What the commentators said
“The reality of Brexit is starting to bite,” said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. The photograph of G20 summit leaders, showing May tucked away on the far left of the second row, was “a potent symbol of the way in which Britain risks being marginalised” – as was May’s absence from a meeting between President Obama and the leaders of France and Germany. Britain may have rejected EU membership, but the G20 summit showed “it is struggling to win new international friends”. Not so, said Dominic Raab in The Daily Telegraph. The BBC made much of the Japanese memo expressing concern about the impact of Brexit, but that letter was “addressed to both the EU and the UK, making the case against erecting trade barriers”. And at the G20, China joined Mexico and India in pledging to negotiate a free-trade deal with the UK.
Besides enlisting trade partners, the other key preoccupation of the Brexiters is controlling immigration, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian – but they’re clearly clueless about how to do so. The Australian-style points-based system was “always a phoney offer. It was a clever shorthand for ‘non-racist yet rigorous-sounding alternative to the status quo’, chosen because it seemed meritocratic… and culturally digestible.” Now that May has rejected it, on the basis that it offers too many avenues for automatic entry entitlement, it has exposed the fact that Brexiters have no Plan B.
Things are only going to get more bitter as Brexit negotiations proceed, said Janan Ganesh in the FT. So it was crazy of May last week to rule out calling a snap election before 2020. Her prospects will never be more favourable than they are now, and the “moral authority” conferred by an endorsement at the polls would afford her vital protection when things turn nasty. It’s true that, after the Scottish referendum, last year’s election and the Brexit vote, there’s little appetite right now for yet another ballot. But consider the scale of the task facing May. “The point about a mandate is not that she should want one… She will need one.”