New PM could get some wriggle room out of stubborn Barnier
Michel Barnier is clear. As he repeated again yesterday, if the British want an “orderly” Brexit then the “only option” is the Withdrawal Agreement that has already been agreed by Theresa May.
This familiar message was also restated very clearly to Mrs May when EU leaders met in Brussels this week. As one senior UK source put it, the EU said “not a dot, comma or font size” will be changed.
And yet, all of the Tory leadership contenders, including those on the softer end of the spectrum like Jeremy Hunt, are clear that the divorce deal will need to be renegotiated; just tweaking the Political Declaration will not be enough. This might make it seem that a head-on collision between the EU and any new prime minister is inevitable – but diplomats and officials in EU capitals have not given up figuring out a way to avoid a truly destructive crash.
The EU’S “no renegotiation” position is indeed deeply entrenched not just in the office of Mr Barnier, who can be expected to defend the deal he brokered and on which his reputation as the EU’S chief negotiator is staked.
More fundamentally, it reflects the fact that Mrs May lost the trust of her fellow leaders. When it became clear that no concession would deliver a deal in Westminster, this rendered all concessions pointless. The negotiation got stuck in a doom-loop.
Things were then made worse by Mrs May’s decision to not change course after she lost by a 230-vote margin, but to head Right-wards and embrace the so-called Malthouse Compromise which the EU so thoroughly rejected as unrealistic. Distrust, then, to disdain.
But listen carefully in Brussels and it is clear that for all the continued assertions that the deal cannot be renegotiated, there is an acceptance that a new British prime minister will have to be given a fair hearing. If they are smart, the new leader will seek meetings in Berlin and Paris quickly, and seasoned officials in Europe say they can expect these to be granted.
The trick, as one senior EU diplomat puts it, is to calibrate a request in such a way that it is very difficult for the EU to dismiss out of hand.
The window to get this right will be very short. A demand to “bin the backstop” will be rejected outright and scupper any chance of a reset very quickly.
Brexiteers fear that the Irish backstop is potentially a permanent trap, so the obvious request (which the EU is preparing for) is a time-limit.
It will need to be realistic - not a demand to have a trade deal done by 2022 - but a genuine insurance policy to reassure Brexiteers that the UK can exit.
Five years after the end of the transition period is a time-frame that is talked about, or perhaps seven.
Diplomats speculate it could be sold with the rider that the Good Friday Agreement will continue to pertain when that limit expires. This would reassure both the Irish government and the Irish lobby in the US congress.
To have any chance of success, such a request will need to have a predemonstrated stable majority in Parliament (perhaps 50 or 60 votes) and the new prime minister, likely a hard Brexiteer, will have needed to have demonstrated a commitment to fair dealing.
Mrs May shot herself in the foot in October 2016, in her first speech to the Tory Party conference, by setting deep red lines and playing to the gallery.
When the new leader rises to make their maiden speech in Manchester, they must avoid the same fate. Europe will be watching.
No one should underestimate how narrow the path is here – indeed the growing assumption in Europe is that this will end in a no deal.
Whitehall sources say a time-limit would require the Irish Protocol text to be re-opened, which opens the UK to other requests.
And given the blocking coalition in Westminster between clean-break Brexiteers and those craving a second referendum, a majority for a time-limit may no longer exist. The rhetorical Tory leadership arms race could also put any such compromises out of reach.
But equally, the British government has never confronted Europe with a pre-cooked alternative that demonstrably delivers an orderly Brexit.
If EU leaders are faced with a choice between no deal in five to seven weeks, or a potential problem in five to seven years, there is still an outside chance that Mr Barnier’s deal isn’t the “only option” after all.