Brexit: will it ever really happen?
Theresa May must have had her reasons for choosing “three of the biggest egos in politics” to manage Brexit, said The Independent. Perhaps she thought that, having campaigned to leave the EU, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis would work “cooperatively to deliver success in a project of national, if not global, importance”. But “boys will be boys” – and no sooner had the new PM marched off into the Swiss Alps for a fortnight’s holiday than her “Three Brexiteers” got stuck into an “oldfashioned turf war”. In a letter to Johnson, leaked to the press, Fox demanded that the Foreign Secretary’s economic diplomacy team be transferred to Fox’s International Trade department. Johnson was having none of it, and from her mountain eyrie May “ordered the boys to stop squabbling and get on with their homework”.
Easier said than done, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Negotiating favourable terms for Brexit would be fiendishly difficult under any circumstances, let alone with three different departments – the Foreign Office, International Trade and the new Department for Exiting the European Union – jostling for control. To make matters worse, Britain has long subcontracted out trade negotiations to Brussels, which means there are fewer than 20 trade negotiators in Whitehall. (Canada, by comparison, has 830.) To plug the gap, lawyers, economists and management consultants are being hired at vast expense from the private sector. Their salaries alone are expected to cost the taxpayer £5bn over the next five years.
Whitehall sources suggested last week that – partly because of these staffing problems – Brexit would have to be delayed until the end of 2019. But “what’s the betting”, said Sam Leith in the London Evening Standard, “that between now and 2019 the Government will find good reasons to put off the moment of truth for another year or two? And then another year or two…” For all her insistence that “Brexit means Brexit”, May knows that “actually pushing the button has a high chance of precipitating catastrophe”. So I have a hunch that – “like St Augustine’s chastity, or my tidying the cellar” – Brexit may “keep slipping into the future” indefinitely. That is wishful thinking, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. With May, “what you see is what you get”. She’s promised to honour the referendum result, and believes – rightly – that trying to wriggle out of it would “only compound the alienation from the political class that led to the Brexit vote in the first place”. The question is “when, not if”.