its religious faith with its desire to destroy Israel.

Such people make up Mr Corbyn’s gang. If he deserts them now, he’s lost in his party. If he sticks by them, he’s lost with the electorate.

It is extremely hard to defend the Catholic Church against criticism of its handling of child sex-abuse cases. It frequently deserves a harsh reckoning. But when it is open season on any institution, one should also look hard at the prejudices which the critics display.

One is the resurrection of the old smear: “A celibate clergy must be secretly gay. Therefore there is more paedophilia in the Church.” In the not so distant past, the two were seen as virtually synonymous. As late as the Eighties, I remember people saying: “He likes little boys, you know.” By this, they did not necessarily mean he was a child-abuser; they often meant no more than that he was homosexual. The two things were confused.

Now this link is back in fashion. A new book about the Vatican claims that more than half of its priestly inhabitants are gay. Because the author is himself gay, he is allowed to get away with this unprovable figure. But no one should be allowed to get away with the idea that the “double life” required by celibacy turns gay priests into paedophiles. The equation that “gay equals paedophile” is as wrong as the ultra-feminist equation that “man equals rapist”.

It would be tragic for churches, and for all jobs involving children, if men working for them automatically fell under suspicion solely because they were thought to have homosexual inclinations. Yet I think it is happening.