Mrs May’s fighting talk is just talk

Sketch Tom Peterkin

Theresa May was hoping for a Maggie moment yesterday. This was supposed to be when she came out fighting in a “lady’s not for turning” manner as the bullish British bulldog who won’t be bullied by Brussels.

Certainly, her terse delivery and strong rhetoric had a touch of the Iron Lady about it, which may have appealed to Tories of a certain age.

But did the tough talking have the desired effect on the other side of the Channel? Would her demand for a bit more respect shove Donald Tusk’s Instagram cake (minus the cherries on top) where the sun don’t shine?

Initial signs, from Mrs May’s point of view, were not good.

“Theresa May joue la victimisation devant l’impasse des negociations du Brexit le ‘respect’ des Europeens,” tweeted Florentin Collump, London correspondent of Le Figaro. One didn’t need to be a linguist to deduce that there was a notion amongst the French commentariat that Mrs May had been playing the victim. Meanwhile north of the border, Nicola Sturgeon extricated herself from literary escapism of the Wigtown Book Festival to describe Mrs May’s statement as “dreadful”, claiming her Chequers deal was a “dead duck”. But Mrs May had to come out fighting, otherwise her premiership – never mind the Chequers deal – would be no more after this week’s humiliation at the Saltzburg summit. Mrs May attempted to throw the ball back to the EU in an attempt to break what she acknowledged had become an “impasse”.

She chided EU leaders for rejecting Chequers without suggesting alternatives and demanded more engagement from them. But the reality is that the ball remains in Mrs May’s court. She is trying to sell a Chequers deal that doesn’t even command support in her own party.

The problems with the Irish border remain while any “solution” that separates Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK cannot be contemplated given that her government is propped up by the DUP. The Gordian knot of the UK’S withdrawal from the EU remains as tight and tangled as ever and it will take more than the ghost of Mrs Thatcher to untie it.