How Chequers unravelled for May
Paris Gourtsoyannis
When it was first announced Brexit would be added to the agenda for the informal summit of EU leaders in Salzburg last week, it was seen as something of a coup for the UK.
Theresa May would get an extra chance to lobby fellow heads of government to win them around on her Chequers plan for post-brexit trade, away from the pressures of the Brussels hothouse.
The expectation in Downing Street was that, with EU leaders well aware of the risk to Mrs May’s premiership from rebellious Brexiteers, particularly in the run-up to the Conservative Party conference this weekend, there would be collective effort to swallow their concerns about the Chequers plan and just keep the show on the road until the formal summit in October.
Now, without a dramatic change in the next month, it looks like Salzburg and Chequers could become bywords for the collapse of Brexit negotiations.
After hearing an appeal for compromise from the Prime Minister over dinner in Austria, EU leaders had her Chequers plan for breakfast. European Council president Donald Tusk was blunt, saying simply that Chequers “won’t work” because the proposal to effectively keep the UK in the single market for goods would in fact undermine a key pillars of European trade.
French President Emmanuel Macron was even more brutal, accusing British politicians who had campaigned for Brexit of being “liars” by suggesting it would be easy to disentangle the UK from the EU.
Mr Tusk also reminded the UK that it had yet to make clear how it was going to put its commitment to a “backstop” for the Irish border into law.
Mrs May was sent away with an ultimatum to come up with something by the October summit in Brussels.
What went wrong? EU leaders were said to have been angered by Mrs May’s complaint at dinner in Salzburg that their proposal to avoid a hard border Northern Ireland would cut the UK in half, by imposing customs checks on internal trade transiting the Irish Sea. She made that point publicly, too, in an article that morning in the German newspaper Die Welt, delivering the telling off for Angela Merkel’s domestic audience.
It was a classic example of how the deep cultural misunderstanding between the UK and the EU has thrown talks off track again and again. Few countries in a continent ravaged by war in the 20th century have avoided messy and painful partition of some kind or another.
The following morning, before they broke off for private talks without the UK, the Prime Minister compounded her error by telling EU leaders that the backstop wouldn’t be ready by the October summit, suggesting that an emergency November gathering would be essential.
Mr Tusk had already opened the door to an additional summit on Brexit, but her comments were seen as an assumption that the UK would get an extension on homework that had been awaited by Brussels for six months.
It is unclear how the government is going to respond to the disaster at Salzburg. The Prime Minister’s angry statement on her return to London, demanding respect from the EU, suggested a doubling down on her strategy – and further deadlock. But in that same statement, she also said the government would now bring forward “alternative” customs proposals.
Meanwhile, there was a significant development at the Labour conference in Liverpool, when the shadow Brexit Secretary, Sir Keir Starmer, effectively confirmed that the party’s MPS would be ordered to vote against any deal that Mrs May brings back from Brussels – because the Prime Minister shows no sign of being able to meet the six “tests” he set her.
Far more than Labour opening the door to a second EU referendum, it is that announcement, significantly raising the chances of the Brexit deal being voted down, that will shape what happens next. In Brussels and at Westminster, the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit continues to grow.