What the commentators said

This speech was supposed to break the Brexit deadlock, said Tom Peck in The Independent, but it “appeared utterly symptomatic of the deadlock itself”. May called for “creative and imaginative” thinking, yet offered no vision of her own about what should happen at the end of the transition period; she has just kicked the can down the road. Her speech was “something of a fudge”, agreed Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail. Its main purpose appears to have been simply to buy more time. “Normally such procrastination would not matter.” But today, with less than 18 months left to reach a Brexit deal, “it matters very much”.

May’s problem, said James Forsyth in The Spectator, is that her Cabinet is hopelessly split over what kind of Brexit to pursue. Her ministers all accept that the UK must leave the Single Market, because they realise that “free movement of people – the price of Single Market membership – is out of the question after the Brexit vote.” But beyond that, there’s a sharp division in opinion. Hammond and others want the UK to remain in as close a regulatory alignment with the EU as possible, in order to minimise disruption. For Johnson and other Brexiteers, however, this approach negates the whole point of leaving, which is to chart for the UK a different course to the EU. May risks alienating a significant portion of her Cabinet by picking one of these approaches over the other, but she’ll have to choose at some point.

The choice, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times, will define whether “the UK becomes a perpetually surly satellite of the EU or a flexible, fully independent global trading nation. It shouldn’t take too much time to work out which is the better future.” But May still thinks she can find a middle way between these two approaches, said Alan Beattie in the FT – one that will give us relatively frictionless cross-border trade with the EU, without obliging us to follow European Court of Justice rulings and every element of EU trade pacts. It’s “theoretically possible” that such a deal could be devised. But it would “represent the kind of big constitutional innovation that hurried and fractious Brexit talks will be hard pressed to create”.