Mrs May has put her own survival ahead of our nation’s sovereignty

The Prime Minister’s offer as it stands represents an existential threat to the EU. This isn’t over yet

lack of imagination. She clearly fails to grasp the importance of wider abstract principles. Her idea of getting on with the job is, in this instance, keeping her government viable. That is the over-riding (perhaps the only) object of her political existence.

I actually believe now that she has little time for the grand concepts of national sovereignty or the integrity of the British state and that she probably thinks of these things as overblown rhetoric irrelevant to most people’s concerns. It is party management and the survival of her leadership that are the priorities. This is not necessarily an egotistical thing: her conception of leadership is clearly bound up with a genuine sense of duty and responsibility. But the job she is famously getting on with is entirely to do with domestic politics, not with the larger future of Britain in the world.

That perhaps explains why she faced down the Remain rebels in Parliament, only to end up giving them most of what they wanted, and then forced her recalcitrant Cabinet Brexiteers to accept what is basically a Remainer settlement. What could possibly have been the point of that? The only credible rationale is that she sees party discipline and the maintenance of order as the primary objective. All that other stuff about national self-determination and a new global outlook and democratically accountable government is just bluster designed to disguise personal ambition – which is to say, hyperbole from people who want her job.

That narrow, managerial view of her function explains why she would never in a million years have taken the path that so many of us were urging after she successfully stared down the Remain rebels in Parliament. Instead of regarding that as a liberation which would permit her to get tough with the Brussels bullies who, seeing their Westminster fifth column defeated, might well have become more obliging, she seems to have seen it as simply one party problem out of the way. Next to be dealt with was the equally troublesome, and rather more anarchic, Brexit gang. It was the danger to her own authority that was paramount because – and this is the most generous interpretation I can offer – without that the government falls apart and chaos ensues.

What happens next? She is presumably preparing to eyeball the recalcitrant Brexit backbench cohort in pretty much the same way that she did the Remain one. At worst, she would end up with a rebellion on a Parliamentary vote – which is what Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to be threatening. But I’m sure she believes (probably rightly) that it could be reduced to an ineffectual gesture. She would be left with a discontented rump of what used to be called Eurosceptic MPs but given the country’s exhaustion with the issue, she would expect them to have less influence on the public discourse.

The threat of disunity within the party is, in truth, the smaller matter. A much larger question is what this proposal, now agreed by a unified Cabinet, will do to the EU negotiating position. Given that what must be sold as her best and final offer breaks several of Michel Barnier’s absolutely sacred rules by choosing (“cherry picking”) the bits of the single market in which we will participate, and that it demands a limiting condition on the free movement of people, it should be rejected outright. If we are to be exempt from the sacred free

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion movement rule as a non-member with an EU trade agreement, why shouldn’t Norway, say, have the same possibility?

Even more contentiously, if we are to have so many of the rights and privileges of free trade with the EU, but escape the more onerous bits – like uncontrolled migration from member states – why shouldn’t members themselves be free to set their own border controls? How will the populations of Hungary, Poland and Austria – not to mention the new government of Italy – feel about this double standard?

Doesn’t it make a rush for the exit with an expectation of the same advantages more likely? It just so happens, you may recall, that migration, and the consequences of the Schengen no-borders policy, is the critically destabilising factor within the EU at the moment. Wouldn’t our exemption from complete free movement incite even more rage and frustration?

What Mrs May is proposing is, in fact, a form of associate EU membership with an inner core of states which accept the federalising project and are on course for evercloser union, and an outer circle of loosely affiliated states with limited forms of compliance. This sounds terribly reasonable (so long as you don’t call it by its name) but is actually an existential threat to the future of the Union project which is why it has always been rejected as a model by Brussels.

So what exactly did Angela Merkel say to Mrs May in that peculiar meeting before the Chequers summit? Did she suggest that the EU would buy this wholesale offer as it stands? Somehow I doubt it. This isn’t over.

‘Keeping her government viable is perhaps the only object of Mrs May’s political existence’